If you don't mind some cropping top and bottom, try using pan/crop and set full width with preserved aspect, then frame vertically keeping the subject in the frame. You will probably have to set individual scenes.

European TVs have had Smart Stretch for the last 10-15 years.

This is for watching 4:3 footage on a 16:9 screen, without any pillarboxing.

It stretches the picture horizontally, but very little or not at all in the center, because that's where the focus tends to be, often on recognizable "round" things such as faces, etc., but then it makes up for this by stretching the left and right side more.

It may seem hard to believe that this would work well in practice, which is probably the reason this concept wasn't adopted for U.S. TV sets.

For doing this in post, you need a warping program. I use RE:Flex for After Effects (built into Combustion), but I think there are less expensive alternatives. Perhaps there is even some way to do this in Vegas that I don't know about.

My inexpensive Olevia TV/monitor has this. It is called "panoramic" view, but can be quite disconcerting on long pans.

See what confuses me is I thought 720 x 480 was standard for a DVD (NTSC), and could be stretched to like 853 x 480 or 864 x 486 without causing distortion. Is this really possible, or something that only happens after encoding to DVD, or am I wrong?

I hate pillarboxing, and I also can't crop pieces off the picture as there's some really specific framing in place. If I have to I'll just have to tweak the camera for every shot, although, I'd really prefer not to.

If I do re-size the resolution should I go for either 853 x 480 or 864 x 486? I want to be able to scale it to 1280 X 720 and 1920 x 1080, and I see both proportions scale to those constraints properly.

why would you stretch it? It's a DVD, the DVD allows 720x480, not the other res you want say you're stretching it to. If you stretch the video in vegas DVDA will reencode it to 720x480, wasting time & quality.

You can't stretch anything w/o causing distortion. It gets messed up anyway. All you can do is scale, then it's the same resolution in a bigger physical area, no quality improvement over 720x480 on a 50" TV vs 720x480 scaled to 1920x1080 on a 50" TV. same source material.

you need to plan ahead & decide if you want wide screen or full screen (redundant on wide HDTV's, isn't it? :D ), SD or HD.

Actually the program I used, is an animation program that uses vectors for images, so I can output to a true 1920 x 1080 image (or any resolution, but the camera will change shape if not scaled properly properly). Again, it's the framing, that I'm concerned with.

So if I master it at 1920 x 1080, I'll be able to lower the resolution of the master to 1280 x 720, 853 x 480, etc., pretty much anything that constrains to those dimensions, for whatever the format eventually is.

I thought that I could kinda get around currently having the project in 720 x 480 by changing the PAR so it would stretch the image beyond 720 x 480 (or upping the resolution appropriately like to 1584 x 1080 with a 1.2121 PAR to get to 1920), but without it looking distorted.

Anyway, I've noticed that when I go into DVDA, the 720 x 480 video looks pillarboxed in preview, while the 853 X 480 video fills the entire preview window. When I view the DVD after burning it, the 720 x 480 video is pillarboxed (on everything), the 853 x 480 video is widescreen on SDTV's (black bars top and bottom) and stretches to fill the entire area of a 16:9 display.

Am I doing something wrong with the 720 x 480 video when burning it? I have it set to widescreen DVD when I burn.

You need to bone up on PAR, Pixel Aspect Ratio.

Computers use square pixels, video usually doesn't.

NTSC 4x3 uses 720x486 @ 0.9091 PAR, while NTSC Widescreen uses 720x486 @ 1.2 PAR.

Notice how 4x3 and widescreen have the same pixel resolution? Widescreen just uses pixels that are elongated horizontally.

The 720x486 above is often only accessed as 720x480 for non-broadcast editing.

I don't know a whole lot about PAR, just what I could figure out from fiddling with settings and stuff I've found on the net. If you'd like to direct me to me an authoritative source, I'd be more than happy to review it.

When I set the pixels to 1.2121, it does stretch, but it looks distorted, it changes the horizontal resolution but not the vertical one, so everything looks a bit too wide.

all you NEED to know about PAR is that the PAR + pixel dimensions listed in Vegas need to match up if you don't want your video's looking funny.

Most animation programs let you adjust the PAR (blender does) so that's all you should NEED to change. Or you can do like you're doing, make the same scale videos using just pixel dimensions & THEN put those in to the proper PAR project in Vegas. but that's more work.

If you'd like to direct me to me an authoritative source, I'd be more than happy to review it.

Based on your questions, I think you need more than tips and something step-by-step to copy.

It would be worthwhile for you to put in some work to get a more complete understanding of PARs and related issues. I don't know what's the best educational resource for this right now, but if you get something reasonably up-to-date on shooting and editing digital video I expect you'll pick up everything you need for this and the next problem that comes up.

It would be worthwhile for you to put in some work to get a more complete understanding of PARs and related issues. I don't know what's the best educational resource for this right now, ... I've posted these links before, but perhaps they would be helpful here. These are PAR resources and tutorials:

Aspect Ratio, PAR, etc.