Ok - what I am going to say is based on this - you shot 4:3 footage and you edited 4:3 footage. And I mean aspect ratio of 4:3, not frame size of 720x480. Also NTSC. (Pal would be the same - except settings would be PAL..that sounds too obvious, and it is..but you never know.) This may get strange but there are a few ways.

If you want this footage to play out as 16:9 on a 16:9 monitor from a DVD player -

First method - just encode using the DVDA template, normal 4:3. Play out of the DVD normally once you have it all done. On the *monitor/TV* hit the "Zoom" button. (It may be called something else) It will play your 4:3 output zoomed and cropped to the correct aspect ratio for 16:9. On a 4:3 screen it will be 4:3.

Next method - You need to crop each piece of media with the 16:9 crop setting. (As to not confuse you - you might want to change your project settings to "NTSC DV Widescreen (720x480, 29.970 fps)" or "NTSC DV 24p Widescreen (720x480, 23.976 fps)" so that what your see on the Vegas monitor is the right aspect ratio) Now you need to make sure you render out with the widescreen setting - either "DVD Architect NTSC Widescreen video stream" or "DVD Architect 24p NTSC Widescreen video stream" Now create your project and burn.

Ok - so here is the important thing. On your DVD player make sure you have set up your output correctly. In the DVD player settings somewhere there is a setting for what kind of TV/Monitor you have - 4:3 or 16:9. This tells the player how to show anamporphic/"enhanced for widescreen"/16:9 DVDs. Most DVD players have settings for aspect ratio - 4:3, pan and scan and/or 16:9. It may have icons and/or it may say widescreen, normal, pan and scan..but the idea is the same for all. This is important and a lot of people overlook it. And on some older players you may have to just go in and reset it each time you play a DVD (On my old Samsung 709 I have to hit play on the DVD, go into the settings, hit normal go back to play, go back into settings, hit widescreen, hit play again. A pain to be sure) Ok - so once that is done you should be all set.

Now your DVD will either 1> play full screen and correct on a 16:9/widescreen monitor or 2> play with black bars on a 4:3 monitor. Remember - you have to tell your *player* what kind of monitor you are using for this to work. If you tell your player you have a 16:9 monitor but really have a 4:3 monitor your image will be squished side to side, no black bars. If you tell it you have a 4:3 monitor but really have a 16:9 monitor you will see a squished image top to to bottom with black bars. (Now don't get confused with pre-letterboxed DVDs -the new Jewel DVD that just came out is "widescreen" but it is 4:3. Meaning it is encoded in 4:3 with black bars so to get rid of the black bars on a 16:9/widescreen monitor you would have to use the "zoom" feature. For the most part the industry has adopted the phrase "enhanced for 16x9 TV's" for DVD's that are encoded correctly for widescreen TV's.)

And for what it is worth the size of widescreen is about 852 x 480. So going back to what I said about zooming - 720 x 480 is the 4:3 aspect using the crop method in Vegas you are "zooming" to 852 x 480 for 16:9...remember there will quality loss. In theory you can minimize it a bit by doing various things. I have done a test with supersample set at 2 for example and it does make a difference. But it is really relative - if you want the best quality just shoot with real 16:9 - normally with an anamorphic lens because most of the low end camera are either 4:3 or have a fake 16:9/wide mode. And the HD size of 1280x720 is a 16:9 aspect ratio - in case you are thinking of going that route for HDV or DVHS. You can't really render out in 4:3 anyway - but if you are thinking about uprezing 4:3 footage to HD you would need to crop it to 16:9.

Now one other important thing here - in Vegas when you output/render. If you render to a 4:3 project and you have 16:9 footage in it will be letterboxed *unless* you place a check in the box that says "Stretch video to fill output frame size (do not letterbox)". When you render using one of the widescreen/16:9 templates you don't need to worry about this.

And if you do need to test this sort of thing out - you can just to a PTT with the settings and than play the video out to your monitor. You can set your monitor settings as well to conform to that, much like a DVD player. So, for example, when working on a 16:9 project in Vegas but viewing output on a 4:3 monitor TV it will be letterboxed on the monitor.