Just having your footage in widescreen will not do it for you... there are two spots where you need to ensure you have set the project settings to widescreen. One is in Vegas. The other is in DVDA.

For us to help - you will need to confirm what settings you had for the Vegas project - how you rendered the file - and what the settings are that you used in DVDA. All of them need to be set to widescreen.

[edit]... What bob said!

i was never able to produce a satisfactory widescreen video using footage shot in 16:9 with my sony dcr-hc85 together with dvda-studio and although my brain was pretty well fried by the time i was was finished, i could swear that i must have tried all possible logical combinations of project settings in both apps. many coasters later, i purchased dvd lab pro as an alternative to dvda (to pick up some functionality missing from dvda-studio) but have not yet tried it with widescreen. (it worked great with my 4:3 stuff however.) i'd be curious to know if anyone else has been able to use dvda studio with footage shot from a dcr-hc85 to put together a good widescreen project.

Ok are you using Vegas Video 3, 4 or 5?
DVDA 1 or 2
what kind of TV 4X3 or 16X9 and do you have your DVD player output setting right for the TV
Now on to big question, in you project did you change the height and width size i.e. 720X480,any place in Vegas settings. I'm not sure about importing 16X9 footage but I think you need to change output frame size (I've never imported wide footage before, I always output wide.)

Hunter

It gets to be a very iffy question. I started a similar thread awhile back that didn't get much of a response since I just started making true wide screen projects.

Many DVD players and the newer especially digital TV and monitors offer many options that allow conventional DVD's to display wide screen different ways. You may not get true 16/9 results without recoding, but just testing random DVD's I've burned using Vegas to make a MPEG-2, using the standard DVD template and burning in both DVD-A 1 and 2 at 4/3 aspect ratio they look decent when expanded on my new wide screen TV. Of course they're being stretched to fit, but again, they don't look bad at all considering.

I'm wondering if there is much advantage if any to bother redoing them since I'm talking only about personal use projectss where my worst critic is me.

I'm using version 4.0 of Vegas.

The width and height of the video is 720x480 and pixel aspect ratio is 1.2121 (NTSC DV Widescreen).

In the project settings, I have width and height as 720x480. I've rendered a video for 0.9091 (NTSC DV) and another for 1.2121 (NTSC DV Widescreen), but both were still letterboxed in the TV.

Everything is fine with the DVD player and TV. Real 16:9 anamorphic DVDs are displayed correctly.

I've had trouble making DVDs with DA 1.0 so I made the DVD using Sonic MYDVD, which doesn't have a setting for widescreen as DA does. I wouldn't think that the problem would be here because aren't these software used just to create the menu and all, not having an affect on how the actual video is displayed?

I think I have the answer, I rendered a clip out to 720X368 NTSC DV then brought it back it VV5 and bingo. You do have change you project settings, it seems you must match the H X W to the media clip. If you leave it at 720X480 a 1.21 AR clip will not fill the frame EVEN if you change project setting to widescreen.