The black area at either top/bottom or sides, sometimes both is the result of your still image being of a size different than the project size. Example, if you're making a NTSC MPEG-2 for DVD the frame size is 720x480. However for best results (due to a pixel size issue) SoFo recommends still images be 655x480. At that size the black border problem should go away.

I know, not always practical. So begin by clicking on the pan/crop button. Be sure you are locked to timeline, then right click on the image in the work area and set to match output aspect. Your image (depending on its size) will jump to fill the frame better. You may very well cut off some of the image. Now using the control box to select the area of image you wish, setting keyframes to pan/zoom. What's inside the box becomes the frame, anything outside is cropped off. The topic of panning/zooming is covered in detail in the manual and in online help and SPOT's site has several tutorials. I was going to write a tutorial too, but seems like overkill.