>>>by picking an odd decimal multiplier apparently out of thin air.

ControlZ, here's some of that "thin air" you were talking about:
http://toolbox.sgi.com/TasteOfDT/documents/video/lurker/pixelaspect.html

I just did a half hour video consisting almost entirely of scanned photos set to music, mixed in with some video. It came out great if I say so myself and got rave reviews.

My advice is to forget about scanning at the correct aspect ratio, be faithful to the original dimensions of the photo, scan at a higher resolution and learn the VV3 pan/crop features really well. I just play with the crop tool in VV3 until I get the right look and dimensions, and it's all pretty intuitive. If a lot of the scan gets cut off in the process of adjusting it to fill up the screen I still won't cut it up in Photoshop. I'll just pan it in VV3: up & down, right to left, zoom in or out, etc. But you have to do it subtly and gently and make sure it goes with the soundtrack. Otherwise it's jerky and annoying.

What you should be mindful of is the resolution. When you have a really good photo that you want to zoom in on a lot you should scan it at a higher resolution.
Normally I scan photos at about 300, although 200 has served its purpose quite often. Sometimes I go higher if I want to zoom into minute detail.

VV3 is a terrific tool for montages.

>>>VV3 is a terrific tool for montages.

right on, Tanjy. for those who just want to make great montages take Tanjy's advice.

As a newbie to this board, you all have to cut me some slack.

CCIR601 specifies 720 active samples per horizontal scan line for both NTSC and PAL systems. SMPTE 240M NTSC is kind of fuzzy in defining how many of the 525 scan lines are "active" but anything going through an MPEG2 DVD codec had better be 480, so let's use that figure. Since NTSC is also defined to be a 4:3 aspect ratio system, these facts imply that any single pixel of an NTSC image is narrower than it is tall by a ratio of

480 / (720 x 0.75) = 0.888

The .9091 figure implies a 480x704 active area. I vaguely recall something to the effect that there would be a border around the active area in order to reduce ringing in analog systems; is this where the SF programmers are coming from? If so, it still seems to me that 480x720 is (or should be) the target spec. In any event, I think VV3 is a really nice product, and I suspect no matter what pixel size one uses as the source, as long that source starts out as 4:3, and as long as VV knows it is meant to completely fill its 4:3 frame, then I strongly suspect it will do its conversion automatically, and the user will get his still picture rendered as a nice avi file.

By the way, one way to know if a writer has done his homework is to see if he mentions that NTSC stands for "National Television Standards Committee." Not true. The group that created the format was called the "National Television SYSTEM Committee." You can look it up.

I know some of this esoterica because the company I founded, The Del Rey Group, was one of the finalists back in the late 1980's proposing an HDTV delivery vehicle. We proposed an NTSC-compatible protocol that could pass transparently through the existing NTSC infrastructure. To our amazement, the FCC rejected it, choosing instead the current DTV standard, which has turned out to be as colossal a failure as we predicted back in 1989. No, we weren't brilliant, but we had a lot more common sense than the lawyers steering the process apparently did.

BillyBoy:

Just scan square pixels to match the size of the photo, then right-click in the pan/crop window and pick "Match output aspect" and you'll be golden.

The only reason to scan 655x480 (or some multiple thereof) is when you want a static image to fill the screen by default with no pan/crop.

If you plan on adding motion or zooming via pan/crop, scan at anything that works for your photo.

///d@