Soniclight:

Don't get hung up on pixel counts, or whether pixels should be square or rectangular. The technology takes care of those details automatically.

IF you insisted on shooting in a 4:3 format AND insisted on square pixels (why you'd care is the question), then, yes, one solution would be to match 640h to 480v. But it makes no difference in the big picture (ha!). For example, suppose you create your masterpiece with a DV camera. That camera automatically composes using 720h by 480v pixels, and each pixel is actually a thin rectangle, with the horizontal side about .91 the size of the vertical side. But it makes no difference--it will play as a full-frame image on a 4:3 TV set.

Interestingly, DV is NOT 4:3--it's actually a tiny bit wider than that. But it makes no practical difference.

Now, the issue is that the adoption rate of 16:9 displays is continuing, so the question you need to ask is whether you want to have pillars on each side of your 4:3 video project when shown on those sets, or whether you want to have letterbox bars top and bottom when displaying your 16:9 project on 4:3 sets. Your call. My preference is to go for the 16:9 shape, since it looks so nice on a widescreen set, and by now people are used to seeing the letterbox on 4:3 sets--in fact, in a sense it makes the video project seem more "modern" or "professional." But, again, it's completely your call.

As for the safe action and safe title areas, the idea is to make sure that the story is still effective even if 10% of the edges of the video image are cut off on an old-style TV. These days, however, newer sets are generally reducing the actual cutoff percentage, and for some viewing methods (i.e. WinDVD on a PC) there are no cutoffs at all. Don't worry so much about keeping the action centered on 16:9 if you will be showing it via letterbox on 4:3 sets--the whole frame, minus the extreme left and right portions, will show up just fine.

Bottom line: find a presentation method you wish to emulate, then do what they do. If you're gonna do 4:3 full-frame, I'd suggest DV. If you want to do widescreen, I'd suggest HDV. Don't worry about pixel counts and pixel aspect ratio details, other than to set your timeline preference to one of those two formats at the outset. For NTSC countries, DV is 720x480x29.97, and HDV is 1440x1080x29.97.

EDIT: I went back and read your original post. If you want to show 4:3 on a widescreen TV, the black bars will automatically be put in the picture for you by the DVD player. The player knows to do this because you tell the DVD authoring program you are making a 4:3 project.

>I went back and read your original post. If you want to show 4:3 on a widescreen TV, the black bars will automatically be put in the picture for you by the DVD player. The player knows to do this because you tell the DVD authoring program you are making a 4:3 project.<

That's not strictly true. In most cases, a 4:3 DVD will be unaltered by a DVD player, even when output to a 16:9 TV. It is actually the job of the display to add window boxes (left/right black bars) and not the player.

Yes, that's right. I got my aspect ratios crossed again. One of my frustrations with the current technology is just that--you'd think that the display device would automatically determine the proper aspect ratio of the program material. Instead, I need to manually select "Narrow" (4:3) or "Standard" (16:9) on our Mitsubishi DLP set.

I am often surprised by the number of public 16:9 displays in bars, hotels, and airports that are set to show 4:3 material full-screen. Doesn't anyone notice how wide the faces are on the display? Don't they care, or do they just assume that's the way it's supposed to be?

Another thing that surprises me is that some DVDs coming out of Hollywood show 16:9 material in a 4:3 window; that is, they use just 360 of the 480 (NTSC) scan lines, so the resulting format is 720x360, rather than 720x480. What you wind up with is a small 16:9 image on a 16:9 display. On my Mitsubishi set I can expand it to full-screen manually, but there is still the loss of vertical resolution when compared with the preferred method.

Thanks to all for your replies, especially the detailed ones.

That said, I've had a long day and my toothache is acting up, so time to decompress my neurons and call it a day. But I wanted to aknowledge your responses -- which I will study and reply to probably sometime tomorrow or so.

Hasta la next time.

I am often surprised by the number of public 16:9 displays in bars, hotels, and airports that are set to show 4:3 material full-screen. Doesn't anyone notice how wide the faces are on the display? Don't they care, or do they just assume that's the way it's supposed to be?
It may be that if you look at that image long enough, you can get used to it. Like a form of adaptation. Your brain starts seeing everything in the right aspect ratio.

Also, the pillarboxing is kind of disturbing.

Personally, this is what I find.

2- To get back on topic:
Choose project properties based on what the majority of your footage is.

When you need to do a conversion on export (i.e. DV to web streaming), make a new .veg. The new .veg's properties actually won't matter, they get overridden by the export settings.

Nest your project into that veg. Go to file export, and export your film. Set Vegas *not* to letterbox- this will ignore Vegas' wacky handling of pixel aspect ratio.

If you don't nest, then other weird things happen (especially to picture montages I believe). So just go the nesting route...