The actual DV frame is slightly larger, try your stills at 787x480. Easiest way to check is look at the size of the preview window, it tells you what size your stills need to be.
Alternatively you could ignore the bars, most TVs will probably not show them or you can use event pan/crop to resize slightly.
If your stills started out at higher res and you're going to DVD straight from the T/L in my opinion you get better results starting with the higher res images on the TL, the difference isn't huge and don't go overboard, you can really bog Vegas down with over the top hi res stills, even if they're png or jpg.
And if you're resizing in Vegas you should render at Best, which will slow things down.
Bob.

The size you should be using is 654x480 or anything proportional to that.

You can also right click, chose properties, click the media tab and select 0.9091 (NTSC DV) as the pixel aspect ratio.

DV frame in NTSC and PAL is 720x480, however, the pixel aspect ratio makes for non-square pixels. For NTSC the ratio is 0.9091 wide by 1.0 high.

Vegas always assumes that the stills you import/drop into the project have a square Pixel Aspect Ratio (PAR). So, when prepping images, Vegas recommends a size of 654.5x480 to fill the frame. Vegas will round the image dimensions to fit.

Alternatively, you could work on images at a size of 720x528. Vegas will fit the image to the frame without any sort of rounding.

You can't change the basic behavior of Vegas regarding this but there are things you can do to make your 720x480 images work:

option 1: Open the event Pan/Crop tool for each image, right-click on the image, select "Match Output aspect" (This is from memory. Exact details may be different)

Option 2: Right click on the event or the media in the pool, select Properties, change the aspect of each image to what you need.

Option 2 plus!: If this is a new project this step can make life easier for you. This will require that you pick an image format that Vegas will always treat as non-square. Drag one image into your new project and then follow option 2 above. Before closing the dialog, click on the little diskette icon. This will save a profile for the image file type. All subsequent images of that type that you import will automatically have the new PAR. Personally, I've designated PSD files for this.

Don't worry too much if you think square pixel images out to be some other size. It's an unfortunate fact of life that Vegas is actually right about the dimensions, but the numbers don't agree with most other NLEs because they did the math based on hearsay. So just smile and go with the flow.

BTW, there are probably scripts available that can reset the PAR of a whole slew of images all at once.

Rob Mack

Excuse my ignorance here but, I think you'll find Vegas expects images (stills) going into the following projects to be the following sizes:

PAL 4:3 787x576
PAL 16:9 1049x576
NTSC 4:3 655x480
NTSC 16:9 873x480

These numbers are real easy to find, just look at the size of the preview window in Best (full). You can for example get away with 720x576 for PAL 4:3 however you will get black bars on the sides. In a strict sense this is correct as that's space allowed for sync when coming from analogue devices.
Except when you go out to DVD and display on devices such as LCDs or PCs you do get to see that area. Also captured DV does fill that frame.
Unless you've got something like PS CS that lets you work with non square pixels I'd suggest altering the pixel AR of stills isn't a wise move, you'll end up stretching your image.
These numbers have worked for me without fail, maybe I've been doing it wrong all these years, I sure cannot see anything wrong, my AR as checked with a circle is always correct. You can easily test any of this, set preview to Best (full) and capture a frame and open in PS.

Bob.

I don't see any argument or contradiction here. these are all square pixel image sizes and Vegas will handle them just fine. It's actually a heck of a lot easier to just work in a "square pixel" frame size and let Vegas handle it. But Duderdude2 has 720x480x0.9091 images. (Also, sometimes you can get better quality if you don't aloow Vegas to make conversions from square to non square sizes. It's tiny, but it's there)

Some people coming from other NLEs expect that they have to prep their images at 720x480. It may even be that someone is delivering stills in this size. We can assume that these are non-square pixel images (or else someone is making a big mistake). You can either work with them the way they are or you could run a batch job in Photoshop to resize them to 654 or 655 x 480.

If someone was handing me 720x480 images I'd be inclined to leave them that way, in part because if they were to look over my shoulder and see I'd changed them then they might have problems with confidence. That's assuming they're used to working with another NLE and that they're a little skeptical of Vegas. In fact, this happens at my work all the time. The main edit systems are M100 there and I try very hard not to contradict too much since they've got years and years of assumptions behind them that they take to be gospel truth.

Rob Mack

Agreed,
fortunately I only have to deal with a few graphic artists who've never worked with video. I do have a hard time explaining it to them, usually I just give them a screen capture and tell them to use that as the background in PS.
Where it gets sticky is I do stuff in both PAL and NTSC so the change in PAR really messes with their heads, well that and getting them to stop thinking about DPI.
Bob.