Everything Ive shot and captured with Premiere 6.5 has small horizontal black bars on the right and left side of frame. However, footage captured with the camera but shot on an XL-1 played back with no bars. The image went full frame as it should. Ive shot with and without a wide adapter and still I get those bars.

If my impression of those "bars" is accurate this is normal, Seth. We've had some very, very long threads on the subject quite some time ago. The size, position, and existence of the bars will vary from camera to camera due to where the image lands on the ccd's. As they land in the underscan portion of the frame (outside the area that a television can normally display) it's considered within spec.

Hmmm. Thats interesting. Here are some screen shots of my problems. They are taken from AE. You can see the bars on the sides of the GL-1 pic, no bars on the XL-1s pic. As you can see on the XL-1s screen shot, there is a little bit of black running laterally on the bottom of frame. Thats not so much a problem cause the letterbox will cover that. If this is indeed normal for my Gl-1, then it seems one would have to make a matte frame and size it to their entire finished product to hide all black edges?? What a nightmare for someone who shot using multiple cameras...


download Gl-1 & XL-1s
http://members.lycos.co.uk/ubernaut/

Yes, that's what I referred to.

It's only a problem if you plan to stream your material on the Web, in which case you would normally crop the bars and render. Otherwise as I said it doesn't appear on a television.

Canon's worked to eliminate this issue, as few, if any, GL2's seem to have significant underscan bars.