Paul, why do you want to letterbox at all? A letterboxed video looks fully boxed on a widescreen TV (letterboxed in production to 4:3, then pillarboxed by the TV to 16:9), and when you zoom into it, there is not enough resolution to make for a good picture. Ugly.

All modern DVD players have display device selection: 4:3 or 16:9. If you select 4:3, the player will letterbox accordingly.

In regards to letterboxing if you still want to do it, Vegas itself has like three settings where you set up aspect ratio (project AR, clip AR, rendering to AR), then DVD architect has couple of settings too (project AR and something else, I dont remember, but I had aspect issue too). You need to make all these settings play along together. Using device aspect ratio in preview mode does not work for me, but I have an old Vegas Movie Studio 6, I think that has been fixed in Vegas 7.

Michael, I'm working on a feature film which will be transferred to 35 mm film when all is done. At regular intervals I am obligated to send progress reports to our producers in the form of a DVD, which they take a look at on their run-of-the-mill TV sets.

Once in a while they drive down here to chat and see how we are doing up close and that's when they get to see the movie at full size. I wanted to find a way to send my reports in complete size as well -- these DVDs will never be watched more than once or twice and then tossed out. Most of the time they show just pencil tests with the most basic sound tracks.

But since I draw all the frames to what should be visible on a movie screen, I have things important to the story just peeking in from the edge of the screen and there are times when these events get entirely cut off by overscan.

Everything I have done up until now has been for TV and I have been conditioned to keeping important actions away from the sides without even thinking about it. This is the first time for me to enjoy the luxury of having no TV cutoffs and I have never been aware, until now, what it really comes down to, and it's a lot more than I had ever thought.

Whenever I was concerned with TV cutoff it had to do with the placement of text, never too much with screen actions.