This will surely add to the debate- Last night in San Diego's market "House" was on a major network on the SD channel and the HD channel simultaneously. The HD channel of course was full 16:9. The broadcast on the SD channel was inset letterboxed on all sides, like a 16:9 aspect but 10" smaller that the edges of both my LCD 1080p monitors. Neither tv would change the aspect. Is this the network simply saying they are gonna let the HD version fix itself on the SD channel, and this is what SD viewers get? Similary, NFL broadcast do this all the time, the program is in perfect HD and the ad breaks are inset 16:9...is anybody else seeing this?

Yes Fred, right there with you. Seems to happen all the time. And it IS NOT that my TV is not set up right!

It's transition time
 

This whole mess is due to the transition - and we not only have the analog to digital transition, but also the 4x3 to 16x9 transition.

Think about this: let's say I am shooting a show in HD/16x9, but the TV station I deliver to, still has to accommodate SD viewers; in other words, basically they have two transmitters right now, one standard def (4x3), and one digital/HD (16x9). They have to air my show simultaneously on both transmitters, so they have a tough decision to make. Most likely they will air it "as is" wide screen on the digital transmitter, but will have to put up the letterbox bars on the analog transmitter.

Now let's say I am delivering to the station a show shot in SD - it's still very common on smaller stations. If they have already changed their video processing equipment, my video runs through a 16x9 processor, so for the HD transmitter they will reformat my video in "pillarbox" format (vertical bars on the sides). But for the SD transmitter, they have to put up the horizontal bars on top and bottom - so now my video has black bars all over.

Makes sense? I can't wait for February 17 - and I hope this is not going to happen.

Unfortunately it looks like it will :-(
A report this morning said that as many as 20,000,000 viewers aren't ready for hi-def so there's a very good chance that the date will be rolled back even further.

Ron is right. If you use a PAR of 1.0(square) in an SD project, widescreen or not, you'll get pillarbox AND letterboxed display on a 16x9 monitor(altho' it will look right on a 4:3 monitor), and it doesn't matter what format flag you set in the header. To correctly display material that originates in square pixel aspect, on a widescreen monitor, you have to to 2 things:
1-render to a non-square PAR (like .909 PAR)
2-set the widescreen flag on the renderer.

very interesting guys, thanks. This first came up when my company delivered a season of HD to Cox Cable for broadcast in both SD and HD in the same time slot. Of course HD was brilliant and then I switched to the SD channel and it was boxed on all sides. Coming from Vegas we took alot of heat from the FCP geeks in the studio, claiming this was a Vegas issue. Its not, unless the NFL is using Vegas...I havnt heard.