Oops! Sorry to confuse you rather than help solve your problem. Resolution issues. The logic seems to be that there are more pixels horizontaly in a widescreen picture. ie more sample points. Therefore rendering squeezed to a 4:3 frame means you are using less sample points than the maximum available for display and therefore getting slightly less resolution. (I think this loss is much more acceptable than a loss of vertical resolution you'd get rendering to a letterbox and zooming it in hardware.). (However I'm not sure if the extra pixels are in the current widescreen display technology with DVD and if what you get on a widescreen DVD isn't just a 4:3 anamorphic image being stretched out to fill the screen) As a solution this "anamorphic" technique has the virtue of being relativly quick and simple. If it works and you like the results -- just get on with the more important things like story, good sound, interesting pictures. ;-). As I said before I don't work in widescreen. So I don't have much to say about the non square pixels thing or how the image works on a widescreen TV. I'll think about it, do a bit of research and ask the video engineer at work and see if I can come up with anything. However in the end it'll come down to a) how and what the end device can display and more importantly b) what quality/resolution the user can notice (different from maximum available resolution.) Widescreen on 4:3 sets I believe the way 16:9 works on DVD is there is an anamorphic version for those that have 16:9 sets and a letterboxed version for those that don't. You set up your home equipment to view the appropriate version. The audio tracks are common to both versions and don't have to be saved twice. I would assume that this would be set up in the DVD authoring program. Since my proposed solution squeezes a widescreen image to a standard frame and relies on the 16:9 hardware to unsqueeze it, the picture will remain squeezed (tall and thin) on a normal 4:3 set. Is this a problem? Maybe not. If you have a known audience with specific hardware you just make the widescreen version for them and not worry about people watching it on 4:3 sets. But if the audience is supposed to be more general, I think you should test your disk on a 4:3 set. Then, if needs be, try to make it work there too. There's lots of room on a DVD maybe you could have three versions -- 16:9 anamorphic, letterboxed 16:9, and full screen 4:3. Depends how long the film is I guess and means extra rendering. DV.com has an article about mastering to multiple formats for TV at http://www.dv.com/magazine/1999/0899/hdtv0899.pdf Interesting site and magazine if you're interested in digital video. I'm not sure if I've made anything clearer ;-( Its a complex area not made any easier by shifting stanards and new technologies coming out every month. Exciting though in what individuals can now make! When I were a lad it was much easier; we just had bits of film , everything was physical -- you could touch it. But no-one could afford to make movies at home in the way I can now with my Mac.