So I shot 11 tapes of footage for a company in HDV... just because I felt HDV to SD looked better than switching my HDR-FX7 to shoot SD...

Now I get to deal with cropping and converting 1440 x 1080 @ 1.33 pixel ratio to 720 x 486 (He's using a Media 100) @ .91 NTSC pixel ratio

I need to crop the 16:9 footage to 4:3 (I framed it decently)

But every clip is different, and want to use the crop tool that Vegas provides, but I'm not positive how to go about the workflow.

If anyone has done this before w/ Vegas 7.0e any advice will be helpful, otherwise I'll experiment with it... might use a 720 x 486 timeline and import HDV clips and try to crop them there...

When you drop the HDV on the 4:3 SD timeline, my experience in Vegas is that it will automatically letterbox. Worked very nice on a recent project that I did (it was16:9 letter boxed on a 4:3) Then, I think you would have to use the pan and crop tool to adjust from there, if you are going to fill the entire 4:3 frame.

Yea I figured it out basically... wasn't hard at all... I love vegas :)