I know this has been talked about in some form or another many times. But I just cant get a clear view in my head of whats going on.

I have the xl2. I've shot footage in 16:9 mode ....I captured footage using Vegas 5. I didn't select any settings for capture. I just hooked up the camera and hit capture. It appeared to "auto-detect" the 16:9 footage.

Where I start to get confused is when I've exported some still images from the project. I open the image in photoshop and the size is 654 X 480. ...Is this right? .......My ultimate goal is to render mpg2 and to burn to dvd. What should the dimensions of the frame be?

thanks,

j.

The DV standard includes an anamorphic bit which the XL2 apparently sets and which your editing software apaprently recognizes. PS doesn't know anything about DV i.e. once you've exported a jpeg the anamorphic bit is out of the picture (literally) and PS will interpret the JPEG as a 720 x 480 with square pixels (720 x 480 is the size of the NTSC DV frame regardless of whether it is anamorphic or 4:3). To get 16:9 in Photoshop you must either change the shape of the pixels to rectangular or change the size of the picture to something with a 16:9 aspect ratio. Doing the latter with interpolation will insure that the picture comes up in the correct aspect ratio in any subsequent use.

I've been scaling my DV grabs by 120% in width only in PS to get them to be stretched correctly.

Assuming that you're viewing on a square pixel device, like a computer monitor, then 120% is close but not quite right:

16 / 9 = 1.778

and

480 x 1.778 = 853.44

Therefore you should resize the image to 854 x 480. Or you could pick any size that you want as long as the width divided by the height equals 1.778.

John: if you have the Vegas 5 project settings set to 16:9 and
then save (instead of copy to clipboard) a snapshot with the
button near the preview screen it should save the picture in the
correct resolution and you should not need to resample it. Keep
in mind to keep the settings of the preview to full, best before
doing such an export.