I'm trying to put 16x9 color bars in to a lettebox. but the letterbox is always on the vertical, I want them on the bottom and top ie horizontal. I have a 4:3 smpte color bars. I don't really know how to crop them into 16x9 and don't have photoshop.

dude, use generated media..
unless your actually using a pre calibrated uncompressed image as the bars, in that case, u can set your project to 16:9, then your aspect ratio to 16:9 (dont pan crop)
Being a square pixel source, the switch to 16:9 aspect should keep everything intact without losing any resolution