I finished editing a movie i shot 24p 16:9 with the canon hx1. it is now ready to burn to dvd but when i burn it to dvd it burns full screen. can someone please give me a step by step guide by how to change this so it plays widescreen with the letterboxes. thank you.

First off, what DVD Authoring App are you using?

Basically though, regarfless of the App, you need to Encode a MPEG-2 16x9 file so that DVD players will know to flag it as widescreen natively. Each program is different though and some cannot handle 16x9.