BobbyA

That makes sense, thank you. Too bad VP can't save to 4:3, seems a bit of a short coming considering the amount of hardware still out there, such as video projectors which are likely to be around longer than the TVs. Especially considering, and i don't think I'm going to far out on a limb here, no one likes the black bars. Thanks again for your helpful insights.

Thank you for the suggestions. I have a halloween effect video clip that I bought instead of shot, so reshooting is not a good option. The running speed of the clip was shortened in VP. But so far I have been unable to save without the bar, if the goofy program will play the cropped clip full screen in it's previews, without the widescreen bars effect, why won't it WSIWG for the saved copy ? The video clips intended use is to play on an older 4:3 LCD TV posing as a painting. I don't want to play it in 16:9 with or without bars. I can now even load the original unedited clip into VP and it will remember the crop and preveiw play without the bars. The only work around I have found so far is using ALC's video player, I can tell it to stretch the video aspect ratios and reduce the bars to about 1/2" inch on either edge of the 20" screen. VP is adding bars to the top and bottom of the saved video, it really doesn't seem to have cropped the saved copy. I am telling VP to save the file as 640 x 480 NTSC TV resolution. Should not be this difficult...

In my case I am using 2.41 to edit a 800 x 600 that has the bars added. I use crop to remove them. VP's preview plays the video full screen, without the bars. However when I try save the movie, (to a new name, same .avi format) in the new file bars are either still there or have been put back. In either case it is very frustrating. HELP.