Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:
Ok, dudes, I figured out how to do curved borders in Vegas. It was easier than I thought it would be... I simply had Vegas generate a large rectangular white frame, then used the "deform" filter, which includes independent controls for curving top, bottom, left, and right. Disabled "stretch to frame", and adjusted pan as needed. I then rendered that out as a mask, which I chroma-keyed in a second pass. The whole thing only took a couple of hours (for a small sample clip). Now that I know how to do it, future masks will be quick to generate.

I've posted a new clip, so you can all compare straight borders versus curved borders, scene-by-scene. It's about 30 seconds long and includes about 8 different scenes. There has been no pulldown yet, but I have resized it according to Mothr's suggested dimensions. I have also done modest color correction, removed the yellow corner, and done a little bit of spot removal. A link to the clip is found at the bottom of the Grande pictures page:

http://www.hardbat.com/puggo/grandePics.html

Scroll down and right-click on "border comparison", and save the resulting .avi file. Close comparison shows advantages of each... the curved border shows a tiny bit of more content, the straight border is - er - straighter.

Thoughts?

looks nice but it still needs to be set to anamorphic. switch the aspect ratio to 16:9 in VLC and it looks right. By default the video doesn't stretch to 16:9

As for the border, either looks fine. I like the curved because it gives you a little more picture information

I'd also do a little more color correction and clean up.