Jonno said:
How was the original transfer formatted - I assume it was actually recorded to video/file via a 16:9 camcorder?

No. The frames of the film are anamorphic, meaning that they are 4:3 and would ordinarily require a special lens to project (and that's not 16:9... it's even wider). But the workprinter's lens is really only capable of projecting the original 4:3, so that's what I captured. Then in post I vertically squished the image from 480 to 310 and adding horizontal bars (but still 4:3 including the bars), because when THAT is stretched to 16:9, the image produced would be correct.

That's why if you take what is on the disk, and tell your DVD player (or TV) to stretch it to 16:9, it then should look right.

So the source .avi file is 4:3 but needs to be displayed stretched to 16:9. Do I need to make the target 16:9? Would it still be viewable on a standard TV? I couldn't find an example of doing this in any examples on the various internet TMPGEnc instructional guides I've accumulated.