ibleedspeed said:

moth3r if 3:2 is correct i am confused. most dvd,s i watch have a dar of 16:9. i tried using vegas to set the dar to 16:9. all that did was give me a 16:9 dar of the picture i loaded into vegas with black bars on the sides.

Oh, I think I see what's up.

16:9 DVDs aren't actually 16:9. They're 3:2, stretched vertically (so people look skinnier and taller). When you put it into a DVD player, there's a flag encoded into the video that tells the player to stretch it out - on a 4:3 TV, it squishes it vertically, adding black bars on the top and bottom that are generated by the player; on a 16:9 TV, they stretch it out horizontally to fit in the 16:9 frame without adding any black bars. This is what's known as anamorphic widescreen (on video, at least - on film, anamorphic widescreen is a different beast, though the principle is similar).

4:3 DVDs are technically 3:2 (720x480) as well, but the pixels are rectangles instead of squares. If the pixels were squares, it would be 640x480.

So what you need to do is just work with the stretched 720x480 video (there might be an option in your editing program to change the monitors to 16:9 so you can see it properly, but the file will still be 720x480), and when you've finished and are building the DVD, make sure that you give the video the proper 16:9 anamorphic flag.