i did exactly everything davnes007 said and the black bars do not go away. so this is almost proving my theory above. somewhere along the line the black bars became part of the 720x480 picture. this means the software that did this was gordian knot when i made the avs script. of which i had followed the instructions in adm,s guide to mpeg ac3 editing. this i believe is the straw that broke my edit. i am starting over. the only thing i can hope for is to save the subs in my project and just remove the video and audio sources and perform the edits again hoping that the subs line back up. this really sucks. i should have learned to make the script my self from the start.