Re: Viewing widescreen footage correctly

What you are seeing and working with is 16:9 anamorphotic video, meaning that it is in the normal 720*576 (PAL) or 720*486 (NTSC) size, but the pixels should get displayed in a much more rectangular way than with 4:3 video. When you set Media 100 i to 16:9, you will see that your viewer windows are changed to 16:9 aspect ratio, and your video is displayed correctly on your computer screen (if your footage is not acquired as 16:9 you can change that via the "Change Media attributes" command, which only will change the "flagging" of the video to tell the system that it is widescreen footage.
You need to change the settings on your video monitor to 16:9 to view anamorphic footage correctly. And make sure to label your tapes correctly, so that the person receiving the tapes will know that it is 16:9.
What you are speaking about with the black bars is not 16:9, but is a 4:3 letterboxed version of your 16:9 footage, which will lose picture informations. Media 100 i cannot output a letterboxed version in realtime (Media 100 HD on the Kona3 board can). If you want to resize it in Boris to a 4:3 letterbox version you need to scale it to 75% on the Y axis.