[edited Because Of Dead Links.]

There are ways of making a 16:9 format video, and this essentially involves cropping the top and bottom of your picture if you don't have a camcorder with a 16:9 option. This guide touches on this http://www.marcpeters.co.uk/tmpgenctools.html (click the link, press ctrl-f and type 16:9). There's also this guide, which can be followed with a few modifications: http://www.videoeditingforums.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=136

Essentially, what you have to do is crop the top and bottom of your video to create a 16:9 shape but don't maintain the aspect ratio so your video looks all squished up, then tell your encoder to put a 16:9 aspect ratio header on your video and on playback, you'll get a video that's strectched out. Alternatively crop the top and bottom (or mask them), then leave the current aspect ratio to get 4:3 with black bars.

I use Adobe Premiere for my credits, but alternatives are After Effects and Tittle Deko. For DVD creation I've settled on Sonic DVDit after using many an authoring software. This creates good looking menus, and the DVD files, which I then burn with Nero.

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I was backreading the posts in the this forum and came up on this one, I know that it's old however this info may be of some use in the future.

Mike Askin posted info on this subject on his site along with some plug-in's that work in Premier and will do the format conversion from 4:3 to 16:9 and so on, you can read more on his site at http://www.mykaskin.freeserve.co.uk/...s/plugins.html and you can also download his preset files to get the job done.

I've had to use it a few times and it works great, just have to re-render the project to get the effect to work.