If you have only a few events then using Pan/Crop is probably the easiest method. Click on the little control in the event that looks like a rectangle with little nubs in the upper left and lower right corners. Reduce the height of the frame to whatever is appropriate. For NTSC using 720x360 looks similar to 16:9 film.

http://www.vegasusers.com/testbench/screenshots/chienworks-blackbars-crop.jpg

If you have many events then using a mask track would be easier. Insert a new video track above the main video track. Insert a solid white Generated Media event into this track and stretch it out the full length of the project. Set the height of this to whatever is appropriate, such as 360 for 16:9. Click the crooket arrow on the main track at the far left of the screen to make that track a child of the mask track above it.

http://www.vegasusers.com/testbench/screenshots/chienworks-blackbars-mask.jpg

Welcome

There is more than 1 way but you can use Pan and crop. Look for the small screen looking square at the last frame of your video event. Hold your mouse pointer over it and it will say Pan/Crop. You can the change the size from top and bottom only to give you the letterbox look. Make sure "lock aspect ratio" is un selected.

You can also add to new video tracks above the video event and change them to mask tracks and create a black strip at top for one and bottom for the other. Keep in mind for both of these you are loosing the top and bottom portion of the screens. It is not re sizing the video. If you want to squeeze it top to bottom a little you can use track motion.

Have a good day!!

The white rectangle method works well, but use the Multiple overlay mode instead of making it a parent, then it will work for more than one track.
///d@

Another way is if you have PluginPac installed, you can use the 3D LE video effect to do the same thing, although, you WILL cut off the top and bottom of the picture.

Thanks Dennis! That's a good improvement. :)

Dennis, or Chien, would you mind explaining the multiple track method in detail?

If you're using P/C then simply select one of the letterbox presets.

wcoxe1: follow exactly the same instructions for the Mask technique, but ... instead of clicking the little crooked arrow to make a compositing child, click on the little "alpha" button to choose a different compositing mode and select Multiply (Mask) instead of Sourc Alpha.

Couple other methods for applying letterboxing when you have 720 - 640 x 480 video.

Open the video in V/Dub, do a crop to desired size using the null filter (step added for simplification), add the resize filter, enter the cropped size in the upper portion of the filter dialog, check the box and enter full frame measurements in the lower, letterbox half, set compression options etc. and render away. [Caveate - requires VFW friendly DV codec for DV video or conversion to mjpeg or similar]

In Vegas, open the video and crop to new size, optionally doing pan & scan (picking the area of the frame to save) on a scene by scene basis. Set the proj to this new, cropped size to prevent resizing video, and render to mjpg at new frame size. Open rendered video, set proj size to full frame, make sure maintain aspect is set for clip properties, render to full size frame using whatever format/compression. Alternatively, if rendering to mpg2, *might* see some gains opening cropped video in TMPGEnc for encoding as it has some options specifically for letterboxing that might give you a smaller total file size.

Methods are based on: Initial compression matrix removes most of that data that can be lost - once this has happened, generational loss is lessened (see adamwilt.com). Vegas and V/dub are designed for different putposes - V/Dub Much faster on resize [anyone who compares times to resize will have no doubts]. Pan & Scan allows better control of content, more assured result will contain main focus of frame - possible but perhaps more difficult when adding masksing/compositing. Adding letterboxing is not computationally as complicated & work possibly done during encoding rather then before And during.