My 4:3 DVD creation shows on WideScreen TV badly cut off top and bottom

If you have your film's track set to 4:3 in DVD-SP then it is either the settings of your DVD player outputting to your widescreen tv or (more likely) the way the tv is set up to display the input it receives. Widescreen tv's usually have lots of different settings (Wide, 16:9, 14:9, zoom etc etc)

As to converting 4:3 to Letterbox you can do this in FCP by using a 16:9 anamorphic timeline (I think) then zooming up your 4:3 footage to fit - with the consequent croping of the top and bottom of your footage)

I don't think you'd need to recapture to convert from 4:3 to 16:9 in FCP (though this question might be better posted in the FCP forum!!). If you have your edit already I think you'll find there are ways to use that edit and then create a 16:9 timeline and reframe and resize to 16:9 - but why would you necessarily want to. To convert it properly to 16:9 you would have to reframe the 4:3 and possibly move it within your new 16:9 frame as things get cropped - this would mean scanning through the timeline and possibly keyframing the footage. I'm no expert when it comes to FCP but it seems to me that if the footage has been shot in 4:3 it should stay that way - surely it would have been composed for 4:3 framing... If it's 4:3 it is never going to fit a widescreen set's screen unless it is shown windowboxed which means you get black bars left and right (and I know my widescreen plasma will do this).

Don't think you can use Handbrake to do this and as you say it's not a good idea to start with a compressed .m2v file convert to a reframed Quicktime then back to .m2v... though to be honest we have done this before in a scrape on things like trailers that have been supplied to us as 4:3 letterbox on a DVD already compressed (and yes, film distributors do do that sort of thing). We have used MPEGStreamclip - a free download which should be in everyones DVD toolkit - and taken the muxed trailers and converted them to Quicktime and reframed them to anamorphic 16:9 then redone them as MPEG .m2v's. We've even used it to do NTSC to PAL conversions (which most "experts" would probably shoot us for - but hey, if it works). And this is for commercial releases!!!

Good luck

Steve

Not sure you've entirely understood what I am saying...

If a movie starts out at 4:3 it really should stay at 4:3. The black bars would be created by the widescreen tv if it is set up correctly to display 4:3 material. You basically get black bars on the side (rather than black bars top and bottom like you would if you watch 16:9 material on a 4:3 tv set). That way - with the black bars on the sides - you get the whole 4:3 picture undistorted. If you instead convert your 4:3 material to 16:9 in FCP (or whatever) you are effectively cropping off the top and the botom mof your 4:3 picture - you are losing some of your picture info (of course that may be acceptable)

Steve