Can someone please help?

[warmstepvision]

The letterboxed footage comes from the cropping of the frame not adding the black bars onto the frame if that was the disagreement about. Some cams in order to shoot 16:9 use anamorphic way of stretching the image vertically of which results i don't know. Some letterbox the field of view cutting down around 25% of the resolution which if you are doing an extremely wide shot might not matter but with the answering shots would be a critical maneuver.  Though the absolutely true wide angle(on a prosumer scale) would probably come from a cam with wider ccds such as pdx10 now if that unit had progressive adjustments i would definitely own. Wonder how an anamorphic would behave with such cam. I would assume the picture would be prolonged horizontally by squizing more in then the native chips in that case you would end up with something close to cine screen but still ending up with the same 530 lines of resolution. Maybe if you letterbox that wider footage while shooting in 1.78:1 it would cut down on all of the software problems. Any thoughts?

[You Never Got Me Down Ray]

Thanks for the input and thanks for those links warmstepvision, I'll check them out. I ended buying a Sony dcr-vx2100. I've only had it for 2 days so I'm still just fucking around with it, but so far it seems like a pretty good first camera. Yeah the 16:9 just adds black bars, so you actually get less image, but I'm still waiting for my wide angle lens and I'll see how that works out.
Again thanks, any advice is appreciated as I am totally fucking clueless to the whole digital filmmaking process. Any books that are recommended? Peace.

[warmstepvision]

Site www.filmmaking.net has a good collection of books you might want to take a look at.
Try something by Blain Brown he is pretty technical, to the point where it reaches chemistry and mathematics.