Hi

. . . . . The format now is MPEG2. When I am done with the editing and adjust the format to 16:9 I click the Burn to DVD button and when the disc is done there are black stripes like it is on 4:3 . . . .

This is called 'Pillar boxing' and occurs when you have 4:3 source video in a 16:9 ratio final video. 

If you want 4:3 video to fill the screen of a 16:9 ratio video then the top and bottom of the 4:3 video will be cropped to get it to fit the width without squashing the video vertically and making evrything look shorter.

From the messages you are getting, the project is set to 4:3 aspect ratio (AR).

You can make the video fill the screen however you will get cropping top and bottom of the recording.

Do this as follows:

1. Change the project settings (E key) to 16:9 AR - select one of the 720 x 576 PAL or 720 x 480 NTSC 16:9 presets depending on your TV standard.  There is no point in making the video resolution higher because the source video resolution is even lower than DVD specification and you will not get any increase in definition.
    
2. You should now see the 'Pillar boxing' in the preview monitor.
    
3. To 'crop' the 4:3 to make it full screen - select Effects, Movement Effects, Size/Position and set the width to the same as the project ie 720.
    
4. Set the Left setting to 0 - the cropped image is now centred horizontally and cropped top and bottom
    
5. You can now change the Top setting to move the cropped video up or down to select the portion of the video you need.
    
6. Repeat steps 3 - 5 for each video clip on the timeline - see below

If there are a lot of clips the quickest way to apply the initial crop is as follows:

1. Crop  the first clip as in 3 above
    
2. With the same clip selected, right click it and select Video effects, Copy video effects or press the   -   key - note this is the hyphen key on the top row of the keyboard not the number pad.
    
3. OK the dialog that opens
    
4. Select all the other video clips and then right click Paste video effects or press Shift and -  (hyphen key), select the appropriate option if a dialog pops up.
    
5. You can now move up/down each video clip individually if required as in step 5 above.

Note: the down side of transferring video tape to DVD is the image quality will be relatively poor when playing back on a HD TV due to upscaling of source video which has an equivalent height of betwee 325 and 480 pixels, depending in the tape format, being increased to 1080 pixels  or more depending on the TV resolution.

HTH

John EB