Making Anime Fit (a resolution problem)

[deviousterran]

ive been working on turning fansub anime into dvds. ive got everything figured out except for a small problem on the final project. the anime is too tall. the source .avi files are 640x480 so it was a simple matter to add black borders to resize to 720x480 when converting to mpeg. however some of the picture is cut off on the top and the bottom.
what i'm wondering is if there is a setting in scenarist or even on the players themselves that will auttomatically use the 720x480 resouliton that scenarist requires for NTSC DVD's. as far as i can tell (correct me if i'm wrong) when the dvd is played on any standalone, some of the picture is cropped. why is that or how do i fix it? and if the solution is to simply add black borders on the top and the bottom what resolution should the actual video be?
I feel that i have missed something about resolutions, because i cant find any information on this. please, someone help me!

[goonix]

Don't add black borders but resize it to 720x480. AVI and DVD have different pixel aspect ratios.
This way you get a full screen view, but a small part on top, bottom, left and right will be in the overscan area and therefore not visible on a standard 4:3 TV set (same as for every DVD movie).

If you want to see the whole movie area, then add black borders to 720x540 and resize to 720x480.
But now the black borders can be seen on some TV sets.

goonix