Yo,

A friend asked me to transfer a Mini DV tape of his wedding to DVD. Like all transfers, I hooked up my Mini DV camcorder to my Toshiba HDD DVD recorder to run it, which always works fine.

But something happened with this tape that I've never seen. It plays back on the MiniDV camcorder screen as a letterboxed image, and the onscreen counter numbers seem stretched. When I transfer it to the Toshiba, the Toshiba converts it to a full-screen 1:33:1 image. I've tried to set the Toshiba's record setting to 16:9 but the recorder refuses to recognize the letterboxing.

Is this a sign that the tape was recorded in HD? Is there any way to get it to a DVD recorder with the letterboxing intact? My MiniDV camcorder is about five years old, so would it even play a HD videotape? My friend is no help, because someone else did the videotaping, so he doesn't know how it was recorded. I have zero experience with HD, so I'm really at a loss as to what's going on here.

Thankz dudes