I am so sorry to bother everyone a holiday weekend, but because it is a long weekend, I was able to get a cheaper rental on a Sony J-30SDI deck. Here's what's going on:

About 6 years ago I directed a short film on 35mm film with Panavision Ananmorphic lenses. The Footage was telecined to Beta SP at SD 4:3. I imported all of this footage at a low res at 4:3 and edited it. Now, 6 years later, I am doing an online session to bring the footage to its best possible state and ultimately make a DVD. My questions deal with when I batch digitize, could I now batch them as 16:9 uncompressed or should I stick to 4:3? I've been testing it all night. When I set my timeline properties to 16:9 2VUY and batch some of the footage at 16:9, the original pixel ratio and no scaling gives me a slightly streched image. Using a pixel ratio of square 1:1 gives me a clear picture but thin vertical black matte on the side. When played in a dvd player, with a 16:9 TV compensate for that? Or should I scale it to fit x aspect? (I lose the sides in overscan mode). When I set the pixel ratio to NTSC CCIR and scale it to fit x keep aspect, I lose a lot of the top matting which is good, but the image seems a little fuzzy (blown up).The Pixel aspect at 16:9 with no scale fits horizontally, but again is a little streched looking.

Any insight to this issue would be greatly appreciated.

You have no choice as to how you digitize it. It will digitized as 4:3 anamorphic. But what you want to do is switch the timeline to SD 16:9 so you see the material in proper aspect ratio on 16:9 viewers. and when you output your DVD from Liquid from this timeline, it will set the 16:9 flag in the DVD so properly setup players will show the video as 16:9 on a widescreen TV and as letterboxed 16:9 on a 4:3 TV. The actual video on the DVD will be 720x480 anamorphic.

Check that out and see how it works for you.

I forgot to mention that I shot some more 35mm anamorphic telecined to SD 16:9. So I assume that I digitize that at 16:9, but how will these clips fit together in the project (timeline properties, pixel aspect, and scaling)? Thanks so much for getting back to me so quickly.

There is no such thing as capturing in 16:9. Beta is always 720x486 so either the material on the tape is anamorphic or letterboxed. When you put it on a 16:9 timeline in Liquid it will all be in the correct aspect ratio and when you output it will all be sent to the DVD as anamorphic. SD 16:9 is always anamorphic or letterboxed, just how you view it changes. Again, Liquid just captures the full NTSC frame from the tape regardless of the format of the material in that frame. At the very worst you may have to go into the clip properties and scale the material to fit the 16:9 aspect ratio of the timeline, but you will probably not even have to do that.