Adjusting photos for video use (pixel aspect ratio)

[manglwise]

I have VS X2 and I want to put some photos into a video I'm making.

I have video from a Panasonic PV-GS200 which gives a 24 bit, 720x480 AVI file. I have the Project Properties set to:

NTSC drop frame (29.97 fps)
Microsoft AVI files
24 bits, 720 x 480, 4:3, 29.97 fps
Lower Field First
DV Video Encoder -- type 1

And the Preferences for Image set to "Keep aspect ratio".

I have a small handbook from Ulead (from 2004 when I purchased video gear) which says that the pixel aspect ratio of DV is rectangular whereas the pixels in my photos are square. And this difference will cause photographs to become distorted as those square photo pixels are stretched to become rectangular pixels in the video.

My question is: do I need to crop my photograph correctly before I insert it into the timeline in VS X2, or is there an option/feature within VS which will handle this transformation for me?

Here is how the book says to crop photos:
for 720x480 NTSC-DV crop photos to 720x576
for 720x576 PAL-DV crop photos to 704x576

It further recommended using PNG file type for photos and to keep the image dimension (resolution) low, e.g. 720x576, in order to avoid artifacts in the video - only doubling the above crop dimensions if a pan & zoom filter are going to be employed. Is this still good advice? An image dimension of 720x576 seems really low to me but I am not used to working with video.

Thank you for any help!

[skier-hughes]

As camers now take pictures into megapixels and beyond, so long as your picture retains the ratio as set out in the manual it will be fine.
Bear in mind though, once part of a video file it will come down to 720x480, but an image with 10x that definition to start with will look slightly better than an image that started at 720x480.