DVD Screen shows for widescreen TVs

[wilderw]

I am new to Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements but have searched the forums without a specific answer to this question so hope it fits here in the Advanced Forum.

I would like to create a slide show on DVD suitable for playback on a widescreen TV with 16:9 aspect ratio.

I've used the Premiere preset for Widescreen DVDs and have success if I manually drag in photos that have been pre-sized to 16:9 ratio.

My Canon digital camera's native capture is 2048 x 1536 pixels (a 4:3 aspect ratio). I understand I would need to crop photos to transform them to a 16:9 aspect ratio and I'm stuck finding a simple way to automate this. Photoshop Elements will let me create an WMV slide show - and there is a DVD NTSC template but the details of that template say nothing about aspect ratio and the resulting DVD shows the photos in 4:3 format.

Ignoring Photoshop Elements for the moment - if I were to simply drag some 4:3 aspect ratio stills directly to Premiere does the latter program have the capability to transform these to 16:9 ratio (hopefully through smart cropping).

A related question - PSE can batch resize photos but does not seem to provide a batch crop. Does anyone know of a utility to smartly transform the aspect ratio of photos?

Many thanks

[ATR]

Suggestions:
(1) I have Elements 3.0 Windows (4.0 should be similiar):
Check out File/Process Multiple File/Image Size/Resize Images, and explore
for widescreen:
Width 1280 pixels
Height 720 pixels
Resolution 72 pixels/inch

(2) Premiere Elements 2.0 will do all the work for you. But pre-sizing is recommended if you have a very large project that would slow down Premiere Elements having to do that much work. If I recall, Rendering time can be impacted.

(3) If you opt for the do it yourself individual route, also check out using File/Open/Blank File/Preset/HDTV 1280 x 720 as a template for resizing your photos. More details, if need be. But, Premiere Elements will do all this for you. So, why not see how it handles this for you (maybe on a small test case).

If you get a chance, make a visit to the Premiere Elements User to User Forum at http://www.adobe.com. There is a nice writeup on the topic in the FAQ of that Forum. Although it deals with Standard, it gives some food for thought.

ATR