I have some 4x3 DV sources at 60i that I want to put into my Aspect HD 1440x1080 23.976p project. Converting 60i to 23.976 was no problem with HD-Link, but I'm trying to figure out what the correct settings should be to get it into 1440x1080 while still preserving the 4:3 aspect ratio. I don't mind using the extra disk space involved in hard coding those black bars into a 16x9 frame, because it's a very short clip.

Every clip I export from HD-Link seems to need to be re-rendered in Premiere Pro and my aspect ratio still seems to get altered. I tried resizing the video to 1440x1080 and checking the box that says "Keep Aspect Ratio". But the way it exported gave me some unusual errors, and still needed to be rendered in my Premiere Pro (Aspect HD) project.

There's probably a setting or a checkbox I'm missing, but I tried a few exports and couldn't get it right, any suggestions?

An default HDV project using the Cineform 1440x1080 present will have the pixel aspect ratio (PAR) specified at 1.33, so that it will play back at 16:9 aspect ratio.

To get the correct aspect ratio for your 4:3 DV footage, you need to either add black bars on either side to make it 16:9 aspect before importing, or at some point specify that it's PAR is 1.0. I'm not sure if that's best done at the HDLink import step, or within Premiere.

Edit: oops, actually DV isn't PAR=1; it's 0.9-ish for NTSC