Hi, I have footage shot on the HVX200 and already have an HD edit on Premiere Pro CS4. Now I need to make a DV PAL 4:3 (letterboxed) master for local networks which accept only MiniDV tapes.

What should my workflow be? Should I render out the edit as DV PAL directly from Premiere? Should I open up the edit sequence in After Effects and render movie from there? I've tried making a DV PAL master direct from Premiere and the results were less than flattering. I would think scaling down a 1440x1080 image to 720x576 would make it nice and crisp. In fact, its made it all hazy and fuzzy. Where am I going wrong?

Someone suggested rendering out a targa image sequence in the original size, taking into photoshop and batch resizing it there to fit a SD 4:3 screen size. Someone suggested resizing the footage in After Effects. There seem to be so many variants.

Also, should I add effects and color correction before transcoding to DV or after? All this is most confusing!

A workflow guide would be most welcome. Thanks!

I'd suggest using VirtualDub (with Lanczos resizing).

Thanks for the reply Robert. I have Media Encoder CS4 and Procoder 3. Does VirtualDub do anything that these titles won't do? I just want the best method to resize. I downloaded VirtualDub but don't really understand how it works :(

VirtualDub is not an encoder - essentially, VirtualDub allows you to apply a very large number of available filters to video (some built in, and a multitude of mostly free 3rd party filters). It will allow you to use Lanczos resizing (a built in filter), which is superior to most resizing options I've seen with the big name NLEs. Compression of the output depends on what codecs you have available on your system. Panasonic's DV codec is freely available on the web, and works well with VirtualDub. Simply open the final edited version of your video, in VirtualDub, use Lanczos to resize it, and use Panasonic's DV codec as the compression option for the video output (if you wish to deliver as DV). (You will have to take the time to learn the basics of using VirtualDub - it's not that difficult.)