My associate editor uses CS4. I don't know much at all about it as I use Final Cut. However, he is working with XDCAM footage, shot at 1280 x 720 @60 progressive, destined for blu-ray disc and standard DVD. He says the HD footage looks great but the SD looks like VHS quality.
Is there a method that produces the best results using CS4?
Here is what he wrote:

The HD footage is beautiful, However----

I have tried without success to down convert the HD footage to standard definition.

When I make a standard wide screen DVD from the time line, I get a great picture wide screen, but massive artifacts.

When I export the HD footage with my media browser to std .avi. I get something that looks like VHS quality, instead of something that looks like SVHS quality.

I can get the image to 4x3 letterbox like the broadcasters do. I think due to the different customers, this is the correct size.

My next test is to play the blu-ray to my dv-cam tape and put the tape version in the computer to generate the std DVD.

thx

I can't say for sure what the specific problem might be, but in general it is well known that CS4 does a poor job of rescaling HD to SD. This can result in difficulty getting a good looking DVD.
With CS4, I would always render out a master HD movie and use a third party encoder (ProCoder 3 in my case) to get the best DVD encode.
The situation is vastly improved in CS5 and I'm getting good results from within the Adobe software.

Hey David....

CS4 does a fine job of downconverting progressive footage..
You'll need to show the settings from AME, and let us see all the options that were checked..
Screenshots work the best..