I shot an interview with my FX1 in HDV. I shot it in HDV but framed it as it was DV, that Is, I knew I was going to discard the left and right areas of the screen.
So now Id like to know what will be the best way to convert my HDV footage to DV, normal DV, not letterboxed or widescreen. I want to chop off the the sides of the frame to make 16:9 into 4:3. I have FCP5, After Effects, Compressor 2, etc.

Ideas?

If you want to convert the clips before editing, you might be able to do something with MPEG streamclip: http://www.alfanet.it/squared5/mpegstreamclip.html

The downconversion Streamclip does are pretty good quality in my experience.

It can downconvert pretty well and as a plus with do effective interlaced scaling. It can do batch conversion and go from any MPEG codec to any codec you have installed on the computer.

I guess inside FCP you COULD just import the footage and resize and clip it using the wireframe tool.