I know this is the wrong forum but I'm not getting a response at the other one so maybe someone can help me here.

I just recently shot a short film on the HVX200 in 720p. Anyway, the edit's finished and I need to compress the project and burn it as a DVD video for a Sundance submission. I'm kind of clueless about this kinda thing so I was wondering if anyone could help me out with the correct settings/compression that should be used for this purpose. The film is about 21 minutes long.

I've tried MPEG 2 compression and it causes the image to look kind of blurry and darker. I'm working with high quality footage (Quicktime, Photo Jpeg compression) in Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0. Anyway if someone would give me a detailed explanation of the settings I need I would be forever grateful. Thanks.

... if someone would give me a detailed explanation of the settings I need I would be forever grateful. Thanks.

Although focused on final cut the following link shows how to squeeze optimal settings when compressing for DVD:

http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/compressor2_custom_presets.html

That said, I usually export my movie in full resolution and then use a compressor like bitVice to get the most out of my footage. I target an average bit rate of about 6.8 for the .m2v file (and shoot for about 256 kbps for the .ac3 file). There are a plethora of additional setting you can use in the bitVice encoder (which is Mac only, I think) that improve your output.

My final transcoded output looks awesome coming from the HD master.

Anyway, hopefully you can cobble together some helpful information out of this.