I have accidentally found myself obligated to shoot girls gymnastic meets. Last time I say something stupid like "I am sorry to hear about your foot. Let me know if you need anything". They are indoor and lighting is mediocre at best. I have a good camera - Canon HF G40. One of the issues is that they want a bad delivered format. A NTSC DVD.. uuugh!!. No bluray disc here for some reason. The filming is not the problem but the HD to SD conversion workflow is. I have done some testing and have not found good results.

My first thought is to shoot in 1080p at 60fps at 35mb since it is fast sports and this would be the highest quality starting footage. Set the project to match and edit. Then make a disk project and done. This seemed to work but the resulting DVD footage seemed less than stellar. I know it will never be like the DVD movie I can buy.

Alternatively I though I can edit the clips and convert to DVD Standard mpg. Then create project in studio as DVD and arrange them. Finally make a disc project and burn. This also did not work so well.

So what do you generally do when you are trying to get a NTSC Widescreen DVD from your HD footage.

Cheers