Capturing 16:9 HDV and exporting 4:3 letterbox
 

I am wondering exactly how to do the following in Premiere:

1. Capture 1440x1080 HDV footage into Premiere and edit it.

2. Export at 720x480 4:3, with letterboxing for the original image proportions to be maintained.

Harm,

That's an excellent article, and extremely detailed. It's amazing that so many steps are required to get a good down conversion.

Does anybody have other suggestions for doing this?

Not the quality of Dan Isaac's method, but far simpler:

Export with AME to MPEG2-DVD widescreen format and use a bitrate calculator for optimal settings: DVD-HQ : Bitrate & GOP calculator