I am making my demo reel (just graduated from visual effects school) all our footage is HD tga sequences, i got to shoot with a CineAlta...sooo sweet!! Anyways, i need to make standard def dvd's for viewing on regular 4:3 tv's. Since hd is widescreen i'm going to have to letterbox for 4:3 obviously, what is the best way of going about that from my tga's? I have Vegas 5.0, premiere pro and shake 2.5.

So to recap, what res do i downres the HD tga's to?
What pixel aspect ratio do i use?

Thanks a million for taking the time to read!! This comunity rocks!

DVD uses MPEG2 and the same pixel aspect ratios for DVD. The
advantage of DVD is that it can letterbox in realtime on playback.
So you really want to convert your footage to 16:9 anamorphic.

DVD in NTSC is 720 x 480 (720 x 576 for PAL) with the following
pixel aspect ratios (according to my Sony Vegas NLE):

- 1.2121 for NTSC
- 1.4568 for PAL

Shake would be your best option since it has very high quality
algorithms etc. Vegas would be my second choice (both should
be able to load those sequences without any problem)

I can't really help you on how to do the conversion exactly. If
you do need help I'm willing to do a test in Vegas 5 for you, do
the following in that case:

- send ONE frame (one TGA file) to visuar@gmail.com
- send another e-mail to my regular address (visuar@iname.com) to notify me that you sent a frame (I don't always check my gmail account)