OK, here are some quick comments.

What bit rate on the video are you using and have these DVD players been OK before? Some DVD players (especially older laptops etc.) stuggle a bit with anything over 6000 Mb/sec. (BTW, as an aside I know that some don't like the audio in PCM but need AC3.)

Also, was the field order accidentally switched between LFF and UFF anywhere in the project as this can cause horrible jumpy/jittery stepping in scenes with a lot of motion?

Thanks Andy for the quick response

I'm pretty sure the field order hasn't been changed in Premiere. The whole interlacing-deinterlacing thing is a bit confusing for me so I didn't knowingly do anything regarding that. Wasn't sure whether you needed to deinterlace for DVD or not? I tried first using TMPGEnc free version to encode to mpeg and used PAL field order settings from the drop down and this DVD had no picture at all. So I ended using Cucusoft which has minmal settings and ended up with my jittery DVD. Can you recommend any decent mpeg for DVD encoders and settings I could use?

I want to put in my .2 cents here as this works perfectly for me in PP CS3.

Using Premiere Pro CS3, I'm seeing 99.5% perfect results in downsizing my 1080i HDV video (from the Sony FX1) to DVD NTSC resolution without any external apps or plugins. Just made a quick DVD test and looks perfect on both a regular SD TV and scaled up to 1080i on my PS3. Here are my steps.

1. Captured footage from Sony FX1 to PC using Premiere Pro CS3. Regular HDV 1080i 29.94fps project.

2. Left "field options" at default settings ("None")

3. Exported movie with following settings:
File Type: Microsoft DV AVI
Compressor: DV NTSC
Color Depth: Millions of Colors
Frame size: 720x480
Frame Rate: 29.97fps
Pixel Aspect Ratio: D1/DV NTSC (0.9)
Data Rate: Recompress is UNCHECKED
Fields: No fields (Progressive Scan) & Deinterlace Video Footage CHECKED

4. After export is done, the resulting AVI should look perfectly sharp when played back on your PC.

5. Import AVI into Encore, encode using "Progressive High quality 7MB VBR 2 Pass" and resulting DVD should look great on a SD TV and HDTV.

I had terrible trouble with encore CS3 as I had a mixture of progressive and interlaced HDV footage on my timeline. I resized a cineform AVI with PPCS3 CFHD output and the results in Encore produced jittery DVDs in places and not always on the interlaced footage - although a lot of that had lines across the screen. The problems showed up on an older TV more. I ended up rencoding with cineform HDLink to a .mov file and transcoding to mpeg with TMPGenc Xpress 4 and got an excellent DVD that looked great on an old TV, a 21" flat panel SD TV and a 42" HDTV.

Any suggestions on exporting 1080 60i footage to SD PAL?

I'm very happy with my TMPGEnc. I haven't exported in PAL since I'm in NTSC land, but that's one of the output options.

I shoot, capture, and edit in HDV, frameserve from Premiere with Debugmode to TMPGenc, then output SD files for Encore. Very happy with the results. Didn't like what I got going directly from Premiere to Encore.

Unfortunately, Brad, TMPG is very weak in transcoding NTSC to PAL - this is what Andriy is asking, I have tested it. The only software (aside from professional ones, that are not only slow, but terribly expensive too) that does a good job in my experience, is Procoder from Canopus.

Ok, I'll check the Procoder out and let you know )

Ah... good to know in case I ever have to supply something in PAL. Thanks Ervin.

standards conversions
 

I don't own this software but I've heard good things about their "Film FX"
Nattress: Standards Conversion: Standards Converter V2.5
here's a format conversion utility for 100 US

My HD to (progressive) DVD Workflow
 

Having tried a number of ideas on this thread I've come up with the following workflow for going from HDV to DVD. I've played the DVDs created with this workflow back on a full HD monitor and they compare very well with the original HD project. So here it is

1. Capture and edit in PPCS3 Cineform intermediate (convert HDV to square pixels 1920x1080)
2. Export edited project back out to Cineform intermediate. Deinterlace at this stage. No scaling, resolution remains 1920x1080
3. Import this file into After Effects use the following composition settings
-Preset: PAL D1/DV Widescreen
- The “Lock Aspect Ratio to 5:4” will be checked (this does not cause any problems in getting the final 16:9 ratio)
-Pixel aspect ratio: D1/DV PAL Widescreen (1.42)
- The rest sets itself with no issues.
4. Drag your 1920x1080 video into your 720x576 composition
5. Select your video file in the composition window hit the “S” key for scale and adjust the scale of your video to 53.5%
If you want your monitor to show how your AE export will look toggle the pixel aspect correction button on the composition monitor window.
6. Next select “add to render queue" and under the “output module” use the following settings.
-Format: MPEG 2 DVD with the following format options
Quality: 5
TV Standard: PAL
Field Order: Progressive
Pixel Aspect Ratio: Widescreen 16:9
Bitrate Encoding: CBR
Bitrate [Mbps]: 8
The rest you can leave as is. Next hit Render.
7. Once this file has rendered out import it into a new Encore project. I have tried a number of other “consumer grade” DVD authoring programs and none of them have accepted the type of progressive MPEG 2 file produced with this method without wanting to re-encode the file in an interlaced form. Encore will not re-encode the beautiful progressive MPEG that you have created.

Have you tried with NTSC footage?

Ntsc?
 

No I haven't tried NTSC but I'd be interested to see how others might go with a similar workflow. There are two NTSC widescreen presets in the After effects composition settings dropdown. One for 29.97 (I think) frames per second and the other for 23.97 (or something like that). I guess if your authoring a progressive DVD the 23.97 might be the way to go or you could override the preset and insert 24 fps in the AE comp settings. Aside from that there's also the issue of going from 60i to 24p which I have no experience with but I'm sure you could find info on. The 50i to 25p of PAL land is a slightly easier equation.