After much experimenting and deadends, we have a very succesfull path to an NTSC SD DVD from a DNxHD sequence.

Export as a QT Movie (not reference) 1920x1080 DNxHD codec, top field, RGB (this takes about 10 minutes per minute of finished footage) and does make a very big file.

Encode in Procoder 2 as a Non-interlaced source, lower or upper field M2v and Wave file.

Author with your favorite authoring program (we used DVD-Lab Pro).

The result is sharp, with great color and smooth motion.

We're still trying to see if we can use a QT reference file but those experiments are still on-going.

YAY!  Always good to hear users post success stories.  I have book-marked this one for my own personal use.  Thanks for stepping-it out for all to read and learn from.

Take care.

added to the everything you need to know thread as well thx for the post.

Menno

Hi all,

Here's the workflow which works for me :

1. Capture to HDV project as HDV
2. Do my edits, effects, titles, etc...
3. Do full effects render (in/out marks on whole sequence and Expert Render)
4. Video mixdowns (puts into DNxHD)
5. Audio mixdown
   
6. Create new sequence to hold the mixdowns
7. Export the new sequence as QT Ref.
8. Sorenson can now compress to exactly what you want - DVD, QT HD, QT SD, etc.

This works . However, the render is v-e-r-y long (last project = 12 minutes took 4 hours), and the squeeze has a ratio of 4:1.

For you experts.  Would the workflow speed up if I did a mixdown after capturing, so I am only working in DNxHD?
In addition, I am working on a firewire 400 disk.  I suspect the connection type (FW400) to be part of the reason for the long render and squeeze times.

For cheap and cheerful quick SD exports from HDV I've found you can transcode a sequence to DNxHD and make a QTref, no mixdowns, then import the QTref into DVDit! 6.
Then I let this package do the rest. Fewer steps and quality isn't bad at all, even though I was only trying for viewing copies

SimonGiddings:

the render is v-e-r-y long (last project = 12 minutes took 4 hours), and the squeeze has a ratio of 4:1.

For you experts.  Would the workflow speed up if I did a mixdown after capturing, so I am only working in DNxHD?

I've been using Squeeze to compress mixed DVCpro HD/DNxHD projects to SD MPEG2.  Working with QTref the render time for 10 minutes, VBR 2-pass, came out at under an hour.  Presumably if you mixdown to all DNxHD you will get similar speedups.  Why not just try it out?