Convert HD Video to SD for DVD

[Kraise]

Hey, my camera films 1920x1080 widescreen, I'm wanting to somehow resize that to standard definition for DVD/NTSC playback, the normal size for NTSC is 720x480 I believe but that's not 16:9.. So I'm wondering how I should go about resizing my 1920x1080 footage to be played back on 4:3 SD TVs as widescreen still retaining all of the original picture?

[Inspector.Gadget]

Resizing to 720x480 is fine, because you'll set the appropriate PAR for 16:9 display. With the PAR applied on playback, your content will look fine.

16:9-in-4:3 is a different case. Essentially, you want your stuff to actually display at a square pixel size of about 720x400 (that's mod16; to be pedantic, you really want 705x480; I'd still stick with 700). You'll need to figure out whether your player does ITU or non-ITU resizing (I think jdobbs once said that a lot of players don't use ITU resizing), but to get a display size for your content of 720x400, you want to actualy encode it at 720x368 and then pad out to 720x480 with black borders.

[Blue_MiSfit]

Don't forget to convert the BT.709 colorimetry to BT.601.

~MiSfit

[manono]

And if the video is interlaced you'll need to resize in a different interlace-aware way.
...the normal size for NTSC is 720x480 I believe but that's not 16:9.
It's not 4:3 either, but 3:2. Both 4:3 and 16:9 DVDs are stored as 720x480, to be resized properly at playback.