Thank you everyone for your responses. You’ve all obviously concluded that rendering down to 480p is where the problem lies and coupled with rendering the Mpeg-2 makes the degredation even more severe.
That being the case, if we were to continue with the same network, would it be more advantageous to print to tape in order to maintain the quality? So in essence, while using Adobe Premiere, we can scale down the HD footage within a 480p sequence and then print to a DVCam? Seeing that printing to a DVCam does not necessarily lose image quality, this would be our only chance of maintaining the majority of the image quality, correct?