[Jeff Brown]

I’m not sure we’ve all defined our terms completely.

Regarding “uncompressed” — there is a lot of leeway in the video realm for what this really means. 4:2:2 YUV video is termed “uncompressed”, but the chroma samples are 1/2 that of luma samples — that’s compressed.
If you wish to see if Premiere (and NOT output codecs) is changing frame pixels, I would suggest using a truly uncompressed format, such as a TGA frame sequence in and out, and compare that. Premiere, as far as I know, works in RGB colorspace; most codecs for presentation will work in a variant of a YUV space. Something is bound to change a bit in the process. MPEG2 is a very lossy codec (it was designed that way), so it’s not fair or accurate, in my opinion, to judge that output vs. “original” footage.

-jeff

[Jeff Brown]

If you are playing of a standard Video-DVD, you don’t have a choice:
720×480 for NTSC (PAL is different).

If you are playing off a data-DVD (DVD-ROM), you have nothing but choices, so test, test, test.

-jeff

[Jeff Brown]

There is a PDF manual. It may require a separate download.

-jeff

[Jeff Brown]

If you have the budget, I would look in to: Twixtor, and/or FieldsKit from reVisionFX. Unless you have CS5, which i think has added similar slow motion generation.
I am not a vendor, just a (happy) user of Twixtor; the results are impressive.

-Jeff

[Jeff Brown]

I will “second” what Alex said. Almost all MPEG formats compress groups of frames rather than individual frames. Which is good for compact files, but bad for editing. DV compresses each frame individually, and works very well for editing and playback.

-Jeff

[Jeff Brown]

AVI is not a format, it is a wrapper for many different codecs (same with QuickTime). You might need to use AfterEffects toconvert the AVI to a different codec (like DV) before editing it in Premiere. The best choice would be your project settings; i.e., up-res to HDV.

-jeff

[Jeff Brown]

… or for the track under the title, you can go to the project window, “add new item” — “black”. In case you might want video underneath later.

-jeff

[Jeff Brown]

You have progressive footage to start with, so you cannot “add” interlacing*. Treat the whole project as progressive, including the DVD encode. Technically, the resulting DVD will be displayed on a CRT as PsF: Progressive-segmented-frame, which is another way of saying both fields display one progressive frame.
LCD and plasma TVs vary in how they display interlaced: some show true interlaced, some process everything to 60P (or 50P).

*technically, you can double the source frame rate and interlace the result, but your clips will be 1/2 as long.

Clear as mud?

-Jeff

[Jeff Brown]

I’ve provided media for both, though I only use Premiere myself. As an animator, one big difference is Premiere can directly import a file sequence. One does have to render for RT playback, but at least you can work with TGA (or PNG, etc.) streams.

-Jeff

[Jeff Brown]

FYI, I’ve found QT pro to be well worth the few dollars. It’s a very handy utility to do quick audio conversions, for one.

-Jeff