Trying AVCHD for 1st time (Canon HF-200) for wildlife photography. Previously edited DV tape from Canon GL-2 and stills from Canon 50D with FCE on MacBookPro. Using Toast 10 to author DVDs. I really can't find any advice on how to optimize settings and workflow to end up with the best NTSC 720x486 anamorphic DVD and am hoping to learn from the experience of members of this blog.

Camcorder: Shooting MXP (24Mb/s) at 60i. Tried 30p but fast motion suffered. Is there a preference?

Flamingo/VoltaicHD: Convert vs. Convert Custom (Compressor Native or NTSC 720x486 16x9 or HD 1920x1080 16:9?), Advanced Deinterlace vs. Custom Deinterlace or neither? If shooting 60i, when should it be deinterlaced? For clips without fast motion, is there any advantage to using VoltaicHD to specify Compressor presets like HD720p, HD1080i, HD1080p when the target is SD anamorphic?

FCE: New project start at DV NTSC 48khz Anamorphic or keep timeline as AIC 1920x1080i60 and reduce at end? Interestingly, if timeline is NTSC, video clip fills frame horizontally at 44% but tolerates cropping up to 80% before falling apart.
Output as default Quicktime (test did not look as good) or QT Conversion? QT Conversion set to H.264, NTSC 720x468 16:9, High, Multi-pass, do not preserve aspect ratio, deinterlace source video. Processing time to output HD vs SD for 2min video increases only by 1/3 (16min vs 28 min) for same AIC source. These times make me want to run screaming back to DV Tape. That hour to import an SD tape doesn't seem so long anymore.

Toast custom SD encoding: max'd at 9Mb/s, 16x9 aspect ratio, widescreen menus. Using toast since iDVD will not compress for less than a 90 minute video. For short HD, I'm using MPEG-4 AVC at 26Mb/s with Best motion estimation.

Sorry for so many questions at one time but any advice would be appreciated. What are the known trade-offs and best recommendations? It is slow going trying to test such a large pool of variables. At least I am experimenting with $0.40 DVDs for now.