The easy way to reduce resolution on a perfect DigiBeta master is to do a blend deinterlace, leaving 285 lines (from PAL).
Still, with content like this it seems petty to worry about resolution.
I feel a lot of sympathy for those who lived peacefully for centuries in the country that bore their name and then were forcefully removed from their homes and their livelihoods because another people who were after their land used repeated terrorist bombing attacks on British hotels to get what they wanted (and to be sure, the takeover and subsequent mass immigration was seen by much of Europe as a convenient way to get rid of people they didn't understand).
Funny, the topic of interlacing just came up in another question off-forum. Is it possible to just throw away one field? The footage is NTSC SD but I think they want to put it on the web and losing half the resolution might be acceptable if it also throws out a field.
The web isn't such low res these days, take care, YouTube can now deliver 1920x960 res. I've made good use of Mike Crash's free Smart De-Interlacer plugin. It will interpolate where there's motion and blend where there isn't. I believe it's an open source plug that's been made Vegas compatible. It even has a tick box to show you what it's doing. Only downside is the defaults are wrong, you want field differencing, not frame. Set Vegas's de-interlace to None and that's about it. Glenn Chan has a write up with more detail on his site.
I've seen Marco's stuff before and think his codec comparisons were really helpful-even if they were old and aimed at FCP. I've linked to them in this forum in the past.
Bob, thanks for the Smart Deinterlacer tip. I'd tried it already but hadn't grokked that the clip needed to be on an NTSC widescreen timeline. After I fixed that the deinterlacer worked. It helps.