Best Way To Convert DV to SVCD For Slow Systems

[Oliver]

I just bought and setup the following on my computer to convert my old VHS home videos to SVCD:

Canopus ADVC-50
Adaptec 4300 3 port Firewire card
Maxtor 120G 7200RPM, 8M cache IDE hard drive

I set these up on a home-built AMD K6-III+ 550Mhz running W2K. So far I've captured a video as a DV-AVI file, and it looks great! Now, from all that I've read, TMPGEnc is the way to go to compress, but is extremely slow. I'm expecting if I run it on my 550Mhz system with say 2-pass VBR and average motion detection, it will probably take 24 hours or so to run, which I can accept given my slow system. I'm wondering, to speed this up, should I plan on creating CVDs instead of 480x480 SVCDs? Given that my source is VHS, I won't lose anything by reducing the horizontal resolution to 352, right? That would also allow me to fit more minutes per CD, right? Also, should I resize during encoding with TMPGEnc, or resize the AVI file beforehand with another faster tool like VirtualDub? And as far as cleaning up the video with some kind of noise reduction filter, should I also do that as part of the encoding process, or pre-process the AVI file with VirtualDub? I'm basically wondering if pre-processing my AVI files to resize and clean up with VirtualDub would save me time during encoding with TMPGEnc.

TIA!

[Oliver]

Well, hopefully this post will solicit a response.

So far, I've played around with TMPGEnc with a 30 second clip of my ADVC-50 captured video. I compressed it to CVD format, having TMPGEnc resize it to 352x480, set to 2-pass VBR (1200min, 2300 avg., 2520 max), High Quality, and it takes about 15 minutes with the 30 second clip. So I'm looking at approx. 30 hours of encoding time per 1 hour of video.

Would resizing beforehand with VirtualDub speed up the encoding in TMPGEnc? If so, I haven't been able to find out what the Interlaced checkbox option is for in the resize filter. My source is interlaced, so should I check it?

Is the extra time with the High Quality Motion Search worth it? Any opinions or suggestions on speeding this up on my old system?