capturing using Pinnacle DV500 and ScenalyzerLive

[Buster Darkwings]

I'm going to be capturing some SVHS tapes on a Dell P4 running Windows 2000 with a Pinnacle DV500 attached to a JVC SVHS/Mini-DV (would dumping the SVHS to Mini-DV on this deck before capturing produce much better results?) deck which should have a digital TBC, so hopefully capturing from SVHS will look OK. I know buying something like the DataVideo TBC-1000 would be better, and dunno how good this capture card is, but I'm not willing to shell out that much for this project right now.

The program I'll be using for the capturing is ScenalyzerLive. Don't know if there are any better programs that are compatible with this card, but I like it so far. Since the source is animated, I upped the Brightness, Contrast, Sharpness, and Saturation from 128 to about 150 (should I go higher/lower on any of the settings?). IIRC the avi format output from Scenalyzer live I used is DV-2, which VirtualDub doesn't seem to have any problems with.

I then convert to DivX 4.12 (I don't really like DivX5 on principle, but
I'll use it if I'll get more of an improvement in quality and file size)
using VirtualDub. I use 1-pass VBR encoding on the configuration for DivX, with a bitrate of about 3000kb/s. "1-pass quality-based" made VirtualDub freeze (or maybe it was just encoding really, really slow), and 2-pass kept giving me errors and corrupt files.

The audio compression I use is the highest quality mono format under the MPEG Layer-3 codec (whenever I tried Lame mono formats it kept giving me errors saying it coudn't convert to this format). I want it to be in mono
since the source was broadcast in mono.

For video, I first apply a deinterlace (I chose blend at first, but is discarding one of the fields the best option? which one?) filter , and then a resize (bicubic), cropping out 6 lines on the bottom, 12 on the right, 2 on the top, and 4 on the left to get rid of the black borders and edge noise.

The test avi I made came out to about 35 MB for 2 minutes of video. I'd like to get it to about half that size, is there a way to do so without sacrificing much quality?

Since this isn't my computer, once I encode to DivX and burn the files onto a CD-R, I'll be converting to VCD and SVCD on my computer at home (an ancient Pentium Celeron 333 running Win98) using Nero. I've tried using other encoding programs, but the audio always ends up out of sync or not present, and it takes forever to encode compared to Nero. Don't think my computer is fast enough to encode SVCDs using TMPGEnc, the other few programs I've tried don't seem to work either. The quality I get from Nero is good enough for the time being.

Any comments are welcome, please let me know if I'm doing anything wrong or what I could be doing to be more efficient and get better quality.

[Redd]

I'm not familar with VCD or SVCD but I do use scLive with Studio 8 with good results. As for the rest, try here: http://webboard.pinnaclesys.com/read_forums.asp?WebboardID=1&SectionID=143&lng=1&Produ...DocTypesID=181