best method to crop video before authoring

[anonjon]

Howdy,
I'd like to author a DVD I have edited together in Pinnacle Studio 10.7 Plus. I've got everything ready, but my VHS capture has the little 10 or 12 pixels at the bottom which are entirely out of place in a movie. I need to remove them, but how? Also, I need to make sure that whatever resolution I leave it at, it needs to be DVD-compatible. What sort of resolution would you give a DV file which is something like 711x468 after cropping? Perhaps my other videos will be 720x468; what should I resize it to then?

I have virtualdub, but I'm not sure about the resolution DVD needs. Please help!

P.S. I would normally just research it on my own, but I'm strapped for time and wondered if any of you fine fellows could help me. Thanks.

[guns1inger]

See What is DVD (top left corner of this page) for permissible resolutions, however in your case 720 x 480 is the closest compliant resolution.

If they mus be removed, then personally I would use avisynth. However you should also consider that these will be hidden on most TV sets in the overscan area (see Overscan in the glossary for details). If the total running time of the DVD is 70 minutes or less then you aren't losing any real bitrate to this noise, so it might not be worth the time.

Otherwise you will have to output the video form pinnacle in a format that does as little damage as possible - lossless or DV, then process with avisynth and encode to mpeg2.