Is this the right dubbing procedure?

[BayGuy]

I recently bought a Sony HX900 and so far it's great. I've been mostly taping (er, capturing--no tape!) some programs I might want to make DVDs of. But also I have a bunch of old TV shows on tape (not available on commercial DVD) that i want to archive on DVD so the quality will stay good and they won't take up as much room.

from what i've read here and my own tests, the A-B erase is not very precise. (That's probably true of all the consumer DVD recorders, not just the Sony.) And if you don't get it on the first try your out of luck because you can't undo it and you can't erase less than five seconds, so if you do one erase and there's two seconds of commercials left you can't get rid of them. And of course if you erase too much you're SOL.

So I think I should transfer each videotape to iMovie (I have an a/d converter), remove the commercials, then send the video back to the Sonys hard drive and make the DVD, right?

Here's my big question. I didn't realize until I read a posting here, that I need to make the hard drive recording at the same quality I plan for the DVD. Otherwise the video gets encoded twice, right? Like if I want to put two one-hour shows on a DVD, I should record the video from the Mac on the HDD at SP speed, and if I want to put one show on a DVD, I should record it at HQ. But what if I wanted to make two sets of backups, one with two shows and one set with one show per disk? Would I have to send the video to the HDD twice, once at each speed, to avoid reencoding?

Thanks!

[BayGuy]

Like if I want to put two one-hour shows on a DVD, I should record the video from the Mac on the HDD at SP speed, and if I want to put one show on a DVD, I should record it at HQ. But what if I wanted to make two sets of backups, one with two shows and one set with one show per disk? Would I have to send the video to the HDD twice, once at each speed, to avoid reencoding?

Someone just told me offline that it isnt worth using HQ for VHS tapes so maybe I should just record the file once at SP and make both one-hour and two-hour DVD's from that same file??