29.97 w/dropped frames or use lower rate?

[Badger]

I'm a newbie having acceptable results (so far) capturing home movies (VHS) to VCD. No budget to buy anything new right now. Using a Dazzle 80 USB which seems to be able to capture only 320x240. My question is whether I will get better video quality (ultimately VCD) capturing at a lower rate (like 15fps) without dropping any frames, or continuing to capture at 29.97 with approx 5% dropped frames. Again, I ultimately convert to VCD (NTSC 1150kbps). I think I've optomized my system to minimize dropped frames, but I still drop from 4 to 5%. Here's my setup:

AMD 1GHZ
256 memory
7200 80gig drive
Dazzle 80 USB (yes, I know....)
capturing w/VirtualDub, huffyuv to avi
compressing w/TMPGEnc

Thanks...

[bugster]

If you capture at 23.97fps does your frame drop rate improve, if so then encode your captures to VCD using the NTSC film template

[Badger]

Yeah....23.97 drops about the same number of frames as 29. Guess I'll have to get a decent capture card. Thanks....

[Mirror_Image]

Or a faster CPU! If your motherboard supports it, an XP1800+ runs around $130 (retail box, US dollars), and that would improve encoding speed as well as many other things (including frame drops, if you normally are near 100% CPU usage with your 1GHz when capturing).

[zzyzzx]

Record at a lower frame rate and let TMPEGNC make up for the difference.