I am transferring clean video8-analog tape to the PC as DV using Digital8 cam and have Ulead VS8, also have many of the video freeware tools.

I've been transferring the DV-AVI at it's native 720x480, but am considering realtime transcode to MPEG2, to save space and since the source res is only like VHS. I'm thinking it would be better to transcode right into 352x480 (and compliantly put that on the DVD) at higher bitrate than to go to 720x480 at lower bitrate - but anyway I can't get the capture MPEG transcoding codec to do other than 720x480.

Anyway, ultimately the goal is to have the MPEG2 to be "compliant" so to not re-encode upon xfer to the DVD. But I want to crop the VHS overscan noise out (I can see it after DVD xfer so far), can this be done largely automatically during the real-time trasfer transcoding or maybe cropped using like VS8 but without re-encoding upon DVD-writing?

It would be function or tool called like "MPEG2CROP"

Thanks!