Advice on when to extract ac3

[outlawstar223]

I am capturing some SD video and I want to place it on a DVD, but I believe I am adding too many steps when capturing the audio.

Here is my video workflow
Capture SD Video with VirtualDub (720x480,YUY2,Lagarath/PCM 48000/16bit)-> Edit Video with VirtualDub (I used Fast Recompress to avoid any conversions) -> Use AVISynth to convert to YV12 and frameserve to HCenc-> Final product a .m2v

To extract the audio I use virtual dub to extract the wav and then use EncWavtoAC3. Is there any way I can include the audio step into my video workflow (maybe using avisynth)

[davexnet]

The best way to avoid compression of the video is to use direct stream copy.

The audio processing depends on what you're using to create the DVD.
A popular package, like DVD Flick, can use the WAV inside the AVI file and create the AC3 during the DVD creation.
No need to use a separate step like EncWavtoAV3.

[outlawstar223]

I agree, but I want to use HCenc to encode the video. So by the time I load up the video (m2v) into the DVD authoring software it will not have the audio in it anymore.

I really want to use HCenc because of the ability to finetune the encoding.

[davexnet]

Then try AVStoDVD which uses HCenc or QUenc.