Hi,

I am trying to capture my tapes to digital formats and write them to DVD disks so they won't degrade. Have both 8mm analog tapes from a 1991 RCA Pro8 camcorder and miniDV tapes. My goal is to keep as much resolution as practical to preserve the memories. Please help with your comments and guidance.

*miniDV tapes (below is what I've been playing with)
Firewire to computer hard drive using Ulead and AVI format (13GB for 1 hour)
Export movie to MPEG2 720x480 variable bite rate of 4700bps using all I, B, and P frames. I get about 4.6GB for 2 hours of video. Just fits on 1 DVD disk.

Questions:
1. Anything else better if I would like to live under the 2 hour per DVD disk constraint?
2. What options do I have if I am willing to do 1 hour per DVD disk? Should I just increase the bit rate of MPEG2 or there are AVI compressions that I can use that can give me lossless results?

*8mm analog tape
I need a lot of help here. I assume the best way is still capturing in lossless AVI format and then do the processing later offline. What resolution should I use for capturing? What sound quality? I assume that it's useless to capture at a resolution higher than the original soure, and it's best to match the source so there is no aliasing effects. Is that right? The camcorder spec says 525 lines/60 fields/30 frames and EIA Standard NTSC color. Doesn't look like the NTSC TV resolution. I need help in understanding what it means to the capturing settings.

Thanks a lot.