Best intermediary file format

[mhs]

Hi
In a process of capturing from VHS aiming to produce high quality (the best possible) Mpeg4-DivX;-) videos, and since encoding in real time is not recommendable, which is the best format for the intermediary file?
I discard the uncompressed one because it needs much HD space.
I heard that Mjpeg is not a good option for this purpose.
Mpeg2 has audio synch problems.
Does Mpeg1 offer satisfactory quality?

Any opinion is useful
Thanks

[Craig Tucker]

I would suggest using virtualdub to capture to YUY2 with huffyuv compression. Still gives you a pretty large AVI file but if youve got the hard drive space it is well worth it for the much better results than with mpeg. You can also capture to segmented files using vdub so your file size is only limited by your hard disc space.

Craig

[Dave B]

When encoding on the fly using software codecs, I would only consider a couple of options. If you've got quite a few gigs free then take craig's advice and go for HUFFYUV capturing at a high resolution. This is a lossless codec so the results will look exactly the same as if you had captured uncompressed.

If disk space is more of an issue (like it is with my computer) then capture using MJPEG with a quality setting of 18 or 19. It won't be as good as HUFFYUV at the same resolution but it will be a darned site better than doing a real time software encode to MPEG1 or MPEG2.

The resolution you capture in often has more of an impact on quality than the file format used. For example, my captures look better at 352x576 using MJPEG(Q18) then they do using HUFFYUV at 352x288.