VirtualDub conversion/filtering questions

[vulture]

I'm trying to understand a few things about processing video in VirtualDub. I captured 8 minutes of VHS video at 720x480 (w/ Huffyuv codec) using VirtualDub. My plan is to capture at high resolution, apply filters, then resize for VCD or SVCD. Sorry for the long post, but these questions have been confusing me for a while now

1) My original video was captured using the Huffyuv codec. Now I need to apply a few filters, like deinterlace, cropping, and noise reduction. When applying those filters and saving to a new AVI file, should Huffyuv compression be selected again? It seems like this would just compress the file again, losing more information (although Huffyuv is supposedly lossless...). If I choose 'uncompressed', I get a huge file.

2) I often need to crop the lower 6 lines (or so) from VHS video because they are just noise. Sometimes I have to crop the sides, too. This changes the resolution to something like 706x474 (from 720x480). Are there any issues when resizing this cropped video, since it's now a strange resolution? Are there any issues when writing to VCD or SVCD (or eventually DVD)?

3) Should audio always be saved to a WAV file in VDub, then brought into TMPGEnc? Or, is it better to just let TMPGEnc use the audio that's part of the AVI file, instead of a separate WAV?

4) If saving to WAV, is it better to save the audio to WAV from the first-captured AVI file, or from the AVI that's eventually processed in TMPGEnc?

Thank you!!

[vulture]

One more question to add:

5) Would it be better to just bring the original captured AVI into TMPGEnc and let TMPGEnc do the cropping, resizing, deinterlacing, and noise reduction? I don't know if it can do resizing, but I know it can do the rest.

Thanks.

[vulture]

Anyone have any tips? It would be great to at least get some guidance on questions 1 and 5. I'd be really grateful...thanks!!

--vulture

[uteotw]

1. you have to recompress with huffyuv, it's lossless. no loss of quality due to this codec.

2. crop them first , but then replace them with black bars using "expand frame" from the Resize filter because after it's more precise to resize to 352x240...which make me think that you should capture @ 704 x 480 if you want to create VCD (352x240) and 720x480 if you want to create SVCD. 704 / 2 = 352 and 720 / 1.5 = 480 , these are pretty straight forward resizing. You could also capture directly @ 352x480 or 480x480... it doesn't lose much quality and it would speed up your processing as there is less data. You'll have to try / compare to make up your mind here.

3. it shouldn't make any difference.

4. again it shouldn't matter... if you've captured 16bits / 44khz.

5. TMPGEnc can do all that (including resizing) does a pretty good job. Again it's a matter of taste... I prefer to work with Virtualdub.

uteotw

[AngusMacGyver]

Why don't you use frameserver in VDub. You can set all the filters and start frame-server to TMPGEnc.
There is a guide to framserver in VCDHelp.