I'm trying to capture the highest quality Hi-8 source into my PC for editing, then output to VCD and VHS (NTSC). There are a lot of suggestions to use AVI, but the file sizes are pretty big. Last night I found that the ATI Video-In app has a DVD preset that captures 740x480 (or something like that). Fiddling with the bit rates and motion estimation quality, it looks REALLY GOOD. BTW, I have a Radeon 64ddr vivo.

Questions:

Will there be flickering or any degradation when I record on VHS and play on TV, since mpeg-2 is frame-based and NTSC video is field-based?

Also, I'm editing and generating the final mpeg using MediaStudio 6.5. Using this through the TV-out port will work fine for VHS. Should I use MS6.5 to generate the VCD file, or feed it thru tmpgenc?