Theory of capturing vhs for later use as SVCD or DVD?

[DaKandEKid]

TASK: Originally was planning on importing about 10 hours of home video footage directly to SVCD using my AIW card. But, that plan i made about a year ago and now that dvd burners are affordable i'm seriously just considering buying one of them and going with DVD's.

But that presents a problem with storage space since DVD mpegs are about 2 or 3x the size of the same SVCD clip. And then i thought that i could import them at a lower resolution comparable to the VHS since i thought that the rest of the data was just redundant. And could then be resized later if i deciede to go the DVD route.

Then i pondered... does the mpeg2 codec know when it's encoding redundant information and therefore would my filesize be the same if i importated it at 720 x 480 or 480x480 if i used a bitrate of about 6.00 MBPS.

Or is there some way to get away with a smaller file size that i could later resize to make a good dvd clip with later.

What settings do most import home movies to be burned to dvd-r?

Hope people can understand what i'm trying to say... Thanks

[medievil]

Capture at 352*480. Thats Half dvd resolution and Legal to burn for DVD. Your looking at about 2.5-3.5 gb for a 2hour movie at that res in Mpeg2 format.

[paulgab]

You can also try setting your max data rate to more than 2520kbps.
If your player can handle, this will give you better result.

[mp3superfreak]

I've converted dozens of hours of home movies to DVD and I must say that I was not happy with anything less than full DVD resolution (720x480 MPEG-2). I also have an AIW card, which is vastly inferior to my preferred method of capture...VHS >> Canon ZR10 miniDV camcorder >>Firewire out to PC. The inputted DV is about 3.3MB/s, but it actually clears up some of the inferior VHS Quality.

This is not the easiest or least time consuming method, but if you want the best quality, this is what I recommend. (along with a big and fast H/D...my 60gb and 120gb W/D's do the trick)

Note: Many of my home VHS tapes have high action sports (BMX freestyle, Baseball, basketball, etc), and I've been unsatisfied with SVCD, VCD, 1/2 D1, XSVCD, XVCD, etc. (all at various tested bitrates) due to the low original resolution, and fast action. I also do some extensive editing via Vegas Video 3, and have been very satisfied with the default NTSC DVD template it uses for exporting the files.

I know this doesn't really answer your question about using smaller filesizes, but I just wanted to give my many hours of experience in this subject

[sterno]

Then i pondered... does the mpeg2 codec know when it's encoding redundant information and therefore would my filesize be the same if i importated it at 720 x 480 or 480x480 if i used a bitrate of about 6.00 MBPS.

The bitrate is the only thing that determines the size of an MPEG file. 6Mbps is 6Mbps no matter how many pixels you're encoding. Depending on the content, 480x480 may look a little better than 720x480 at the same bitrate just because you're trying to compress less data in to the same space.