Output to "Tape" with Studio 8 - quality of output

[tryguy]

I'm new to all this and found this great site! Found answers to all my questions I had but one............

I bought a digital camcorder (JVC G70U) and Pinnacle Studio 8. I'm happy with both but would like to keep the best resolution of some of the stuff I shoot. I learned at this site that the best is to make DVD disks. But......... I don't have a burner. Questions:

1) If I male VCDs, I see that the quality is a little better then a VCR tape. Can not use SVCDs. If I make the VCDs and use the lower quality compression (MPEG or MPEG2), will I be able in the future make those files revert back to their original quality? That would be uncompress back to I believe AVI that my Studio 8 captures at (720 x 576 pixels) and burn them to DVD when I can afford one?

2) What if I just make my movies and output them to tape. Studio 8 allows you to do this but does notgive you a choice of how it is being sent back (MPEG1, MPEG2, AVI, etc.). It gives you all kinds of choices for outputting to VCDs and using different compression standards. I guess by sending the movie back (output) to my camera, I am hoping to put movie on blank tape at the original excellent (720 x 576 pixels) quality for future retrieval. Is that what would happen ? The only choice I really am given for output choices to tape are VCR or Camcorder

Thanks in advance to anyone that can help this newbie out!

[yg1968]

If you intend to burn on DVD, later on, you are better off outputting to a DV tape. DV is less compressed than mpeg-2. The quality of DV is better than mpeg. So DV is actually better than DVD in terms of quality.

Going from VCD to DVD is a possibility. But you would essentially being burning vcd quality files to a DVD. The quality would not be improved by doing so. But you could fit longer videos into a DVD.