[MacDV] Is this the right dubbing procedure?

[Patty Winter]

I recently bought a Sony HX900 DVD recorder/hard disk drive, and so 
far it's great. I've been mostly taping (er, capturing--no tape!) 
some programs I might want to make DVDs of. But also I have a bunch 
of old TV shows on tape (not available on commercial DVD) that I want 
to archive on DVD.

The HX-900 has an A-B erase feature, so theoretically I could dub the
tape to the unit's hard disk drive, erase the commercials, and then
make a DVD. But choosing the erase points is not very precise. (That
may be true of all consumer DVD recorders.) And if I don't get it on 
the first try, I'm out of luck, because I can't undo it. And I can't 
erase less than five seconds, so if I do one erase and there's two 
seconds of commercials left, I can't get rid of them. And, of course,
if I erase too much, then I have to start over.

So I think I should transfer each videotape to iMovie (through my
Canopus converter), remove the commercials, then send the video back 
to the Sony's hard drive and make the DVD, right? (Thanks to a 
recommendation on this list, I recently got SimpleVideoOutX from Apple, 
which lets me send the full-quality QuickTime file to the Sony.)

I do have one question. When I capture the video onto the Sony's HDD
from my Mac, I have to record at the same speed at which I intend to
master the DVD, right? Otherwise the video gets encoded twice (once
from Mac to HDD, and once from HDD to DVD) and loses some quality? 

For example, if I want to put two one-hour shows on a DVD, I should 
record the video from the Mac on the HDD at SP speed. If I want to 
put only one show on a DVD, I should record it at HQ. All correct
so far?

But what if I want to make two sets of backups, one with two shows 
per DVD and one with one show per DVD? Do I have to send the video 
to the HDD twice, once at each speed, to avoid reencoding? 

Thanks for any information you can provide!


Patty