[MacDV] VCR to DVD Strategy

[Dennis Fazio]

I am in the process of converting about a dozen home video VCR tapes  
to DVD. I have a Canopus ADVC-100 I got a while ago and it works just  
great feeding into iMovie on my PowerBook.

I could use some advice on how to best manage the quantity. I have  
about 100GB of firewire disk available which will hold 3 or 4 2-hour  
tapes at about 24-25GB apiece. I was thinking I would just do a  
direct copy/convert one tape at a time to DVD, but then I thought I  
might want to edit them down a bit later on before a final version.  
That would require writing to DVD to free up space and later ripping  
them back in to edit.

My concern is the loss of quality from the extra compression step.  
Since the original is 200 or so line resolution from a VCR camera, is  
there a way to do a temporary write, re-rip, edit and rewrite process  
without really losing any quality that I or others without expert  
eyes would really notice from this kind of source material? If I  
wrote, say, 1/2 hour or 1 hour of material per DVD to reduce  
compression, would that help?

How have others handled this kind of thing in the past? Just process  
one at a time to final edited version? My concern is that if I throw  
in the editing time for each tape before reading in the next, it may  
take me a very long time to get them all transferred and I'd like to  
get them all into digital form quickly before the tapes deteriorate  
too much further in quality.
-- 
Dennis Fazio
dfz at mac.com