VHS to PC with HuffyUV to MPEG/H.264?

[lupin981]

Hi everyone, thanks to what I have read on the forum in recent years I am completing my video capture chain from VHS, VHS-C to PC. Right now I have:

- Panasonic NV-FS200
- ADVC-300
I get rid of the ADVC300 on the advice of various forum members, and thanks to lordsmurf who will send me the TBC green AVT-8710 and new acquisition device, I improve the acquisition chain a lot.

When I'll have everything I would like to acquire while losing as little as possible, so in 720x576 with Huffyuv losless codec. I will keep the source files in archive but how to filter and clean up the videos I still have to choose.
The videos are all homemade from a camera, some cassettes instead come from a previous transfer from Super8 to VHS made by a photographic laboratory (very rough).

I know that it is better to avoid the crop and I would also like to keep the interlacing, I see no reason to remove it (at least in the sources to keep archived).

I saw how to mask the edges in virtualdub, but I wonder, if a resize is not done, how to get to a centered image, and to a resolution that is compatible for future encoding (Mpeg2 or h264)?
Should I activate the letterbox and leave the black frame up to 720x576?
Do I go down to a slightly lower resolution? 720x540?
Is it better that the PAR stays in 4:3? Square pixels?
If I left interlaced maybe it would be better to have the final files in mpeg2 Standard DVD?
The vision will be via HTPC connected to the 16: 9 TV, but obviously to be seen in the original 4:3 format
Some advice?

[lordsmurf]

Correct, no reason to deinterlace source captures. Do that in later copies/encodes. And retain source.

Masking will re-center within the matte. If you cut 20 pixels from bottom, 0 from top, the matted image will have 10 pixels black above and below. Understand? So VirtualDub masking "auto letterboxes" to the 4x3 720x576.

For later copies/encode, to encode at 4x3 for a 1:1 pixel ratio, yes, 720x540 is good -- but ONLY after deinterlace. Before deinterlace, you must do 768x576. However, in PAL, it means so loss of detail from upsize. (With NTSC, we have 720x480 > 640x480. So for once, NTSC is better!)

MPEG copies for viewing interlace as 4:3 is good.
H264 copies (in MKV) deinterlaced as 1:1 is good.

The TV will auto-matte down to 4x3, not stretch. All TVs have an "SD squish" mode.

[lupin981]

It is clearer, so the most logical way would be to compress the files in mpeg2 so as to always leave interlaced. Then I don't need to upscale and leave 720x576

Otherwise to go to h.264:
Deinterlace first, then should I upsize? Can't leave 720x540?

[lordsmurf]

High bitrate (15mbit+) 4:2:2 MPEG.
Not DVD compression >10mbit, but <15 (20/25 even)

h264 = deinterlace usually required.
After deinterlace, 720x540 is fine, good size.