Anamorphic and Cropping for Half-D1
 

When encoding at 352x480, how does the anamorphic aspect get managed? Should video be cropped to 704 before the encode for best resizing?

My goal is to fit more video onto a single DVD without significantly sacrificing quality. Sources are animated and clean.

Crop not needed.

If the source is analog video tape then crop down to 704x480 (NTSC) or 704x576 (PAL/SECAM) assuming you are capturing at 720 (16 useless black horizontal pixels are added by the capture card to preserve the video frame without risking cutting it off), When you encode to MPEG-2 give pixels an aspect ratio of 10/11 for NTSC and 12/11 for PAL/SECAM for a perfect 4:3 frame, 704 is part of the DVD spec no resizing needed.

If the source is digital then what it is and what aspect ratio and resolution it has?

Here is a sample of a VHS cartoon capture, Notice that there is no black borders on the sides when cropped to 704 and because the capture device is professional it captures at 486 instead of 480 so by removing 2 lines at the top and 4 lines at the bottom to get 480 lines half of the head switch noise is gone.