How to crop and post-process captured footage?
 

Similar questions have been asked here before but I couldn't find definite answers.

I have captured old vhs-c footage using the following setup:
-jvc hr-s6600eu
-hauppage usb-live2
-virtualdub on win10 desktop

I have captured the footage using huffyuv encoding and in 720x576, as I have understood is the correct capture resolution. For playback on mobile devices etc, I would then want to convert it to 768x576, which would be the original 4:3 playback resolution.

My first question is, what area of the captured footage should be stretched to the playback resolution? I.e. what to crop and what to mask? I've seen people suggest cropping the 8 pixels from either side and then doing the conversion from 704x576 to 768x576. Does this mean that the noise at the bottom (and to a lesser extent at the top) of the capture should be masked only? Whether the noise is cropped or masking has an effect on the final product as the video is stretched differently during the resize to the final playback resolution.

Second question is just about the software used. The final workflow should be something like this:

-deinterlace
-mask/crop
-resize to 768x586
-trim/cut/join different clips
-encode/compress

Which software is recommended in 2024, can I do all of this in one software and how do I avoid quality losses?

For joining use vdub2 (direct stream copy), Joint your clips first to the final length and do the cuts before you start doing anything else so the next steps are done once not multiple times.

Are you familiar with AVSPmod? you can do de-interlace, crop, resize, trim/cut (if not done previously) in one step, I would not recommend resizing to 768x576, Just add an aspect ratio flag during the encode step or resize to 1440x1080 from a proper crop (704x576 masked or to the bare active video area).

Final step is the encode to h.264 or h.265, there are script based methods and there is GUI type such as Hybrid.

Depends on your knowledge, let us know.