Properly cropped video, what to encode to?
 

I followed the guide pinned above, and it seems to work great- except I'm not sure what I should encode it as at the end- Right now I'm using the same codec used to capture it- Grass Valley lossless (I use that one because it plays well with Vegas, my fixer-upper program)

Or should I encode it to MPEG to put in DVD Architect (DVDA)? I was going with the GV, because I've read that DVDA will go ahead and re-encode some MPEG even if it was the right parameters, so if I encode from VirtualDub to MPEG, then DVDA may decide it doesn't like it and do another lossy encode.

Encoding depends on output needs.

But I think you're referring to VirtualDub. You must encode out to lossless AVI in VirtualDub, and then feed that video to an actual later encoder for the output needs. VirtualDub has no MPEG encoding option, not even VirtualDub2 does that.

Ahhh OK, I had thought Virtualdub had MPEG encoding. So I'll just keep using the GV lossless for everything except the final encode to DVD

One more question- is it better to use fast re-compress, normal re-compress or full processing?

Edit- answered my own question, the mask only works on full processing mode

Fast recompress = disallows filters, disallows colorspace conversion
Normal recompress = disallows filters
Full processing mode = allows filters