"I capture some Hi-8 video in avi format. I set video rendering to "best", and set the video format to NTSC DV. Then I render as an mpeg2, and burn to DVD using Dazzle. But I'm wondering if I'm getting the best quality...there's an unnerving lot of codecs to choose from, including uncompressed. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. "

If you capture to DV, cool [thru box, camera etc. over firewire] - if not, if you capture analog, don't use the DV template.

Rendering to mpg2, be careful regarding the dvd authoring app, as many will force re-encoding of the video, which costs time and quality. Not sure about dazzle, but if it re-encodes (should be evident from the amount of time it takes), might be better to render to avi if editing, or leave alone if captured footage is cool, importing the avi to dazzle - again, this is if dazzle re-encodes only, and you want to use dazzle.

If you want to shorten the process, investigate captureing to DVD legal mpg2? RE: codecs, uncompressed is always best, but a huge hog of disc space. If captureing DV as above, leave it that way until encoding to mpg2. If captureing analog, HUFFYUV, Morgan, & picvideo are popular. Shouldn't recompress if possible until the mpg2 step, and then only once.

DV codecs are so good these days, there is very little reason to use anything else. The one in Vegas is especially good; Sonic Foundry once had an example on its web pages showing DV after dozens of round-trips through their codec. Very little degradation.

DaveT2: A nitpicker would also mention that legal DVDs can be made using MPEG1 files--not that anyone would want to, unless the source video was really poor and he wanted to get 7+ hours of video on a DVD-5 disk.

"DV codecs are so good these days, there is very little reason to use anything else. The one in Vegas is especially good; Sonic Foundry once had an example on its web pages showing DV after dozens of round-trips through their codec. Very little degradation."

Right about that.
FWIW, According to adamwilt.com, most of the degradation comes from the initial scan and compression, so additional encoding has less data to lose. At any rate, if one's capturing analog, not DV, no need to go encoding to DV prior to mpg2. Of course, same for DV as posted earlier.

Also according to Adam's site, seems there's not a huge difference between mpg2 all I frame and DV, provided both are at the same bit rate, which is obviously a huge catch, manageing a DV comparible bit rate (or better), and perhaps why only the big boys tend to play with it. Mention it 'cause I'm playing with converting some VHS stuff to mpg2, trying to figure out if using the mpg2 matrix originally gets any gains in quality from a notably compromised source. So far I've been surprised at how nice mpg2 all I frame can be.