Messy,

If you have a DV camcorder, you could use it to do the DV compression. Many digital camcorders can do it "on the fly" by connecting the camcorder to the computer via a FireWire cable and by connecting the TV or VCR to the camcorder via a regular AV red, white, and yellow RCA connector cable.

I don't believe Vegas has an NTSC to DV compression option and, even if it did, that would be very CPU-intensive and I doubt that most, if any, computers would be fast enough to keep up with the processing in real time.

I have a Sony Digital8 camcorder, and I use it to do my DV conversions. Canopus makes an external conversion box called the ADVC100 that a lot of people like, and it could also be used to do the conversion "on the fly." But if I didn't have my camcorder, I would capture the uncompressed NTSC AVI in manageable-sized clips, and compress them in stages.

Since your 90 minutes of VHS will take about 70GB of disk space, you may have to compress the clips in stages and delete the uncompressed clips to make room for the next stage of uncompressed clips. I probably would use Vegas' Main Concept to do DVD quality MPEG-2 compression. Then I would assemble the MPEG-2 clips in Vegas to make the final production.

As an alternate approach, you might be able to use something like TMPGEnc to externally compress your AVI clips.

-- seeker --