avi to svcd.. need help

[dreadycarpenter]

so i'm having a problem converting .avi to svcd, i'm using adobe premiere mpeg export for my encoding, but adobe premiere crashes every time I load a xvid or divx .avi,
I've uncompessed the audio, video, and cropped using vdub, then import with adobe premiere and everything is totally fine. except i dont have 70gigs available for the entire movie uncompressed.also have TMPGEnc, but I need to crop to 480x480 for svcd.....

so my questions are.....
Is there a way to crop an avi.with vdub without re-encoding???(if no can w\something else) vdub won't let you use filters if you don't have set to full processing mode, that brings up another Q.. am I losing quality if I then set my compression to what the avi was previosly encoded (my theory is that vdub uncompresses each frame then crops,then recopresses therefore losing quality.)
and i shouldn't have any probs importing xvid or divx with premiere.., should I????
thanks dreadycarpenter:p

[djidjo]

As far as I know, there's no way of cropping a video without reecoding. What you might want to do is frameserving either with VirtualDub or AviSynth to avoid decoding->cropping->encoding->decoding again (in tmpgenc or premiere)->re-encoding to SVCD but rather do
decoding->cropping->serve decompressed frames directly to adobe or Tmpgenc->encoding to SVCD.
Look into Doom9 guides about frameserving, and use link2 or VFAPI if premiere doesn't accept frameserving directly from VirtualDub or AVISynth.
By the way, if cropping and resizing is the only thing you need to do to to your video, I think TMPGEnc can do that for you, you don't need to use VDub.

Hope this helps.
Djidjo