If you want to offer your material in a variety of bitrates, you would need to cycle through this process once for each bitrate, producing a different ASF file each time. In that case, you will want to be careful to start capturing from the same point in the tape each time, so that your video will be consistent for all bitrates. Using this technique, the only video equipment you need are a player for whatever tape format your studio provides and a video capture card. The disadvantages of this technique are that you give up a lot of control and flexibility since you will have to schedule your studio time, and pay somebody to do the editing for you. An additional consideration is the speed of the machine where you do the video compression.
Video compression is a CPU and memory intensive process.
Remember that your video tape will play at its own speed, and your computer must keep up regardless of whether it can do a good job or not. If your machine is having difficulty keeping up, it will do a poor job on the compression, or simply drop frames to avoid falling behind. Dual CPU machines at 300 Mhz or better and 128 Mb of memory or better are recommended. If you want to do your own video editing, you must capture raw video as AVI files, then edit and compress later. You can either record your video on tape and play it back into the capture card later, or connect the output from your camera directly to your capture card and bypass the tape.