It depends on how you are doing the transfer.

Your best bet, is to transfer the Video tape to a losseless type file. The result will be rather large.
Then, use your software to turn that losslessfile to a DVD.


If you are transfering that video file to your HD, and compressing it to file in the same process there will be quality loss in the transfer.
And then some more quality loss when you convert the file to DVD.

There will be a quality loss either way, since converting to DVD, but by copying as lossless first, youll minimize it.



Once you have a DVD made though, any Copy you make of it will have no quality loss from the original.
Youll only loose further if you recode the DVD to a smaller size.

For example, if you make a Dual layer DVD out of it, any copy on a DL will suffer no loss at all, regardless how many copys you make.
But, by recoding it and shrinking it to DVD size, will result in another quality hit.


..If that makes sense.