VHS tape recordings can benefit from motion adaptive de-interlacing just as much as other source material.
But some loss occurs with recording on regular DVD. The VHS source (and all analog NTSC source) has individual coloration for each scan line. Whereas DVD preserves only enough color information for every other scan line. So you have to go to hi-def (Blu-Ray) to actually preserve all of the content, and provided that the particular recorder handles the video just right.
