Home video to HEVC

I finally backed up 5 VHS tapes, one  VHS 4 hours long onto 5 DVDRs.  That is 12 hours of 20th century footage.  The next step was to convert these to 720x480  x265 format. I am in the middle of converting MPEG2 to x265. The mp4 is on 64 GB SDcard.  Its got Disney World and 1990s  footage. I have 6 hours in x265 1.4.512 and it is blurry compared to MPEG4 AVC.  It takes an hour to encode 30 minutes so I keep the HEVC versions.