Editing MPEG files

[roylz]

I'm currently caturing my video to AVI files for editing and subsequent rendering to MPEG, which is extremely time consuming. I'm looking at adding a new capture device that uses H/W rendering directly to MPEG but am uncertain how much editing is possible with the captured MPEG file and how much, if any, this approach would reduce the overall time to create a finished MPEG file.

[ormonde]

If retaining the best quality is your desire, capturing to AVI using a lossless video codec is probably the best method, although it is more time consuming and will produce huge file sizes, but you can reduce those by encoding to mpeg afterward. How good is your source? That's where you should make your determination as to which approach to take.

[roylz]

I'm using Pinnacle DC10Plus capture card and Pinnacle Studio 8 for editing and rendering. My primary desire is to copy from VHS & HI8 Camcorder or TV which the current setup does OK except that a full DVD takes about 7 or 8 hrs to render.

[megamachine]

Editing MPEGs is sometimes dicey, and it really needs a clean capture (i.e., no dropped frames or other glitches that sometimes occur with H/W rendering devices). I use an external H/W capture device and have devised settings that work well most of the time, to avoid glitches. Depending on how much editing you want to do, there are several options. For simple cutting and joining, you can use MPEG Tools in TMPGEnc Plus, or the Womble MPEG-2 editor. For more complex editing, you may need to re-encode with something like Video Studio. Probably the time is the same, and, as Ormonde notes, the quality is better with lossless AVI, but in my case the file sizes are prohibitive, especially with any project longer than a few minutes. Best bet might be to test out some MPEG-2 captures and do some editing to find your preferences.