Video editing question (can anyone help?)

[Gameshow Host]

I'm a bit of a newbie and not sure where to post this question, it's about Premiere and video editing. I'm not talking about highly compressed movies for Web, I'm talking about full quality MPEG2 movies for home use. I've just bought a video capture card and want to edit my movies, like trim the beginning and end so they are neater. However, I'm having a few problems...

First of all, I can't even import my movies into Premiere! They don't show up in the import window. AVIs show up, but not mpeg2s. I know the files are there, but Premiere doesn't seem to recognise them.

Secondly, once I import my mpeg2s, I was wondering if there's any way I could crop the beginning and the end of the movie and save it as an mpeg2 again, but without having to recompress. Surely there's a way to just chop the beginning or end off an mpeg2 without losing any quality.

Thirdly, when I view a movie I have captured (in windows Media player) I want to take a few snapshots so I press "Print screen". But when I paste into Photoshop the video area is blank! Is there any way around this, or any quick and easy way to take screen grabs from a video (without having to edit the video in Premiere)?

Thanks for any help anyone can give.

[setarip]

"if there's any way I could crop the beginning and the end of the movie and save it as an mpeg2 again, but without having to recompress. Surely there's a way to just chop the beginning or end off an mpeg2 without losing any quality."

You can use TMPGEnc for all your MPEG1, MPEG2, VCD, and SVCD editing and conversion needs.

[johnbmx4christ]

if you can get you vid to be in view in premier..to export 1 frame..put it on the frame you want to grab and then push
ctrl+shift+m .
as far as importing mpeg 2 ..mine works but i have seen on the adobe forums other people talking about a plug-in needed to import mpeg1 and 2..i dont know why but mine works fine.
also it would be MUCH better to capture in avi and then edit and then convert to mpeg2. it is not smart to cap in mpeg 2 knowing that you need to edit.

[Gameshow Host]

I grab in mpeg2 because I usually don't actually need to edit the video.

When I know I'll need to do something with the video, I always grab uncompressed; but most things I record I won't need to do anything with them, so I grab them straight to mpeg2.

However, some times I want to open these mpeg2s in Premiere so I can get the audio from them, or to grab frames, or chop a section from them to keep. In which case I need to be able to import mpeg2s.