miniDV to PC files - pinnacle vs windows movie maker?

[dgrrr]

First - If all I'm doing is capturing a miniDV digital video tape to my PC to make MPG or WMV or AVI files to watch on the PC, does it make any difference whether I use Pinnacle or Windows Movie Maker? (for quality?)

Second -- If I use Windows Movie Maker, and I have plenty of PC power and HD space, and I want to preserve quality at the cost of space -- Shouldn't I choose the "DV AVI" option?

Third -- What is the benefit of MPG vs AVI vs WMV files?

Fourth -- How does DIVX and XVID and those other encoders relate to what I"m doing -- if at all?

Fifth -- Since I'm going from a miniDV digital video camera to a PC, I have no need for a "digital capture card", right? (Is that for people who have a VHS camera,and want to end up with a digital format?)

THanks

[Floppy]

Hello

Right, If you have a firewire port and a decent video card I wouldnt worry so much about the quality of the capture because there wont be an issue there at all. (I dont have a problem with quality of capture from my mini DV to PC).

About the different formats DV format is the same format as you have in your camera but DV as Movie file rather then DV AVI.

MPEG-1 is meant for medium-bandwidth usage and MPEG-2 is meant for high-bandwidth/broadband usage. Most commonly MPEG-2 is used in digital TVs, DVD-Videos and in SVCDs.

AVI audio/video can be stored in very various ways. Most commonly used video codecs that use AVI structure are M-JPEG and DivX

Microsoft has used its own flavour of MPEG-4 video encoding technology (not very surprising, it's not compatible with other MPEG-4 technologies..). DivX video format is originally based on hacked WMV codec.

DivX supports old DivX movies and also adds new features and better compression quality than "original" based on Microsoft's version of MPEG-4 encoding technology, called as Windows Media Video V3.

To Answer your first question last, WMM2 is very powerfull indeed and I would use it instead of pinnacle 9 but then again I use Ulead VideoStudio 8.1 much better than both, with this said I would save the file as a DV (movie file format) Quality/space speaking and ditch the rest.

The benefits of different formats are compatibility/ size of file vs compatibility and ridiculous quality for the size of file. Besides everyone has their favorite flavour, eh?

Would u click on the vote link on my signature please, its a multiple option, free, and no strings attached, no information about yourself will be collected or needed....

Good things