AVI conversion vs. Direct DVD

[camster39]

I am in the market for a new camcorder - my JVC MiniDV is on it's last leg.

1 - My main objective is to ultimately create home movies on DVD. For the past year or two, I would use DVCapture to import the AVI file to my PC, DVDTimeStamp to add the date/time to the video, and Pinnacle Studio 8 to render & burn to DVD. Kind of a pain but I liked adding the menus and stuff.

2 - There is definitely a slight loss of quality going from when I finally arrive at my DVD. I've tried a bunch of encoders and authoring programs and no matter what - there seems to be a slight loss of quality - not a huge deal though.

3 - Finally, I would love to get a camcorder with at least 3 megapixel still capabilities - I really hate having multiple devices for moving & still.

______________________

Am I going to notice a tremendous difference in video quality if I record directly to DVD (rather than MiniDV - PC - DVD)? My final goal is create an MPEG-2 right.......isn't that DVD format or am I missing something? Do these camcorders just record in MPEG-2 format?

Anyone have any recommendations on a camcorder that would suit my needs?

Thank much

[guns1inger]

I would stay with mini-DV. Any quality loss you see from encoding DV to mpeg is nothing to what you will see when you start recompressing mpeg footga efater editing. DV can withstand several encodes before problems really start to arise. Mpeg can take only one or two before artifacts beconme very obvious. Not mention that even with specialist tools, mpeg is much harder to edit nicely.

[camster39]

How about if I didn't do any editing at all? In other words, I just took the DVD out of my camcorder and threw it on my DVD player.

Do you think I'd notice a significant improvement over what I'm doing now (Mini-DV - AVI - DVD format)?

Thanks

[bugster]

Double post, please continue here