dv camc vs capt card and encoding times; realtime encoding

[morr1s]

I would like to transfer several VHS, Hi 8 tapes to DVD. I have a panasonic PV-DV852 camcorder with pass thru. I firewire into Premiere 6.5 and do simple dissolves and fades and some cuts and export to mpg2. I use Ulead movie studio to author my DVD. The encoding times are long. I am running and AMD 1800+ with 512m and two hard drives 80Gignd 200Gig. I am upgrading my motherboard soon to either a pentium 4 3ghz with 800 bus or comprable amd. with 1gig of ram.

I am wondering if I should buy a capture device that does real time mpeg 2 encoding (under $200) or will I get better results with my DV cam. I am hoping the new motherboard/cpu will make a difference in encoding times. I probably have over 100+ home video to convert and would like the best quality.

[snafu099]

I think you will get lots of advice from both sides of the issue.

For speed alone the hardware capture is the route to go.
For extensive editing, it used to be that dv/avi was the way to go and may still be, BUT, mpg editing has improved greatly

I have 2 usb hardware capture devices and one software.
Bothe hardware devices provide excellent quality.

ADS USB InstantDvd-2. any analog to mpg 1 or 2, latest capwiz ver has a direct to disc that does not use hdd at all. Real time capture/author + less than 5 min to finalize disc. Does auto chapers also. Downside is that it does not have tv turner/pvr functionality. Great featue for doing a quick backup of DVD for kids to handle

COMPRO USB VideoMate Live Also any analog to mpg 1 or 2 but has tv tuner/pvr as well. I was able to schedule and capture over 200 hrs of the Olympics with excellent results

Both are in same price range of $100/150-us depending on sales

Leadtek Winfaast 2000 Deluxe. realtime software encoder. Really needs a 2+ ghz system. But for $50 with a good sys it can do the job depending on how picky you are.

[thecoalman]

Are you rencoding it when you use Movie Studio? Here's the way I do it . I capture to AVI. Edit it in my editor. Encode to a DVD compliant mpg with the editor. Put it in my DVD Authoring app select "do not convert dvd compliant files" and burn the DVD.

The longest part of this process is the capture and encode from the editor. The encoding time is roughly the same as the clip. The authoring process takes a while but no where near the either of the other two. That's using a 3ghz P4 and 1 mb of ram BTW.