Best method to capture and edit...

[ER1C]

I capture a lot of NFL football games and plan on converting them to DVD. Right now I'm capturing everything in MPEG2. Should I switch to AVI?

I ask because Ive read that most video editing apps are designed to handle AVI as opposed to mpg2.

Speaking of editing apps... I own Nero Vision and Adobe Premiere Elements. Does anyone have a suggestion on which works best? Ive used Roxio's video edit software in the past and it worked well but I wouldnt mind having a little more advanced program.

[redwudz]

MPEG is fine, as long as you don't need to do more complex editing. If you are just cutting out commercials, most any MPEG editor will work. Popular ones seem to be VideoReDo and MPEG-VCR. But Elements should be OK. I don't use any Nero product for much more than burning, but that's a personal choice.

The editing problem is mostly because of highly compressed formats. For example Xvid is very difficult to edit and it's a type of AVI. But DV, another type of AVI is very easy to edit. DV has every frame as a keyframe, which allows frame accurate editing. In other words, you can cut anywhere you want without re-encoding to make it work. Xvid has a keyframe every 300 frames by default, so it makes it near impossible to do frame accurate edits. MPEG is somewhere in between. Not easy, but if you are just doing cuts and pastes, it works well enough.

If you are capturing in MPEG-2, are you capturing as DVD compliant video? See 'WHAT IS' DVD to the upper left for the DVD specification and format. If you adhere to that, you just need to edit, then author to DVD format and burn. Very quick and easy.

And welcome to our forums.

[ER1C]

Thanks for the succinct information on the formats and how they impact the editing process.

I know where your coming from regarding Nero - Ive actually worked with Vision a little but it didn't impress me. Ive yet to really even explore Premiere Elements.

I read through the what is DVD but Im still a little unsure if my captures are compliant. I believe they are. I'm capturing @ 352x480 NTSC, 3.45 mb per second with 48000 16bit stereo.

I do have one more question. I reduced quality so I can fit an entire game (about 3 hrs) onto a single sided 4.7GB DVD. My files are right around 4.7 GB's. I figure that once I edit out the commercials I should be golden. However, once I bring the file into my video editing app (this used to be Creative's package) and removed a single commercial, the entire project would jump 1GB in size. Why is this? If my file is capture is DVD compliant and I'm simply removing a few chunks of the file, shouldn't it shrink?

Great forums and thank again for the information.

[redwudz]

I don't often edit MPEG, but my guess is that the edit program is doing some re-encoding. You could check the bitrate and see if it's changed or maybe the audio was converted to another format. I normally use AC3 as it's compact and DVD compliant, more so than MPEG-1 Layer2. If your editor converted the audio to PCM, it will get quite a bit bigger.

And a DVD-5 is about 4.37GB. I usually allow about 100 - 200MB for authoring. Probably more than necessary, but trying to fill 100% of a DVD capacity may be asking for problems. The 1/2 D1 format is probably a good choice for what you are doing.

[ranchhand]

I have Nero 7 Ultra; I have captured analog with Hauppauge 250, converted to mpeg2 and authored/edited in Nero and burned to DVD. The result was, at best, Okay only. One bad thing is that my resulting DVDs would get a audible "clicking" or "rattling" sound and the picture would shudder for a couple of seconds, and then clear up. This would happen randomly and fairly often. I have read that Nero recodes and the may be the reason.

I switched to Pinnacle 10+ for authoring only. Imported my mpeg2 files and used them directly (same as Nero), Pinnacle converted to DVD and burned them. I have so far done three short tests with excellent results, no "rattling" and excellent video, far better than Nero. That's my experience anyway.

[ER1C]

I wonder why Nero decides that it needs to re-encode the video? Hmmm... I suppose it doesnt matter since I'm moving to another program. Thanks Red.

Thanks for the info ranch. I'll give Premiere a shot and see what its like. Ultimately maybe I should move to one of the programs Red mentioned.