Warning >> I'm a total newbie wrt all this stuff << Warning.

The setup is:

- A PC with an nVidia based video/capture card,
- Firewire onboard,
- WinXP and Power Cinema software pre-installed,
- Bought Pinacle Studio 8.1.

The camera is connected to the PC using the Firewire. The video is captured, edited, and burned using Pinacle.

Now, the captured video quality looks fine on the PC (AVI or MPEG), but once it's been edited and burned to SVCD the results are less than optimal. Not that they're bad... but the picture is a little less sharp, and the colours especially look a little off.. a little washed out.

From what I can gather, there are various DV codecs. A MS one comes with XP. Does another come with Power Cinema? And Pinacle? And which one is better? Not that I can seem to choose between various DV codecs in Pinacle, it just lists one.

The same goes for MPEG(2) encoding.

I also noticed on the [Video Comparisons] page that SVCD is only 480x576
max. I guess that means capturing in 768x576 is pointless?

In short: which file format do I select to capture to, and which codecs do you recommend at each step? Do I need other software? TMPGenc?