Just a couple of questions please

[VideoDoc]

Hi everyone! New to digital video. I have spent the past 2-3 weeks reviewing the posts on the various forums and user guides. What a wonderful and vast source of information. I have made several purchasing decisions based on what I have learned from this site. My thanks to those who have contributed to the knowlege base!

My interest is in converting several Hi8 analog family videos to DVD. I think my hardware setup is adequate. I have a Dell P4 2.4 GHz, 120 GB HD with a Sony DRU500A and a Canopus ADVC-100. I am not interested in doing anything fancy; just want to extract certain segments of video, maybe include a few titles then burn to DVD. My main concern is maintaining quality. Just a couple of questions:

1. Does it make any difference what program I use if I am capturing to an AVI file? I think the answer is no but just want to be sure.

2. Does anyone have much experience with Ulead VideoStudio7? I have been playing with the demo version and like it because it is so easy to use. You can capture, edit, convert to MPEG-2 and burn to DVD all in the same program. I know alot of you on this forum use a separate program for each of these steps. No doubt this gives you alot of flexibility but remember my needs are relatively simple. My main concern is the conversion to MPEG-2. This seems to be a critical step based on what I have read. Should I be using TMPGEnc? Is it that much better?

Thanks in advance!

[marcelr]

TMPGEnc is freeware if I am not mistaken. Ulead VideoStudio7 certainly isn't. TMPGEnc works for me to do the encoding.

[ZippyP.]

TMPGEnc is freeware if I am not mistaken.

You are mistaken. There is a time limit on Mpeg2 conversions so you can trial it and purchase it if you like. It is relatively inexpensive and well worth buying. I don't know about Ulead but TMPGEnc gives excellent results and is widely used.