Pinnacle avi to MPEG??

[RK]

Hi,

I'm new to the forum and very new to this field. I have pinnacle studio version 8 and am basically trying to archive my videos onto cd. eg family and holiday videos on VHS etc. I've been able to capture the video and render it (what ever that means) and can save it as a number of files. From what I've been able to make out MEPG 2 will give me good compression and reasonable play back. I would like to save at the highest quality but don't want big files so thought saving to MEPG 2 would be the best option. Question 1: Please tell me if I'm correct with the above???

Next: I've tried saving to MEPG 2 with the pinnacle package but on play back it's not that flash, a bit jerky and blocky. I rang for support and was told that the codecs (I think) in the package are not that good and to find others. Great I say any ideas! They say just check around on the web and suggested this site as a good start. Please help with any suggestions. either with good free software to go from avi to MPEG 2 and a viewer or any other format you think would be better to archive my video.

Thanks heaps.

Ray

[mats.hogberg]

What is your end product? To view on TV or just on computer? If the latter, stay with AVI. XviD/DivX compression is a good trade off between picture quality and file size.
For TV viewing, you want to put it on CD or DVD. The available formats are VCD, SVCD and DVD. VCD is mpg 1, SVCD and DVD mpg 2.
There are plenty of guides for AVI to VCD/SVCD/DVD. DVD will give you the best results, VCD the "worst". A good mpg1/2 encoder is TMPGEnc. mpg1 encoding is free, mpg2 encoding has a 30 days trial period.

/Mats