I've been editing some movies and I've been doing my best to keep the clarity of the clips. I'm looking at producing, NEAR DVD quality movies (I'd REALLY like to make a documentary that I can send to a duplication company for mass production.)

I'm using a Dazzle Hollywood-DV bridge and MainActor. I'd tried exporting a DV-AVI file but when the movie gets over 12 minutes, MainActor crashes on export (probably a file size issue.... it hits 2GB then crashes.) So, I started exporting to MPEG 2 thinking I'd keep my image quality high, but the video plays back REALLY slow and sometimes the export clip becomes very garbled ( one time the video looked like it was copied in 8 strips vertically across the clip and then all snowy too. )

Any thoughts on where to find suggestions on what might be going on or to find better reading somewhere on good settings info for high-quality clips (I'm not TOO picky about format. I just want the best quality PC Playable clips. DiVx encoded clips crash when I try to export... so I'm not sure what's going on there?)

-Ed

p.s. - Yes, I know that MainActor might not be suited for what I'm trying to do, but I really need to explore it's limits before I give up on it and just get Premiere.