AVI or MPEG-2 for DVD Burning?

[kevsu]

I'm a beginner at capturing DV and burning DVDs, (am I in a blind leading the blind forum?)
So, bear with...

My question:
I capture my video from a Sony Digital Camcorder to my Sony Vaio laptop via firewire iLINK. I use Ulead VideoStudio 5.0 as capturing software (seems to work the best so far). I usually choose to capture in NTSC DVD 720 X whatever... It will save my capture as an AVI. When I click finish, I then have the option of rendering in MULTIPLE formats. I read everywhere that MPEG-2 is DVD quality, so I choose that for rendering. It renders all pixelated and the quality is diminished. Now if I render as an AVI, the quality is superb, DVD quality. What's going on? The AVI files, as you all know are HUGE in size. My main goal is to produce high quality DVDs and I've come to the conclusion that AVI is the best quality but SO big!

AM I WRONG? If I'm not, then I need to know - do I need to compress the AVI? (I think I do) There's gotta be a way to get them down in file size!! HELP!

If am wrong about AVI being the best DVD quality picture, what format is and how do I get this?

Thanks in advance.

KEVSU

[binkyaut]

When Video Studio does the capture, it sounds like it is using uncompressed AVI - so the video is probably pretty close to perfect. I would try to re-encode it into MPEG2 using TMPGenc instead of Video Studio. There is just alot more tweaking you can do with TMPGenc to get your videos to look alot better. The new version has a project wizard that will help walk you through doing it the first couple of times.

You WILL need MPEG2 if you want to put it on a DVD...

[kevsu]

Hey thanks...that's all I needed to know. I've already created about 3 DVDs with scene selections, etc before my 1st posting but I couldn't quite get the quality to be where it needed to be in size and look. I downloaded that program (TMPGenc) and it seemed to do the job in reducing the size of the file with only a little quality sacrificed. Just for your info or anyone else who cares, ULEAD MovieFactory butchered the MPEG when I opened it up to make a DVD. Plenty of horiz. lines all over the place. However, when I opened the compressed mpeg in Ulead DVD Workshop, the quality matched that of the AVI. I'm new at this, so I don't know why the same mpeg would look different in two different programs (produced by the same company)...