Organisation of editing and problems with MPEG2 format.

[SSO]

Hi,

I am in the startup phase of video editing and have a couple of questions.

My source is a SONY DV camcorder, from which I capture into AVI format files.
My final destination will be MPEG2 files on DVD's.
As the AVI format contains 3 times as much information as the MPEG2 file I thought I might as well compress the data to MPEG2 format right after capture, so to use up less HD space. With many hours of raw DV this does become an issue.
Editing will be cutting, joining, titles, and new sound.

Q1: Would the above approach result in a reduced quality on the final DVD compared to working directly in the AVI format?

The MPEG2 files I have encoded sucessfully using either TMPGEnc or NeoCapture. They are played without any problem.

The editing I expected to do using Windows Movie Maker 2.0
I expected initially to edit using Windows Movie Maker 2.0, however When trying to import a MPEG2 file encoded as indicated above I get an errormessage: Untitled.mpg could not be imported. An interface has too many methods to fire events from
Q2: Does anyone know what the above problem is and how it is solved?

Thanks for any help here.

Cheers

Stephen Slot Odgaard

[jfvan]

Movie maker will export to a wmv ao avi. I suggest doing you editing on the avi's then run it through TMPGEnc. Save them as a wmv as they will take up less space than an avi, At least in my experiance it will only save as an uncompressed avi so it is rather large. TMPGEnc will accept the wmv files.

[bugster]

jvfan is right that you should edit the avi. However I disagree with him about saving in wmv format. Yes, this will take up a lot less HD space than the DV avi, but it is a very lossy compression format and will not look good when converted to mpeg-2 for the DVD, significant quality loss wil result.

Mpeg-2 was never intended as an editable format. Although mpeg editors do exist they are mostly quite expensive and don't always do a very good job. Loss of audio sync is a big problem for these types of tools.

If HD space is a problem, consider buying a new, large HD. At todays prices you can't go far wrong!