ok - this is my Newbie conversion of my wedding video - although the source itself isn't great, I'm trying to get a good conversion into mpeg for a dvd...

I catpured on canopus advc100 w S8 (8.5.21) and the avi file looks pretty good quality wise (on my pc)...

I've tried to convert to mpeg2 w/ S8, tmpgenc, mainconcept and cce basic. S8 and tmpgenc output looked remarkably similar - blocking artifacts that even to a newbie (somewhat picky but newbie nonetheless) really bothered me. I tried many variances on tmpgenc and they all looked about the same (incl. motion search high quality eventhough this is a low motion source; also tried 2 passvbr and cbr in tmpgenc). no matter what, the quality wasn't that good.

then I tried the cce - better results but a little bit noisy or grainy.

also tried mainconcept which looked to me for this tape marginally better then the cce (and better then tmpgenc and S8), but even the mainconcept is somewhat noisy - almost too much so, but at least the blocking articfacts are much less prevelant.

I did try I frames only as one guide suggested but mysonic (was using to do a simple burn) didn't recognize the file as valid.

what suggestions would you all have - my best conversion seems to be the mainconcept (which I may shell out the $ for since I have many oth. tapes to do) but it's still noisy.

does avisynth help w/ noise reduction (although it looks like it takes some learning although the site does link to someone else's gui for it (germany I think)).

any suggestions on this? Much thanks in advance...