Using WinDV, Ulead VS & TMPGenc

[neo]

I did my first project yesterday. Once again I am capturing Satellite Dish to hard drive files so I want no quality loss but small file size. I first tried capturing with Ulead but I could not do anything else. So I captured in AVI 1 with WinDV which is free, no dropped frames, and I can still use my computer.

Then I switched to UL VS 6 which I have to edit. I found the free video tutorials on VS 7 very helpful. After a lot of time learning how to split the TV show into segments, trimming, adding transistion effects where the commercials were and a title it all looked great and I had a lot of fun. The most useful effects for me were just adding more black color, fade to black, and crossfade.

I then rendered to MPEG-2 but was not happy with the quality. I was surprised that it rendered in about the same amount of time it took to encode (almost real time). I suspect if it is rendering this fast with a low processor load then it probably was not doing a great job.

My next plan is to render the finnished product to AVI. Then run TMPGenc to crop and use other filters and just let it run overnight. I suspect that the greatly increased rendering time should give a much better result.

Any ideas or thoughts?

Thanks

[Gees]

Just one, I'm afraid:

so I want no quality loss but small file size.

impossible