Need Help Selecting Software

[facialcrunch]

I have a Sony DCR-TRV11 DV camera and I use Ulead Video Studio 7 to capture the AVI via FireWire. I have used Ulead DVD Workshop which makes some nice motion menus and converts the mpegs and burns the disk. Seems like a nice all-in-one program with nice results.

For simply converting the captured AVI files to MPEG, I have used TMPGEnc 2.521.58.169 Plus, Canopus ProCoder 1.5, and CCE SP. CCE is the fastest, but which is best. ProCoder has some nice filters, and TMPG seems the slowest.

I'd like to convert my AVI files to the MPEG that I will use to author the DVD's in the future to save space on my hard drive.

1.) Which program do you recommend I do it with. I've read a lot and there are a lot of conflicting opinions out there. From what I've read, CCE SP seems like it's the best, but I also saw a comparison that said that CCE SP was not as good of final quality as Canopus ProCoder.

2.) For home video AVI conversion, using 4.7 GB DVD-R+ disks, what BitRate is best to encode to. I realize the higher the better, but what realistically will give great video at the lowest bitrate?

3.) Is there any advantage to having separate audio and video files (like TMPG, Canopus, CCE produce) as opposed to a single MPEG file containing audio and video (like the Ulead products produce) assuming I will not be editing the audio at all?

Thanks for the help. I really appreciate it!

[Baldrick]

Encoding/Conversion isn't authoring so I'm moving your topic.