Hi All,

I’m quite new to the DV capture and editing scene so please bare with me if I make a few mistakes

I have successfully copied old VHS wedding footage onto my digital webcam and have transferred that into my PC as DV. I have Pinnacle Studio 8 and have managed to edit the footage to my liking. The problems I’m having is encoding this edited footage into a format that is reasonably high quality whilst saving space. In Pinnacle there are several pre-set options including VHS SVCD. Both of these produce disappointing results. Also there is an mpeg option to encode as Mpeg1 and Mpeg2. Mpeg2 allows the data rate to be selected manually, the default being 2400kb/sec. However the results of encoding at these settings are still disappointing. Increasing the data rate improves the quality to an acceptable level but when burnt to CD (I don’t have a DVD burner) it doesn’t play very well in my in my DVD player although it’s ok when played on a PC (my DVD player is also plays MPEG and DivX formats). In Pinnacle there is the option to encode as AVI which allows other codec to be used. I’ve experimented encoding with various codecs that are freely available from the internet including DivX but I am still not impressed with the quality.

What I’m after doesn’t seem impossible because I have seen very good quality footage of movies that have been converted to DivX format which are generally very long (up to 2hrs on one CD) with little loss in quality.

It may be that I’m using the wrong codec’s (I guess free one’s will never be as good as paid for versions) and I need to spend some cash on a decent one. If this is so can anyone recommend any? Can somebody please tell me what I am doing wrong.