Suggestions for a Good Home movie program?

[a1parrothead]

Hello,
I am pretty new to all of this, but have transferred some of my old VHS home movies to DVD already. I use Arcsoft Showbiz DVD. Its O.K. and works fine, but I cannot control the important settings like the bit rate and audio choices such as going from uncompressed audio to AC-3. I would like to be able to control this so I can find the right balance and fit more video on my DVD media.
Anyway, I use a Canopus ADVC-100, and this WORKS GREAT. ALL of my videos have PERFECT sync with audio to video. But I recently decided to use Dazzle Studio Version 7 instead of Arcsoft Showbiz. I did this because the Dazzle program allows me to change the bit rate. After getting 2 hours of video onto my hard drive, I discover that about halfway through the video the audio dropped out. I went to the Dazzle website FAQ's and they say its because of a problem with my source VHS tape (most likely) or a bunch of other things! Blah, Blah, Blah!!!
I need a suggestion for a program that will allow me to control bit rate etc. when going to MPEG2, is fairly easy to use to edit the video, will not drop frames or audio (I have never lost any with Arcsoft), and will work well with my Canopus ADVC-100. I like Arcsoft, but it has no controls! I am running windows XP Home. Please post any ideas if there exsits such a program!

[DVO]

Premiere and Vegas can do this but they cost quite a lot. Editstudio4 looks nice and pretty cheap compered to those mentioned, it also come with a mpeg-enconder now.

An other option would be to output as AVI and use a dedicated encoder to convert them afterwards with TMPEGEnc for example.

Check the tools section on the left there are plenty to choose from.

[sitlet]

i use adobe premiere 6.5 and pro. they are fairly expensive and hard to learn, so if you're looking for somethign easy, stay away from premiere. there are however plenty of programs that can do what you want in the TOOLS section to the left. check out some of the guides to walk you through what you need to do.

[jdlabelle]

I consider myself a mid-level user. I've looked at Vegas 5 and Adobe Premier on the high end, but found they had 6000 features when I needed 40. (also several hundred dollars each)

Arcsoft in my opinion is pretty bottom of the barrel basic like you indicated, like Microsoft's Movie Maker, both of which are geared toward the "import file, add title, burn" crowd. I didn't care for Roxio's Videowave either.

I think for the mid-level user like myself, you can't go wrong with Ulead's Videostudio 7 (now 8). The more I use this, the more cool features I find. Now, just slightly below in terms of capabilities is Sonic's MyDVD. Sonic is actually pretty good, with plenty of basic featuers.

I'm most recently checking out WinDVD's DVDCreator (I think it's called). It's clean and simple for when I want to pick a file, and get it on disk), but not much else.