Please advice: how to edit MPEG2 from DVDCAM w/o qualityloss

[FrancescoPP]

Hi all,

A question from a newbie.

I have a Hitachi DVDCAM and I have (of course) problems in editing the footage I produced. I have read through the forums and I understood that a DVDCAM is not a good idea in the first place. Alas. I have also seen the suggested procedure from aciprez in the "Editing etc" forum.

Bit I would like to understand things a little better. Does anybody know if it would be a good idea to convert the MPEG2 generated by HITACHI to a more easily editable format and then use some program (I have Ulead Videostudio 8 ) to create effects etc.?

I have tried to use VS8 directly with the DVDCAM, but it seems to destroy all the original quality. I have also contacted the technical support of Hitachi and was contacted by a kind person, but he suggested to use VS8. I suspect that VS8 is always re-encoding, hence the (huge!) quality loss.

In general, can someone drive me to guides explaining the different formats, and in particular the format used in Hitachi DVDCAMs? Once I have understood these basics, I can try to use all the different conversion guides to understand how to proceed.

Thanks and regards,

Francesco

[Abond]

If with "editing" you mean cutting, I would suggest to give Cuttermaran + TMPGEnc a try - for frame acuracy cutting of mpeg2 files..

[FrancescoPP]

Thanks for your reply, abond. Also, I would like to do some basic combination of clips of my family, with some fade-in/fade-out effect. There are plenty of them in VisualStudio, byt the quality is then heavily degraded (re-rendering, re-encoding? Boh?). Any suggestion?

Best regards,

Francesco

[mh2360]

Sony Vegas has a very good integrated encoder (Main Concept) and all the effects you could ever need...

[reboot]

I've been playing with a lot of editors lately.
Vegas is very nice, a little pricey, but does a wonderful job.
Pinnacle Studio 9 seems to work, but is rather buggy (just like ver 7, and 8).
Mainconcept EVE is very nice too! Not as many options as Vegas, but the price is much better.

[schematic2]

I don't think you'll get totally away from the degradation. You are not working with DV, you are working with MPEG2. Cutting out clips won't be a problem, but any real editing (color correction, filtering etc.) is going to require reencoding. That is the evil of a DVDcam that no saleman will tell you. Try to stay away from reencoding if you can. If you just want to snip out clips, use something like TMPGenc, Womble or Mpeg2cut. They won't reencode just to trim out clips.

Sorry to say but "MiniDV" is a better choice for camcorders.