Why not capture in MPEG with Pinacal?

[outofline]

I have only captured and completed to DVD a couple projects, the first capturing in DV and the second capturing in MPEG. The MPEG captured well, edited well and rendered in a lot faster time then the DV encoding. The results looked good so I was wondering why I had read in forums to not encode to MPEG on the fly when capturing?

[yoda313]

Hello,

I can ONLY capture in MPEG with my wintv pvr250 so I don't have a choice. But I'd capture straight to mpg anyway since its so easy.

EDITING is the main reason to use avi. It's more flexible than mpg. THOUGH you can still edit mpg without too many problems.

Kevin

[jtoolman2000]

The only reason is that if you have a less than optimal sistem, you may drop frames. Remember that DV ytansfer is simply copying and transfering to MPG it has to convert on the fly which can be a pretty intensive. If it starts to choke, it will start to drop frames. With DV transfer, you can edit to a single frame position. Not so with Mpg. I dont know exactly the term but I know that you can not do a start or end point to a single frame poisition. I alway do transfer to DV as I may need to render my edtits back to DV tape of some occassions.

[yoda313]

Hello,

I dont know exactly the term but I know that you can not do a start or end point to a single frame poisition.

I'm not a 100% certain but aren't they I and P frames????

Anyway - I don't believe I've ever had a dropped frame with my hardware mpeg wintv encoder.....

Kevin

[outofline]

I did drop a few frames with the DV capture and froze the PC up on a couple acations while editing, but I did not drop any with the MPEG. I had no problem editing the MPEG even down to frame by frame.

Thanks for all the replies!

[FulciLives]

The best program for editing MPEG files (without the need to re-encode) is MPEG-VCR by WOMBLE MULTIMEDIA

The program does do some re-encoding at the edit points that are not on "I" frames but this is no big deal and when you save to a new edited file the "rendering" is done very quickly. Again it will only do re-encoding at the edit points.

Another option is to use TMPGEnc DVD Author by PEGASYS as it will allow you to make edits (and does this very well) but you can only edit on "I" frames so your editing is not 100% frame accurate since an "I" frame only happens about once every 15 frames. With MPEG-VCR you can edit at any frame you like.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[outofline]

I tested capturing to MEPG with analogue using Pinical and what a mess that was. Dropped frames by the dozen! So looks like I have to stick with DV from striate to MPEG.