Pinnacle Studio 700 PCI 10 - poor Mpeg2 output files

[pochrist]

First off let me say, I'm not a complete Newbie... I built a computer for a church to do some audio-visual work. Nothing real fancy just spare parts and some new parts.

The system specs are:

Asus A7v133 Mainboard
AMD Athlon 1600+ CPU
640 MB PC 100 Ram
SB Live Soundcard
Asus AGP video card (Nvidia FX 5200 chipset) 128mb ram
Pinnacle Studio 700 version 10+ PCI card
400watt psu
LG 4167 DVD Writer
Maxtor Hard Disks
Win XP PRO SP2

All drivers are up to date.

Like I said not a scorcher of a system but it should do the job (even if it will just take a little longer)

My own system is a little more power full than this (AMD 1700 + PC2700 ram + Dazzle DV?? ( I can't remember) and a few hard ware differances)

With that said I use on my own system Adobe Premeire with CCE to convert Edited DV files to Mpeg2 files before Authoring.

Now like I said the client is a Church and the people are not real talented with computers so I decided to get the Pinnacle Studio 700 PCI 10 to make it easy for them to do it for themselves.

While testing the system last night I captured some video off of my own DV Camera via fire wire. play back through a Windows Media player 9 it shows up fine plays back smooth.

I used the Studio 10 + software to make a quick movie, added a few transitions and out putted to a Mpegs 2 file useing the automatic setting in the program. The result was not impressive at all, the video play back in WM9 was "smoothish" but the colors appearing to fade in and out (like a strobe light in the back ground messing with the lighting)

because I'm not familiar Studio 10 + and really didn't tweak the settings, I'm just curious is this a hardware problem or a poor software encoding problem. Any Advice would be appreciated.

[funnel71]

You've peaked my interest here. I'm getting a Pinnacle 500 USB2 capture device for Christmas, and I certainly hope I don't have this kind of trouble. Any opinions here?

[pochrist]

Not to go off my subject but personally I prefer to use the PCI versions over usb espcially if you want to have firewire capabilities. I'm not 100% sure but isn't an internal PCI card capable of higher transfer rates than USB 2.0? Perhaps some one can answer that questions as well.