Capture Straight to MPEG (or its equivalent) on the MAC?

[fbenitez]

I posted this in the Newbie forum and someone suggested I post it here instead.

Short question:
Is there a way I can capture one hour of analog audio and video, directly to "some format", then edit it down to 40-45 minutes (taking out commercials) and have the file fit under 700 Megs on the MAC at a quality slightly better than VCD?

Long question:
I am thinking of getting a new system and wondering if I should get another PC or switch over to a MAC. Right now I'm archiving video by capturing with Dazzle VC (Movie Quality) to MPEG. Once the comercials are edited out I have about a 695Meg file that fits nicely on a 700Meg disc. BTW I'm not attempting to do VCDs or XVCDs, just archiving to later watch on the computer.
I am leaning towards the MAC because of their speed, their software and operating system is a lot more polished (iMovie, iDVD, iPhoto, etc...), and seem to burn nice DVDs, although the later is not a priority right now. The downside is I don't think I can do what I am doing now as easily on the MAC (without spending time encoding and going through formats back and forth) I don't see MPEG mentioned so much when looking at video products on the MAC, mostly Quicktime, DV, and MJPEG. So the question is: Is there a way I can capture one hour of analog audio and video, directly to some format, then edit it down to 40-45 minutes (taking out commercials) and have the file fit under 700 Megs on the MAC at a quality slightly better than VCD like I'm doing now?

Or even going to the extreme (this is how bad I'd like a MAC), has anyone used the Dazzle USB (or Win-TV, WinVCR, etc.) on a MAC through Virtual-PC?

Maybe there is someplace I am not looking (I hope so..) but capturing MPEG without re-encoding doesn't seem posible on the MAC.

Thanx for your help.

[major]

direct capture is only supported in DV format unless you buy appropriate external hardware.. for mac, not for pc.. it exists and even support MPG2 capture, like eg this USB unit: http://www.esbuy.com/noname4.html

if you just want to burn the video on a CD to view it later on a mac, and do everything without buying additional hardware, the best plan is to capture to DV (you will need lot of hard disk space) then export to Quicktime using a good codec like Sorenson 3 (which is a VBR codec with better image quality than MPEG4 and high compression ratios, allowing to fit lot of video in a single CD), or 3ivx (but this one is still slow in playback), or even divx (you can't still encode it on a mac, but you can play it at good framerates in fullscreen, both in OS9 and OSX)