Need a little help capturing hi8 video

[azuberi80]

I have a sony hi8 camcorder and a bunch of little tapes that I want to put on dvd. I have the camcorder hooked up to my computer through a firewire card.

I am using cyberlink power director 6 to capture and edit my clips. What I want to know is should I capture in avi or mpeg2. I have done both ways so far and have no dropped frames with each (i have a fairly new Dell C521 with 1gig of ram and an amd x2 processor).

I am not going to be extensively editing these clips, just trimming them and putting them on dvd. I know that avi will give me huge files which i will then have to recode to burn on dvd and this is supposed to give me the best quality......BUT how much better?

Is it worth the extra time and space to do this? Will I see a noticeable difference?

Thanks.

[thecoalman]

If you're just doing minor edits and not reencoding the MPEG the quality will depend on how well your machine and codec can do it on the fly. Best way to test it is to sample both.

BTW I think you meant digital-8 camcorder? Hi-8 is analog and has to be captured with addtional capture hardware.

[azuberi80]

yeah i think it is digital 8.

I definitely will not be reencoding the mpeg2 file. I just want to put it on my pc, trim it up, maybe clean it up with the "magic" feature on the power director software and then burn to dvd to watch on the tv (and make copies for family).