Capturing HDTV and Converting/Exporting

[eighteesix]

Hello--

I have been capturing some HD video (Discovery HD) using FireRecord. It works great, no complaints. However, it saves all the files in the .m2t format. I've been trying to use MPEG Streamclip to edit and convert/export the videos.

This is where I am running into problems. At first I couldn't even get "Export to AVI" in menu to function at all--I kept getting compression errors after 30 seconds. After I acquired DivX Pro, the "Export to AVI" function now works better, but still wont complete. I get a compression error 5-20% in. I don't even know what the difference between "Export to AVI" and "Convert to MPEG with MP2 Audio", and how they affect my HD content. However, using "Convert to MPEG with MP2 Audio" with the .m2t file works fine (and is fast!--exporting to AVI is very slow).

Also, I am attempting to convert the mpeg file from what I described on the line above to AVI in QuickTime now, and its going to take over an hour and a half (the clip is only 10min) while converting to mpeg from m2t only took 30sec. So basically I am a little lost. What should I convert my .m2t to if I want to keep a reasonable HD quality? (honestly i think the mpeg+mp2 looked better than the .avi but avi is the ideal size).

Any advice would be appreciated.

[Baldrick]

Please don't cross post. https://forum.videohelp.com/topic365992.html