I need a new NLE

[SomeGuyWithACamera]

I have found that I am taking most of my recent most of my recent home videos with my Canon SD880 still camera instead of my old GS120 miniDV camera. Mainly because it is small, easy to get the video off and has a nice wide angle lens.

I was using Premiere elements 4 to do my editing with the GS120 and it worked great for that, however it does not seem to work well with the h.264 30P video from the still camera. I guess that the imported video is converted to interlaced internally and then deinterlaced on output which seems to degrade the resolution.

What would be a good NLE to try? I have tried the demos of a few. Some of the ones that I tried seemed to work well, but saved the exported file as 29.97 instead of 30P. others did not give me any control over bit rates.

So does it even matter that the files are saved at a frame rate of 29.97 vs 30? Also I never burn DVDs. My movies are saved on my PC and either viewed on the PC or streamed to my home theater PC to be viewed on the TV.

[Baldrick]

What have you tried? I would try vegas movie studio.

[SomeGuyWithACamera]

I tried vegas movie studio and at first I thought that you could not set the project properties to 30 fps, but I looked at it again since you suggested it and I found that you can. I am really starting to like the program now.

One problem I do have with the demo is that the mp4 output looks very bad. The first frame is always black and the video jumps and looks severely compressed although I have high bit rates. WMV output looks great and if I save my video as a uncompressed AVI and use x264 and handbrake to convert it to mp4 it looks great. I see these I issues on both of my PCs which are about as different as you can get except for they both have vista 32.