Hi,

After numerous (failing) attempts to get the Pinnacle DC30 working in my machine I opted for the ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon which so far seems to work just fine. I have done some captures and encoding using Premiere 6.0/Panasonic MPEG 2.5 and the final results look good, but I have definately seen better (in VCD format) which leads me to my questions, but first some more information on my current setup:

AMD 1GHZ Athlon CPU
Abit KT7 Raid Motherboard
784 Megs Ram
ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon
Diamond Monster Sound MX300

Premiere 6.0 (with 6.01 upgrade) and Panasonic MPEG 2.51 plug-in.

I am doing my current captures off of satellite using the S-Video input. Currently I am capturing at 320x240 resolution (when I capture at higher resolutions, the playback looks real bad in Premiere which makes it difficult to edit/synch audio and video).

I then use Premiere to do my editing and encode to 352x240 in MPEG1/NTSC/VCD format. As I mentioned, the end results are good, but very blocky when viewed up close and on TV.

I have seen other VCD's out there movies, epsiodes, etc. that look much better and have far less pixelation then the encodes I am doing, so now for the questions:

- If I am going to do final encoding in 352x420 format, does it really make a difference on what resolution the original capture is done in?

- Are the better/more optimal settings for the Panasonic encoder or am I better off using a different encoder?

- Using TMPGEnc, my end results are near identical to that of the Panasonic, but is this really a better encoder and are there ways to determine the best settings to use (using various templates does not seem to yield any different results)?

What I am really looking to accomplish is to do additional captures and encoding in VCD format, but trying to get the end pciture to look cleaner and have less pixelation like some of the movies and episodes I have seen (Exodus' for example).

Anyone with any suggestions / advice would be appreciated.

Regards...