"Playing" with VHS-to-DVD conversions for about a month I have briefly used Pinnacle Studio, Adobe Premiere & WinDVD Creator II.

WinDVD Creator II only lets me save up to 7,2 Mb/s thus I turned to Pinnacle Studio. Pinnacle Studio, though, when I want to save an edited version of an existing MPEG-2 clip (I only work with this format) takes triple time of the clip duration, e.g. if the clip lasts 30 mins, I have to wait 90 mins until the edited version is finished being rendered as MPEG-2.

WinDVD Creator II did that in only 10-15 mins.

Quality is important tome, too, but it looks like I can't afford to spend so much time on daily basis. Plus I want to learn one program and use effectively.

Which do you suggest ? Are there any more details as the above that make difference ?

I would appreciate all replies.

-- Nikos Andreakos (nandreakos@hotmail.com), September 26, 2004

Answers

The MPEG2VCR editor (http://www.womble.com) will be a better solution to your editing problems. It is a frame accurate MPEG-1/2 editor and I highly recommend it. It won't re-render your clip, although very large files could take 5-10 minutes to save. I haven't used any of the programs you listed except TMPGenc. TMPGenc is terrific for MPEG-1 video and very good for MPEG-2. I know a guy who is using Premier on MPEG-1 video and he is getting absolutely amazing results, but I haven't seen any MPEG-2 video under Premier for comparison. Premier or TMPGenc would be my recommendations. If your capture card is of good quality and all you really need to do is edit videos, buy MPEG2VCR and don't worry about the other programs. TMPGenc's editor doesn't work correctly on a lot of PCs, unfortunately, but the video encoding always works.

-- Root (root@yahoo.moc), September 27, 2004.