Alan, thanks for your reply.

I was under the impression that converting to mpeg from DV or AVI (whatever the footage was captured in) can be a real time consuming task (possibly taking hours on end depending on the speed of your pc). I was led to believe that encoding in real time would shave quite of bit of time off this task.

However, I read a report that editing files already in the MPEG format could lead to a degrade in the final quality. Therefore its best to record in AVI files and when I'm ready to authorize for DVD, I can render the file to an MPEG format.

These two points of view is where I'm kind of stuck between between a rock and a hard place because I'm not sure of exactly which scenario offers to best solution for my clients.

For the record, all I want to do is take home video footages (VHS tapes, ETC) and convert the files to a professional quality DVD complete with menus and the like. Most people are also under the impression that putting their home videos on DVD should also improve the image quality of the picture (of course we all know that this depends on the source material). That's why I thought that a real time hardware encoder might be the thing to get as its converters would probably be more superior to the lower end capture card products. However, if you have any suggestions otherwise, please feel free to contribute your thoughts.