Hello folks. I'm new to this forum and Premiere Pro CS3. Up untill now I have been using Main Concept's Main Actor for cap and edit. I recently shot a hockey game (SilverSticks tournament in Fort Wayne Indiana). Video on tape played through TV looks good. AVI looks good in Power DVD. In timeline and in finished DVD or MPEG2 the close-ups with action produce a slight double image and look jittery or shaky on TV or copmputer. If I render the questionable section of video in MainActor the MPEG2 looks much smoother and a DVD is also much smoother. I'm trying to determine if my taping techniques are at fault or I'm doing something wrong in Premiere.
Here is what I am using:
Sony DCR-HC85 NTSC video camera
MB: ASUS M2N32 SLI-Deluxe
AMD Athalon 4200+64x2 (32/64)
2 GIG memory (800 fsb)
ATI Radeon X1650 Pro
O/S: Win XP Pro SP2
2 Seagate 250 Gig SATA drives (7200 rpm)
[FONT='Calibri','sans-serif']In the general preference window of Premiere I have used both performance and memory settings with no visible change to video. Any thoughts or ideas would be helpful.[/FONT]

[FONT='Calibri','sans-serif']Thanks,[/FONT]
[FONT='Calibri','sans-serif']D[/FONT]

Did you capture with Premiere? This is definitely not normal.

Using three different pieces of software to go from camcorder tape to finished DVD might be the problem.

Hello, thanks for reply. I used Premiere for capture. I encoded the AVI using Premiere and then encoded the same AVI using MainActor. The MPEG2 from MainActor was much smoother than the one from Premiere.

Thanks,
Don

Did you use the same settings in both?

As far as I can tell the settings were close. Both programs use MainConcept MPEG2 encoder. Here are the settings from Premiere;
Under video tab:
Quality 4
NTSC *
720x480 *
Frame Rate 29.97 non-drop frame *
Field Order-Lower *
Widescreen 16:9 (1.200) *
Bitrate VBR, 2 Pass
Min Bitrate: 1.5
Target: 4
Max: 7

The entries with the asterisk are the same as MainActor. In addition I had these settings :
Motion Search Pixel Movement (selected)
VBR
Max 8000 (kbps)
Avg 6000 (kbps)
Min 3825 (kbps)

During Taping I had steady shot engaged. I have heard that this can also cause similar problems to what I'm experiencing.

Thanks again for any help ideas,
D.