We shall assume I am going to stick with what software and hardware I already have.

I am looking for best quality from older analog camcorder tapes.

Laptop computer WinXP Home, 512 MGs RAM, external HDD 250 gbs

Capturing with ADS Xpress in DV AVI (via USB 2 and S-Video)(analog camcorder so no firewire).....

Editing in Ulead Video Studio 6.0.....keeping files in AVI format. Then setting SHARE/ save to video file. Saving as NTCS DVD

(At this point should I save the file in a different format?????)

Burning in SonicMyDVD......

Anything I should change to get better quality? Results aren't bad at all, but always looking for improvements.

Appreciate any suggestions.

Topper.......

The one thing that stands out is using a USB device to convert your analog video. Very few people are happy with the video quality from this.

I suppose it's possible someone has finally come up with a good USB based converter, but I haven't heard of one yet.

Such devices are fighting several battles, one is controlling cost, the next is power consumption (USB 1 or 2 has a max of 2.5 watts, typical is .5 watts) and tied in with that is digitizing and compressing at full frame rate and frame dimensions along with digitizing the audio at a high quality rate.

Many USB based converters will cut quality on one or more of these.

I recommend a PCI based converter card. I use Hauppauge's PVR250 for analog conversion and it works very well. It produces high quality MPEG2 video at up to 12Mb/S and MPEG1-L2 stereo audio at 48ks/S (384kb/S) in real time while only using 30% or so of my system resources. (Most of that is due to decompressing the video for display, the actual compression is done in hardware chips that only use about 5% of resources)

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Fav quote - "Experience is whatcha don't get 'till ya don't need it no more."

System - Athlon 1.4GHz, Win98, Hauppauge PVR250 receiver and compressor.
Software -Magix Movie Edit Pro 10, Nero 6 + NeroVision Express, Moho 4.61, PSP 8.1, Bryce, Quicktime 6.52 pro, Goldwave 5, DVD-Lab.
Cameras - Panasonic GS9, Canon ES8400V, Canon EOS D20 and Canon A70

Appreciate the answer, but hardware was not an issue. I have that setup at my other place......right now I am at my summer home and dealing with what I have here and now.

And am wondering about my PROCEDURE: capturing in AVI, editing in AVI and then letting the rendering be taken care of by the burning program....which would change it from avi to mpeg3.

At least, that is my understanding of what happens in final rendering/burning.

Again, any other procedure or any other format I should be using to keep what quality I have????? Am I going astray in how I am doing this?

As I said originally, hardware and software are givens.

So many out there with knowledge. Hope someone will share.

My thanks to Crusty, but.........hardware not going to be changed at this point.

Well regarding formats, if you capture in DV AVI and do all your editing and post as DV AVI, then output to MPEG-2 for DVD authoring, it's the right way.

Thank you! What I needed was validation or correction.

Appreciate your response.

Topper