DV to MPEG2

[phi]

Hi All!

I've got tons of home video on DV tapes. With my fireware card I can capture their contents into DV format AVI files, and I wanted to convert them into MPEG2 streams to write out to DVD-R disks later.
The problems begin here. I'm really quality freak, so I used TMpegEnc: 2 pass VBR, best motion search quality (slowest).
Horrible!!! Encoding 10 minutes of video takes a day an my PIII@700Mhz!!!
So, I decided to buy a HW MPEG2 encoder card, but it seems to me, that won't help.

My questions are:
1) Is it true that DVCII can only capture from its AV source, and cannot convert existing DV avi?
2) Are there any HW MPEG2 encoder which can produce comperable quality with TMpegEnc (best settings)? It doesn't have to be a real-time conversion.

So, my utility function is quality*speed/price;).

Any suggestions?

Thanks
/phi

[Nogami]

I usually capture my stuff into AVI form with Adobe Premiere v6.0, then use AVISynth to feed it into CCE 2.5. Encodes VERY fast and the quality is excellent.

If I need to do 3:2 pulldown, I usually use TMPGENC instead, but I'm experimenting with using CCE for this with the pulldown.exe program instead because it's much faster.