handycam D8 video to xvid avi ?

[apratim_pranay]

hi

i'm tryin to convert handycam videos to xvid avi

i use pinnacle studio which gives an option of DV capture or mpg capture

since mpg capture takes much lesser space(somehow i cudnt see the difference in quality) i prefer that

but is editing a mpg difficult?

also how do i convert an mpg(PAL,25fps) to xvid avi

will MeGui(which i use for DVD to xvid) work?

i tried a but didnt even get average quality

sorry but i'm really new to handycam vidoe conversion

thanx

[theReal]

Don't capture in mpeg if you want to edit and re-encode. Editing mpeg video is a bitch, most editing programs need to de-code and re-encode the mpeg to do it, if they can handle it at all. Also you'll lose lots of quality when re-encoding mpeg.

MeGui works fine for converting DV to XVid. However you should consider using an avisynth script with a few filters before encoding. First of all DV video is interlaced and usually you'll want a progressive XVid file if you want to watch it on a computer screen. Then you'd usually want to resize the video to keep the filesize down and to make the aspect ratio 4:3 for square pixels (=computer screens). Homevideos also need some smoothing (filtering) or you'll need really high bitrates.

I recently converted some DV homevideo to XVid with the following avisynth script, I used 1100 kbit/s and got pretty good results (though this was just for sending it to friends over the internet, for archiving I use DV only and I burn DVDs for watching on the tv)

DirectShowSource("input.avi")

converttoyv12()

FieldDeinterlace()

LanczosResize(512,368)

Undot()
Temporalsoften(3,5,5,mode=2,scenechange=10)
Convolution3d("moviehq")