Capture DV from Camcorder in MPEG2

[moviefan]

Hi guys,

I have a camcorder which records videos on miniDV cassettes. Now I want to edit the material and thus need to copy it to my computer. I have done this before using Adobe Premiere, but then the video was in DV-AVI format, which takes a lot of space. Also I have to encode it to MPEG2 afterwards to burn my video on DVD. Is there a way to directly capture the video in MPEG2 format?

Regards

[trolltuning]

I have an external box called InstantDVD made by ADS Technologies. I use mine to capture from a VCR, but I see they have a model with a firewire input, so you could capture directly from your camera in mpeg 2. I'm sure there are other competitors.

[bb]

There are several software solutions which make direct MPEG-2 capturing possible, i.e. realtime conversion to MPEG-2 while capturing. Examples are the MainConcept MPEG Encoder with its DV capturing module, or Ulead's VideoStudio.

The quality method is to capture to DV, and to encode to MPEG-2 in a second step, though.

bb