No

Why isn't there an Mpeg2 file capture?
Why capture an Avi file and then covert it to an Mpeg2 file?

Why capture MPEG?

There are lots of cheap solutions out there, most of them hardware based, that capture directly to MPEG if all you want is to immediately create a finished MPEG file.

On the other hand, Vegas is an editing system. MPEG is a very bad format to use as a source for editing. If you're going to edit, capture to DV or uncompressed AVI. If you're not going to edit, or if you're happy with low quality and all the problems that editing MPEG creates, then Vegas may be overkill for your needs.

Hi Chienworks, are you saying that avi is better quality than MPEG-2(not mpeg1)?

Well, generally that's true, but it depends on the parameters of the .avi file. I suppose you could capture .avi at 80x60, 8 bit color, 6fps and it would look pretty bad. But if you stick to broadcast specs of 720x480, 24 bit color, 29.97fps then MPEG can't compare to .avi. MPEG is squished, both spacially and temporally. Consider that uncompressed .avi is about 237Mbps and even DV is about 30Mbps. MPEG-2 usually ranges between 2Mbps and 9Mbps. The MPEG stream doesn't anywhere near as many bits to maintain the quality that broadcast .avi does.

What makes MPEG particularly unsuitable for editing is the temporal compression. Most of the frames aren't complete frames, but depend on data from previous frames. This makes it very time consuming to position or cut the clip at arbitrary points. It also makes editing take a lot longer. Generally the more compressed a source file is, the worse it is for editing.

As a compliment to what was posted above...

AVI files are containers for whatever media content. Generally they are a better alternative to mpg1/2 because they *Usually* contain data for every frame, whereas mpg1/2 do not by default. That said, there's nothing inherently wrong in captureing to mpg2 all I frame, which gives you the same thing, a storage of data on a per frame basis.

Mpg2 files that are all I frame can be better or worse then their avi counterparts depending on a lot of things, including the avi codec used. In practice I've seen mpg2 captures that looked better then an avi file converted to mpg2, and some that looked worse - depends a lot on your source and how much quality you lose from each generation or conversion.

Why doesn't Vegas offer it? Vegas is primarily concerned with DV when it comes to capture, which IMO is more of a utility function comparred to the primary purpose of the program which is editing. You'll need other software to do capture well if you're not doing a DV transfer over firewire. Good news is there's plenty available for cheap money - if you wanted to capture to mpg2 directly, depending on your hardware, might even be able to get away with an older version of neodvd that you can usually pick up for the cost of shipping.

Finally, FWIW, remember the old garbage in garbage out thing with computers? Well, same thing for video. If you're captureing lower quality VHS or broadcast, you can capture noise just as well using mpg2 as using DV or anything else. IOW, if the source isn't that clean to start with, while over-compressing can hurt it further, a higher quality format won't improve it a bit.