I think this is the worst problem with DVDA. Don't get me wrong, I have been an advocate for SF products for several years and have done a lot of professional, nice paying jobs using their softwaere. But when it comes to DVDA being professional, 4 to 7 hours just doesn't cut it in the pro world. I hope and pray they are working on a way to speed of the process.

The el cheapo Dazzle Digital Video Creator works just fine, at least the PCI version does. We use three of them and have had no problems nor any complaints. Sometimes it is challenging to get the device to acknowledge a video signal but not very often. I went from an Optibase MPEG1 encoder to the dazzle that cost about 2.5% as much and truly see no difference in quality as viewed on good monitors. You can spend more but why?

Peter

Although I work mostly in DV for serious things, for certain TV shows I use a Pinnacle PCTV Deluxe, which has an on the fly MPEG2 encoder. It also has a built in TV tuner and comes with a remote control, all for $150 bucks! It's an external box that connects to your PC with a USB 2.0 connection (it can be used with USB 1, but doesn't produce the highest quality). It also has analog inputs (vhs and super-vhs).

I mostly use it to watch TV while I work, and it works great for this. It also has many of the TIVO features (like pause live tv and digital vcr). But to get back on topic, the quality of the MPEG translation is quite adequate for certain programs, especially considering the price - and no waiting for rendering.

Thanks for the suggestions!

pb, does the Dazzle card offer control over bitrate and CBR/VBR settings? Any other adjustable controls? And do you know if it will work with the SF Video Capture utility?

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I have a pinnacle PCTV deluxe. Have you tried to capture using Vegas? Also, have you rendered a MPEG-2 from pinnacle using DVD architect. When I render a movie the audio is out of sync with the video. I am using the latest versions of Vegas and DVD3.

Thank you for any information you have with this product.

Kathy

If you are looking for some nice hardware MPG encoders- look to Sonic Solutions...they have 3 flavors from SD-500, SD-1000 and the SD-2000. The main issue is price- it's gonna cost you plenty and in the thousands....

I've got an ATI AIW card. I captured from DVCPro to this via s-video &, honestly, I couldn't tell the difference between a 6mbs DVD & a DVCPro. Everything from fades to fast motion looks good.

It's a video card though, so if you have a good multi-monitor card then you'd want it i na seperate computer, which you may not want to do. I've got the AIW 9600 & it supports duel monitors.

You can adjust the bitrate, motion compensation, frame size, frame rate, etc. Pretty much evreything you can change when encoding in Vegas. You need to use the ATI capture program though, but it's not hard. It's got a timed mode so you can capture certain lengths.

One problem though (not with the card). When you put mpeg's into DVDA you can't trim them. You can tell it not to display certain portions, but it won't trim the actual file. So, if you captured 3 hours worth but only wanted to put 1 hour on the DVD, ony 1 hour will show up but all 3 hours will be burned. You'll need something like TMPGeng to get around this.

ADS have a mpeg-2 encoder box that has firewire in. I'm told you can PTT out of Vegas to it and capture back in in RT or something like that.
Still very good mpeg-2 encoding does take time and heaps of calcs. I guess it's a question of how important qulaity is to you. If you've got bitrate to burn probably not an issue but if you want Hollywood quality at 4 Mb/sec be prepared to spend big and be very patient