I just bought a JVC GZ-MC500U digital video camera, and I'm looking for a decent video editor to assemble my footage into movies and burn them to DVD. I have an old version of Premiere, but it doesn't recognize the file format of the new camera (MPEG-2 .MOD files), and the software that came with the camera (CyberLink PowerDirector) does not support 16:9 and all the footage I shoot is horizontally squashed to 4:3 and looks weird as a result. SHould I pay the $79 to upgrade PowerDirector to version 5, which does support 16:9, or pay the extra bucks and upgrade Premiere, or is there some other reasonable option? I'm working on a laptop, so hard drive space and CPU power are both kind of limited, and a bulky, demanding program would probably not work well.

Your problems are just starting, to do a descent length of DVD you will need 20 GB of free space minimum 50 GB is better, A fire wire port is the esensual for quality capturer.If you use USB2 you will lose about 20% of your capturer quality
Try and do a on line update on your Power director 4 to5 is $59
Premiere is better but costs lots of lolly you will also need Encore to finish of your DVD, You should also look at Adobe Premiere Elements 3.0

Your free time starts to shrink from now on Good luck, Robert

My camera records directly to CF cards. I bought it because it was 50% off regular price (open box demo), and I already have a collection of 4GB Microdrives for my DSLRs. I shoot to the Microdrive at maximum quality and then copy the files to the computer with a card reader instead of being tethered to the laptop.

I have a Fin pix S9500 witch also takes CF & Micro drives and makes transfer so much easer. I sill have to transfer analogue and digital video for my family. The videos will be a good complement to your photos. Hope you have a DVD Burner on your laptop
Robert

Check out Premiere Elements 3.0. Very good and does all you listed very well.
I have been using Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0 for my JVC HD camera for the same capture format (MPEG-2, although it is the HD version) as yours.
Anyway I picked up the brand new version of Premiere Elements 3.0 for it's ability to render HDV - and just love the simple interface. Everything works too!
It doesn't do everything the Pro 2.0 does, but for simple things like render and burn to DVD - it is ideal. Should be under $100.
Best of luck.

Editing mpeg files is always a bit iffy unless you are using an all I frame flavor of mpeg (mpeg25 or mpeg50) which is similar to DV25 and DV50 video. The problem starts when you use IBBP encoding on the mpeg and then want to make a cut (or other transition) at a B or P frame. Some editors will calculate the GOP and allow a cut on those frames, some will only allow the cut on an I frame, and those might be half a second apart.

You can probably find a few utilities to convert the .mod to something that can be opened/edited in just about anything that can edit mpeg files. If you want a nice light weight, yet full featured editer check out EditStudio from Pure Motion. I've used the version 3 software to edit DV video on a pentium 266 laptop with a firewire connected drive. It was simple cuts only, and was still fairly painful, but it did work. To find utilities you should look around www.videohelp.com I'm sure there will be something to convert the files, and you might even find a free editor like Zwei-Stein ro one of the others in the tools sections (left hand side of the page). Help can be found in the forums.

Realized I left out an important part:

I frame - contains all information needed to decode the frame
P frame - is a predicted frame based on the I frame before it, some information is encoded
B frame - is a bi-directionally computed frame based on the frames before and frames after the B frame
GOP - group of pictures

"normal" GOP of 15 for IBP encoding (1/2 second between I frames)

IBBPBBPBBPBBPBBI.........

You can also get IP encoding which is a larger file, and as mentioned all I frame encoding which is much larger

DV25 is 25Mbps compresed video, all frames encoded
DV50 is 50Mbps compressed video, all frames encoded
MPEG25 is (generally) all I frames at 25Mbps

Mpeg looks at the video to see what has changed and it puts those changes in the P frames, then computes what would need to be changed between the nearest forward encoded frame, and the nearest backward encoded frame, these are the B frames. This makes it hard to edit on a P or B frame since those frames do not have everything needed to decode the frame. So the editor must decode that GOP to temp space in order to edit on those frames. You'll find that most DVD authoring software will only allow chapters to be placed on I frames, and applications that work together like Final Cut and DVD Studio Pro will cause I frames to be encoder when you put the chapter markers in the Final Cut timeline and then export the project to DVD Studio Pro.

Can Premiere Elements do things like export the audio to an external editor and re-import? How does it handle voiceover/narration, etc.?

After a bit of hassle downloading the 700MB trial for Premiere Elements 3, I think I've found what I'm looking for. Lots of features and functionality, good stability (hasn't locked up or crashed yet!) It's much better than the CyberLink PowerDirector crap. I'm burning a DVD right now of some stuff I shot this morning.

Jonathan,

I use PE3, too and I like it. Be sure to look at the Adobe support forums for great user to user help! There is a bug in the code that somethimes causes PE to lock up. This can be avoided by simply not using Video Track 1. Why? No idea, but it's a well documented fix. Hope you enjoy it.

Regards,
Hugh

jonathan how has your experience with PE3 been so far? i am looking for a video editing software, and its down to PE3 or Ulead. your comments and experiences with PE3 would be appreciated.
TIA
amnon