editing large MPEG-2 files

[nate-the-great]

I've been capturing large files with my ATI AIW 7500 in MPEG-2 format. The files are usualy 6 hours long and about 8 gigs each. I'm trying to split them into segements so that they can then be burned onto a DVD with my burner. But, every program i've tried, (Ulead, Vegas, etc.) it is extremely slugish. I have a Athlon 1800 proc with 512 DDR333 ram with an 80 gig HD. Shouldnt that be enough to edit video? If so, are there some inherent speed issues with MPEG-2? Meaning, should i try capturing to another format such as AVI so it won't be so painstakingly slow to edit? or, do i need to get a special program..along those lines, which program is best for splitting video files?

thanks

[Adam]

The problem you have is the MPEG-2 file format is not very suitable for editing. Rather than a storing information for every frame it uses keyframes and then the changes from that keyframe until the next keyframe. This means that for each frame it creates it first must decode the nearest previous keyframe and all the subsequent changes until it gets to the one it wants. This works fine if you are watching a film as everything follows the sequence NLE dont work this way. My suggestion, if you have enough disk space is to capture the footage using a frame based format, eg Motion JPEG or the DV format. You will also probablly get and improvement in quality by avoiding two stages of MPEG encoding.