Will Vegas solve my MPEG2 woes?

I have a Sony SR300 HDD camcorder and I'm trying to edit the footage with Premiere Elements 3. Unfortunately, I'm getting lots of horizontal lines in my footage. I think it has to do with interlacing, but nothing I've tried (de-interlacing, reversing field dominance) has worked.

At this point, I'm thinking of switching to different editing software and was hoping someone could tell me if Vegas suffers from these same issues?

Greatly appreciate any input!

Before you switch, you should understand something about different display devices. You don't say where you are viewing your video that looks so bad. I suspect it's on your computer display. Computer displays are progressive devices. Interlaced video (which I'm further assuming is what your cam is recording since you didn't say how it was recorded) often looks bad on progressive devices especially when there is movement and diagonal lines.

What you should do is connect your cam to a TV and play the video. Most TVs are interlaced so they should display interlaced video very well.

If that's the case, then you need to decide where you are going to show your video. That will determine whether it should be de-interlaced or not. If you're going to make DVDs, the don't de-interlace. If your'e going to post it on the web, use a format like WMV. your NLE should de-interlace automatically as it encodes the video to WMV. I don't think there are too many situations where you need to de-interlace video yourself. The distribution format you choose should take care of it for you.

Good luck.

Dennis

Working with different formats and media that has different resolutions is just not going to give you a good result. any software that handles this does "parlor tricks" to make it work. (Notice the undoes you have to do? what do you suppose is happening)

Mixing media formats also means more foreced rendering which is basically compression decompresion. Heaven help you if you want an effect over any of that

It is not so crazy to bring in good looking footage into a PC via an analogue method. I know, sounds counter intuitive. But, when you do this, all the media conforms for resolution, color space, aspect ratio. Sometimes you can actually lessen compression becuase more will work in real time.