Best software to edit and burn EyeTV recordings with?

[jmbill]

I'm using Elgato's EyeTV software to make recordings of live TV. What I want to be able to do is to edit commercials out of the recordings and burn them to DVD for playback through a normal TV / DVD player.

Currently I am editing eyeTV footage using eyeTV itself but is is rather tedious because the editing interface is rather poor. I am then exporting the recordings in .mpg format and having Burn convert them to .mp4 and burn them to DVD.

I was wondering if there is a better way of doing this? As expected, there's quite a sharp decrease in video quality, but this exporting to MPG format seems to be the only way to fit a 2 hour recording onto a single layer DVD for TV playback? I'm not expecting miracles really because these eyeTV recordings are far from HD quality. But I'm thinking there must be an application which can offer further editing and burning functions?

Elgato tell me I should be using Toast Titanium, but software review sites aren't actually praising the latest version (version 10) at the moment, so I'm not really sure where to go next. I'd be interested to know what others are using currently.

Thanks!

 

[ben1969]

Toast 8 works perfectly for me on an intel iMac with 10.5 -- it's fast and very well integrated with the EyeTV software.

 

[macffooky]

I personally do the rough editing in EyeTV, export to MPG and then do the finer stuff with MPEG Streamclip, which has a function to find the nearest keyframe. I don't notice any quality loss but you can simply right click on your .eyetv file and open the MPG inside with MPEG Streamclip if you prefer. The only issue I have is that most material is interlaced but that shouldn't be a problem if you're going DVD player -> TV. I don't understand what MP4 has to do with this process (unless your broadcasts are in that format). You can just set Toast not to reencode your edited material and create DVDs/burn with that.

 

[ibglowin]

I can edit an hour long show using the eyeTV editor in about 5 mins, 10 min to save the edited file. Hit the Toast button and tweak the settings to the highest and forget about it. Doesn't get much easier. The video quality is excellent. What sucks is that it doesn't keep the 5.1 audio but converts it to 2 channel stereo. Other than that its great.

 

[jmbill]

Thanks for your suggestions.

I will download the demo of Toast and see if it's suitable for my needs. I read somewhere that EyeTV is actually based off Toast, so I suspect the compatibility between the two products is excellent.

 

[hazmatzak]

I personally do the rough editing in EyeTV, export to MPG and then do the finer stuff with MPEG Streamclip, which has a function to find the nearest keyframe.

When set to Fine, the editor in EyeTV should also edit on the GOP (keyframe). There appears to be a bug in the current version, where the frame indicator always ends with ".02" when clicking on the thumbnails, but you can see that more than one thumbnail shows the same time; and something else that I forget that indicates the resolution is about a half-second, which is expected.