Quote: I am working on a fairly large project, mixed stills & video. Because of its size and the assumed limitations of my pc, I Edit a clip of 10-20 minutes, copy & paste it as a new file and then Produce this section as MPEG2/DVD HQ/Pal. When I have a few semi complete clips I join them up, add extras where appropriate and then Produce these as a larger MPEG2 clip. By the time the complete movie is ready for disc/s it is possible that I have 'reproduced' each early clip some 3 times.

Question: Does this degrade the quality of the finished product? When Producing I do not use SVRT or any of the accelerators.

It is possible to degrade if you are not using as near as possible to the original quality to produce.

You are the best judge if you are losing quality by playing in a external player and seeing how the video looks.
If the produced videos are good, then the loss if any is not detectable.

Carl312: Windows 10 64-bit 8 GB RAM,AMD Phenom II X4 965 3.4 GHz,ATI Radeon HD 5770 1GB,240GB SSD,two 1TB HDs.

Ron,

I would suggest you split the project into logical peices. Work on each seperate peice until you have what you want. then work on the next section.

As an example: I generally work videos for hockey games that are three periods (20 minutes each). Each game video that I do has 5 parts/projects.
1 - Pre-game
2 - First period
3 - Second period
4 - Third period
5 - Highlights/ending

When each of these are completed I do one more project for the 'Game Complete'

Just my workflow, others may differ.

Hal
OS - Win11 Pro, Alienware R13, CPU - Intel Core I7-12700KF 12 CPUs), 16g DDR5 4400 RAM, Video - Geeforce RTX 3080ti 12g, PD11 & PD365
My YouTube

Gidday Ron, I am only a novice with an old I7 Quad but initially I was doing as yourself with compiling a bits of dvd,
eventually I have refined my procedure to first if neccesary producing the clips to either mpg2 or 4 into a folder on the desktop
that only contains that mpg common format,then i just keep adding these clips to the timeline until there is enough to fill either a dvd5 or a dvd9 disc. Importantly I cured a lot of the slowness of my system by if using HD clips allowing shadow files and also making sure that interlacing format was correct,ie interlaced at either top to bottom or bottom to top scan for our pal TV system.
If the finished disc is for PC display only I then make it 'progressive' scan. This has saved me heaps of time and fortunately my capture / tuner card outputs in either mpg4-2 so normally it is just straight to the timeline with clips with no rendering required.
Another plus I have found with PD 10 is being able so far to compress during burning 10 gig onto a 8.5 disc and 5.4 gig on to a 4.7 disc without any problems. I don't know if this gives you any insight for your problem but I have found PD 10 to be by far the best system friendly editor having tried 'Premier Elements','Corel' and 'ULead'...... Regards Mike

Thanks for all your replies and the various advice.
I wondered if my process was somehow 'lossy' as it is when, for example, modifying . jpeg pictures but this seems not to be the case. I understand the . jpeg process but am no expert at video.

I'm saving and creating Packed Projects at each logical stage and if any final result is unacceptable then I can always redo from these files ... don't want to mess it up since it is the record of my special '0' birthday stay in Paris and cruise on the Rhine here in Europe No prizes for guessing which special'0'

Thanks again
Ron CYa Ron (W10/i5gen8/Nvidia)
Someone famous once said: "We only have the 4th dimension of 'time' so that everything does not all happen at once"