Here is what I want to do. I took some short video clips on my sony digital camera, about 2 minutes each. They should be in mpeg1 format. I just want to trim the beginning and end and change the levels a little and then save it again.

I downloaded the trial version of CS4 (I am using 6.5 still....as all my work is still in miniDV) did the changes and tried exporting to many different formats.

Not one of them looked good. The closest I could get to how sharp the original looked was to save it in WMV. Every other format just make the resulting file look like it was a codec throwup.

I don't beleive I did anything wrong, this is pretty straightforward.

So, no version of Premiere will allow me to do what I want to do? I find that hard to beleive.

Can anyone shed any light on this, or there is no solution? If that is the case, can someone recommend a great mpg editor?

thanks

Trial versions of Adobe don't have all of the codecs installed... this might be the issue
you are seeing...

MPEG1 files from digital still cameras won`t look acceptable, no matter what codec or editor you throw at it.

But, you can trim it with MPEG Streamclip.