I hope this is the right or best subreddit for this question, if not, please show me where I can repost it.

I'm currently working on digitizing my family's home videos and the converter we got makes video files, AVI ITU H.264. I can play them in VLC and they look great. While they're digitized and that's the most important part, I wanted to edit them into smaller videos by event and organize it better, with titles, etc, and into a smaller file type than AVI.

They are not accepted into my video editor. Any converter I've used (many different programs, many different video file types and codecs) leaves artifacts, glitches, stretches the video, and a whole mess of other problems.

I need to find a good converter that won't do that, or find myself another editor that supports that file type. Any suggestions? Thank you so much for your help.