Simple way to edit MiniDV footage and save it to DVD

[jellyfear]

Hi

The question I have is: "What software should I buy that will let me do the whole process (copy from miniDV, edit, and save to DVD) easily in one place while retaining [close to] the original picture quality?"

I'm new to this and not familiar with most of the jargon, but I've read the FAQs and looked at endless other websites so any help you can give (in simple terms) would be very much appreciated.

I have a Sony Handycam DCR-HC27 Mini DV camera, and I thought it would be fairly simple to edit and transfer to DVD's so my family can see holiday footage etc.

I have succeeded in this task, but I had to fiddle around with a few different freeware programs and I'm not happy with the finished quality (final DVD is grainy and colours are dull compared with playing the tape stright into the TV from the camera).

First I upgraded my P4 3GHz PC to 3GB of memory and a new 160GB scratch drive, so I assume the machine should be OK now.

I copied the files using a firewire cable and Windows Movie Maker, and after the editing, I saved it to DVD using Nero.

This sounds easy, but I feel I may have picked settings that were not the best at some point, or just used the wrong options but have no way of knowing where I went wrong...

Hope someone can help

Thanks in advance

[JohnnyMalaria]

The usual "mistake" made with WMM is saving the edited video in a low quality format. This is because of the somewhat clunky way the software assumes what format to use. You can tell WMM to output to DV format which will be the same quality as your input.

Have you watched the edited video from WMM before putting it through Nero? If the quality is poor then the above is probably the reason. If not, then the DVD encoder settings within Nero need changing.

[edDV]

WMM hides the DV-AVI export here. Export your edited timeline to DV-AVI and import that file to Nero.

[Richard_G]

The question I have is: "What software should I buy that will let me do the whole process (copy from miniDV, edit, and save to DVD) easily in one place while retaining [close to] the original picture quality?"

You don't mind paying for it, want decent quality and want simplicity. For an all in one you won't go far wrong with Ulead Moviefactory. You can get very slightly better results by doing everything the manual way but for a beginner it does a good job. There's a 30 day free trial at www.ulead.com