Can I directly burn a DVD-R from my camcorder?

[debbyandbill]

I would like to know if it's possible to directly burn DVDs from my camcorder? I have a Sony DCR-HC21 that records on miniDV tapes. I don't want to do any editing. I just want to copy the contents of each tape to a DVD-R. My computer has a firewire port and so does the camcorder. The only information I could find about directly burning from tape to DVD was via the use of a Sony VAIO but I have a Dell. Does anyone out there have experience doing this? Thanks, Bill

[redwudz]

If you wanted to burn directly to DVD disc, it would be a slow burn, the same as the playback time of the DV tape. I don't know how well the buffers in the DVD burner would handle that. My understanding is you don't want to transfer it to your PC hard drive first, then burn the file to DVD?

And DV is about 13GB an hour. You would have to stop the tape and stick in another DVD if you ran out of disc space. Seems a bit more complicated than just transferring the whole DV to your PC hard drive, then splitting it into ~4.37GB chunks and burning those as data discs.

[guns1inger]

If you want to create a playable DVD then it is possible. I believe Corel VideoStudio can do this, and there are a few others. I cannot vouch for the quality of the result. It will do a single pass encode to mpeg-2 and works along the same lines a standalone DVD recorder (which is another option, of course). You still have to capture the DV from the camera, so the process will still be real-time plus whatever it takes to finalise the disc.

Would I do it this way ? Nope. DV, unless well lit and shot with a tripod, usually needs a lot more care. I would encode with at least a two-pass VBR encoding method and probably want to do some clean up before hand.

[debbyandbill]

Thanks for the help. It sounds like trying to do a direct burn from the camcorder might not be the way to go, especially if DV quality might be compromised. Thanks Again, Bill