Newbie questions that cover quite a few bases

[UltimateNinja]

Hey everyone,

So I've spent a few days sifting through the forums trying to decide what forum to post this in, and to see if anyone else posted similar questions. It doesn't appear so, and so I figured I'd just post it here and hope for the best.

Okay, so I'm extremely new to capturing/cutting/converting/authoring...pretty much everything regarding the topics that this site covers. Using LordSmurf's excellent tutorials for All-in-Wonder capture settings, I've got that aspect pretty down pat. What I'm trying to do is this: I want to be able to capture sporting events (Football and basketball games mostly) and fit them on one DVD. Using pretty custom settings, I've captured a test football game onto my hard drive in MPEG-1 format, and everything looks pretty good and ready to go. The question is: What's next? What is the best way to edit out commercials? Am I going to need to capture these games in .avi format, in order that they may be edited in Premiere (The suite I'm most familiar with)? Is there any easier way to do it that I'm just not finding on the forums, and is general knowledge or something? Once in Premiere, where can I download new export codecs? Or is there a tutorial somewhere for exporting the files with Premiere? Because the only ones that I have (or that I can find) result in a MASSIVE .avi file. What's the best form of media to burn onto, for playing in regular DVD players? My new drive can handle all the formats (RW, +R, -R).

I really appreciate the help guys. Thanks in advance.

The Ultimate Ninja

[hiflyact]

My experience has been not to capture directly to MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 for that matter. The problem is when you go to edit out the commercials or portions you don't want, you'll end up with audio/video sync problems. It's always best to capture to avi, then edit then save and/or frameserve to an encoder.

I use VirtualDub to edit out commercials. Works wonderfully. Load the captured avi file and move the sliders where you want the cut-in and then move the other to where you want to cut-out and then hit the delete key and bam, that section of commercials are history.


What's also nice about Vdub is that after you have edited the file you can save the processing settings to a file, that way you can encode it at a later time by just loading up the saved settings. Cool feature.

I don't know a lot about Premiere, so I can't help you there, sorry. Hopefully I've been of some help to you.

[UltimateNinja]

Huge help. Thanks so much for the info!