Steps To Take....?

[pbmc59]

Hello,
I'm trying to get two hours of D8 onto one DVD. There are many helpful How To Guides here but I'm getting lost in the overall outline.
What are the basic steps to take?
1. Capture: with what? I have Window Movie Maker and Roxio Videowave that came with the PC.
2. Encode: I have TMPGenc. Do I just encode the audio? And if so, what do I do with the audio after that?
3. Author: From past tries, when I pull the encoded file to author, the file grows, evidently from re-encoding the audio, making it too big to fit on a dvd.
4. Burn: I'd love to get to this point.
I have Virtualdub and Beesweet, g-spot...all the right things but no idea what to do with them.
Possibly a Newbie explanation of what happens on each step would help.
Please help if you think it's possible!
Thank you for your time...

[FOO]

I assume you have a camcorder with a firewire connections.
1. You need to transfer the video to the computer as a DV
video file. I think MovieMaker might do it , but DVIO is free and
certainly will.

2. Encode the DV AVI with TMPgenc to a DVD compliant MPEG2 file.
You have to decide on bitrate depending on how long the video is.
There are calculators for that. This gets you a System MPEG2
file with MP2 audio. If you insist on AC3 you have to find an audio encoder (besweet) and do audio separately.
4000Kb/s is a good starting birate for 2 hours

3. Don't use Sonic MyDVD . Get MF2, TMPG DVD author , or DVD lab

4. Burn . some of the authoring programs will do that but I do it
separately so I can check the compiled DVD first

[pbmc59]

Thanks Foo.
I left out that I have a firewire/D8 camcorder setup..sorry
I've gotten through this before using generic setups and the slide bar in TMPGenc which regulates the size of the file I want. It's just when I go to Author, the program says it won't fit, even only one of the hours won't fit. So, if I do encode the audio along with the video, is there authoring software that won't re-encode the audio and inflate the file size?
I'm simply trying to get two one hour D8 tapes onto one DVD. I'm not a resolution fanatic (yet), I have alot of one hour D8 tapes and don't want to copy one for one onto DVD, two to one is cheaper! I can fine tune ( with the help of the experts here ) my DVDing after I get some basic DVDs burned.
I need to stress...THANKS FOR YOUR TIME!

[FOO]

What do you use to Author ? If it's MyDVD it makes huge Audio
MyDVD sucks.
Get a demo of one of the above - free for a month
None of them diddle the audio

If your MPEG2 files are around 2GB, they will both fit