1st DVD Project

[heyjjjaded]

I've got my Sony TRV 22 and am ready to make my 1st home-DVD with it. I have the firewire card & cable, but I am curious about software.

To capture, the choices that I have on my computer are ULead's free version that came with my firewire card, Windows Movie Maker, or Sonic My DVD. Any decent choices there?

To burn, I believe only Sonic MY DVD will burn to DVD on my computer, but how about the encoding? Should I capture as an AVI with one of the above programs and then let Sonic My DVD encode to MPEG2 and burn? Or is Sonic My DVD not up to this challenge? Should I download TMPGEnc & use this to encode to MPEG2 and then burn with Somnic My DVD? Any advice would be greatly appreciated ... thank you!

[Brpod]

Hi heyjjjaded

It's me again, not sure if you got my MP reply. Capture with MM2, ignore what some say here about it, if you capture to AVI its a data transfer and quality don't come into it. MyDVD (get the latest version) will import the AVI using the 'Get Movie' button and stick it on the screen for you, add more if required, choose style, animated menu buttons is cool, insert DVD and hit burn. Then leave the room, or house for a few hours. MyDVD encodes the AVI to Mpeg2 and takes it's time about it but it does have great results.

I suggest that you try a single short movie first and make sure that the media you burn to can be read in your standalone player. I have an old (4years+) sony which is very temperamental so recently got a $50 cheapy to piggy back the connectors to my amp. Have fun

TTFN

[AarontheRipper]

To be honest, it doesn't really matter what you use to transfer the DV .avi to you computer. You're not really capturing, just transferring data. I would avoid the built-in encoders in many of those progs and go with TMPGEnc to convert to mpeg2. Then use your authoring prog of choice (I prefer TMPGEnc DVD Author) to make the dvd compliant files and burn away. I've done a few camcorder movies on dvd with this method and although a bit more complicated than some, I think that the quality is superior to the other methods I've tried.

[victor010170]

Hi AarontheRipper

I see ur using tmpgenc to mpeg2 and use tpmgenc dvd author to burn. So do I but the quality I get is not as good as the hvs tape I see through tv. Want to share with me how you set up on tmpgenc to get hi qa. Thanks.

[AarontheRipper]

I try not to put more than an hour on one dvd so that I can use a CBR of about 8000. Use all the highest quality settings, even if it will slow you down.

[heyjjjaded]

Thanks everybody!

Brpod -
Regarding Movie Maker 2, I'm having trouble working with large video files. Is there a limit on the file size you can work with there? I can't figure out why I can split & combine video clips sometimes, but other times I can not (the combine option is frequently greyed out).

Regarding Sonic MyDVD, my version is 4.5 & I like the quality of the 1st DVD that it produced. If there's one thing that I'd like to change about it, it is that this DVD plays back with about a 2-second freeze at the end of every chapter. Each of my chapters are separate video files & the freeze at the end of each chapter happens every time. Does this occur with the version of MyDVD that you use? Any way around this? Transition effects?

Thanks again for all your help!