DV to CD-R

[cheng917]

Hi!
I'm kinda new to this. I want to transfer some clips of the video I took of my baby in my Canon miniDV to a CDR in my PC. I have read that I need firewire? How will I know if my computer has firewire? And also, can someone help me with the steps on achieving this . Thanks.

[daamon]

Hi cheng917,

There's a number of ways to identify firewire:

1. Do a search on your favourite hardware suppliers site and find out what a firewire card looks like, especially the ports.

Look on your PC (most probably the back) for such a port or ports. They usually come in threes on one PCI card.

2. Look in the "Device Manager" for a "1394" item... That's a sign that you have firewire.


If you don't have one, they're pretty inexpensive and you don't need a really expensive one - in this case, cheap should work OK.

You'll also need a firewire cable. Make sure you get the right one, as there are connections with different numbers of pins. Luckily, different connections are different shapes - you can go by that if you're not sure of how many pins you need.

The way to decide is to look on your cam (probably a small connection) and the firewire card (probably a large rectangular connection, with corners at one end "cut off").

Use WinDV (free) to capture the footage from your cam to DV AVI Type 2.

Once you've got your AVI, you'll need to encode it to MPEG1 so that you can make a VCD (Video CD). You can use a tool called TMPGEnc that's free for encoding to MPEG1.

Once you've got your MPEG1, you need to create the VCD using something like VCDEasy (free) - there are other tools.

You're best doing loads of reading in the guides and looking for answers to questions in the forums, as what you want to do has been done sooooo many times that the answers will beout there.

I hope that ansers your (inital) questions and points you in the right direction.

Welcome to the site and the forums. Goos luck.

[cheng917]

Thanks. I'll try those things.