Looking for right software

[stilon]

Recently I started to turn some of my home movies to DVD. Couple of years ago I bought a digital video camera and now I have a lot of movies that I want to make DVDs out of.

I have played with all kinds of software (can’t even remember any more which) but I have not found one that can do everything that I want.
I have been reading all kinds of posts in this forum and I start to think that there might not be all in one software that will do everything that I want.
I want to make really good looking home DVD movies to play back in stand alone DVD player.

Here is what my “requirements” are:

Capture video from digital video camera (as high quality as possible)

Edit
- split into smaller clips (not really necessary but easier to work with)
- edit scenes
- edit original audio within scenes – i.e. mute certain portion of audio, make certain portions lauder…
- add audio/music track to the movie
- edit audio/music track (i.e. adjust volume of track throughout the movie, overlap music clips…)
- add voice over track to the movie
- add transitions
- add special effects (mostly brightness and color adjustments…)

Author DVD
- make or import custom menus
- make or import custom buttons
- make or import custom backgrounds
- create chapters
- I really want to make high quality good looking menus

Burn to DVD disc –as high quality as possible

Here is an example of what I want to do:
I have about 1 hour of footage from our last vacation.
I would like to have 1 DVD with 3 options:
1. Just the raw footage of what is on the video camera
2. A movie that I created with music and so on.
3. The same movie as above with a voice track

So when I put a DVD into the player I would have three options as described above. Within those options I would like to have the options of selecting chapters.

I can create all the art work for the menus with Photoshop at the office. So that is not an issue.

So here is a question, is there all in one software that I could use? If not what would be your recommendation to achieve what I want to do?

Thanks for your help.

[dphirschler]

You can do most of what you want edit-wise using AVIsynth. For instance, in AVIsynth you can do the following:

Load several video sources, split them to clips (each with their own variable name) along with audio.

You can bring in several audio clips as well and split them into pieces as well. You can adjust the volume of each piece of the audio clip and possibly (with a clever script) ramp the volume up and down. See the "animate" command.

In the video, you can hard cut or soft dissolve from one clip to another.

You would have to use a product like EAC or Goldwave to record your own voice over track. Then you can bring it into AVIsynth as well.

Load your avs script into Virtual Dub for preview or feed it directly into TMPGenc for encoding.

Once encoded, you can use Ffmpeg to encode audio to AC3 and use DVDauthorGUI to author the DVD. Then IMG Tool Classic and DVD Decryptor to burn.

So not all in one, but definately cheap, and great quality too.

Darryl

[stilon]

Thanks

Looks like I will have to play with all this over next couple of day and see how it works out for me.

Cheers

[guns1inger]

Vegas and DVD Lab Pro.

Vegas can capture and split the video based on the original scene changes, edit video and audio, and has strong transitions and special effects.

DVD Lab Pro can use your photoshop files to create a menu, allows for multiple audio tracks, and can create chapters manually or automatically.

To be hanoest, none of these are particularly hard asks, and with the exception of multiple audio tracks, most packages can do any of this. I wonder how hard you actually looked.