A couple of quests which require your contribution to be resolved

[Canon GL-2 Guy]

Quality is very important to me and my goal is to obtain the best possible results without spending a lot of money as I'm on a budget.I'm using a couple of Canon GL-2's and mini-dv.I have an old version of Adobe Premiere Pro 6.5.Of course when you export the timeline using Adobe Media Encoder (updated to version 1.2,not 1.3) you get a seperate MPEG-2 file and a wav file.It does a reasonable job of encoding but not the greatest and when played back on my computer looks fine.So far so good.Now for the real challenge.A couple of months ago I purchased a all-in-one capture,edit,DVD authoring and burn program from U Lead called Movie Factory 5 for just over $50.Unfortunately the rendered files to dvd are poor as the movie looks washed out, noticebly less vibrant and also (unexplainably) suffers significant loss both in the areas of color,sharpness and resolution.Unhappy with that and so the search continues.If any of you are familiar with the program,I ticked off the box where it doesn't further compress MPEG compliant files before burning the dvd.I also tried a borrowed version of U Lead DVD Workshop and couldn't get it to work successfully on my computer as it wouldn't include the audio for some odd reason!Please,I need your help,expertise, suggestions and reccomendations in order to best put this what has thus far been a frustrating experience behind me.What are the best freeware/low cost/fairly easy to use programs will do the trick?preferably ones with tutorials or guides.

1)Combine the audio (wav) and video (MPEG-2) into what I've been told is a program/"steaming file" which can be handled by a server.No dvd authoring or dvd menu is required.Who knows,maybe if I have a combined DVD compliant AV file,DVD Workshop will accept it.

2)Need a straight forward program which will take the files as they are,not compress them even further (and potentially take even more quality away) and simpy burn the video and its accompanying soundtrack to DVD.

There are many apps here at this site,and I don't want to guess which one(s) to choose from.
I would really appreciate it if someone would be kind enough to list the steps I need to do in order to accomplish both of the above.

Looking forward to your replies!

Thanks,
Bruce

[guns1inger]

I am struggling to reconcile this idea that you can maintain quality and spend no money doing it. That you have a GL2 for shooting (albeit with a couple of mini-DV cams) and would then use a $50 home editing programme to produce output.

If you are truely serious, money will have to be spent. It doesn't have to be a lot, but $100 wont do it.

Addressing your specific questions

1) What are you trying to do ? By streaming, do you mean across the web ? If so, you need to re-encode your video and audio to a more web friendly format. Mpeg2 is not designed for streaming, especially with a full blown PCM audio track. Please be clearer in describing exactly what you are trying to achieve.

2) GuiforDVDAuthor (or DVDauthorgui) is about the only free authoring tool that will take your video and audio, and create a DVD structure. This can be burned with imgburn2. This is all free, and will do enough for what you are asking. If your needs are greater than what these can provide, you should seriously look at DVD Workshop 2 as your authoring tool.

[redwudz]

Canon GL-2 Guy, one post on the same subject is enough. The other has been deleted. If you want a post moved to a different forum, PM a Mod.

And welcome to our forums.