recorder dvd to avi

[rikit]

I hope this is the correct place for this question. I am going to copy all my 8mm analog tapes and dv tapes to dvd with my stand alone dvd recorder to preserve them. I am too lazy to get around editing all of them right now.
I want to be able to go back and edit them later. How do I do this and with what program to take them from dvd to avi?

[guns1inger]

Depending on the type of editing you need to do, you will be better off, in most cases, using an mpeg editor and not converting your video to avi at all. Unless you convert to either uncompressed, or lossless compression, you will incur some degree of quality loss.

If you edit needs are simple - cuts, a simple fade here and there, and not colour correction and effects work - look at the Womble mpeg tools or VideoRedo. You can edit the material that you have encoded with no quality change in most instances.

If quality is a concern, and you have more extreme editing needs, then get a firewire card and transfer dierctly to your PC and avoid the mpeg2 stage. Mpeg2 is a poor choice for editing.

[rikit]

Will TMPGenc dvd author work also? If taking it back to AVI I would choose lossless uncompressed for quality and I understand size would be quite large. I usally work with uncompressed AVI.