basic editing & burning

[enutz]

Just had a new baby & got a video camera, I wanted to make some DVD's. I have both Windows Movie Maker & Adobe Premiere(I know Premiere is way better but Its a little over kill for what I'm doing) I made a DVD but the picture quality is poor. I tried to import as a AVI file but both editing programs would freeze up & the file was too big for a dvd anyway. Whats the best & easiest way to get good picture quality? I'd like to add some basic menus(freeware ideas?) I have a program that converts any file to anything & I have DVDshrink. Thanks

[dnix71]

There isn't much 'free' but DVDAuthorGui might be worth a look. You shouldn't be recoding or shrinking if you don't have to. The quality will suffer.

I have a dvr that makes mp4 video with mp3 audio, so I'm forced to recode the audio to mp4, but that's trivial.

You should save the original unedited camera dv file as is to cd or dvd discs for safekeeping.

[guns1inger]

GUIForDVDAuthor or DVD Styler might be worth a look in the free area, but neither will make any difference to your image quality.

Vegas Movie Studio, Premiere Elements, or even Ulead Video Studio are all aimed at about the level you are working at. They are all pretty stable, have good editing capabilities, and will author at some level for DVD.

The secret to getting a good image is to learn how to configure your encoder correctly, and not try to squeeze too much on a single disc. Your average home grown DV film clip is generally hand-held, and shot under less than optimal lighting. This leads to a lot of camera movement, and a lot of noise. Encoders hate both of these elements. For this type of material it is best, for quality, to keep the running time to 60 minutes or so, and no more. For viewer sanity, I would suggest 20 minutes is pretty good.

[redwudz]

I'll assume DV format from a video camcorder. Once you have it in the computer, you probably need to edit. WMM will work, but you need to output as DV format to preserve quality. Then you encode that to MPEG-2 for a DVD. Generally, you should be able to get one hour of good video onto a DVD. TMPGEnc is one payware encoder that's easy to use. There are some freeware ones, HC and QuEnc are a couple. From there, you need to author to the DVD format. TMPGEnc DVD Author is a easy to use payware program. DVD Authorgui or GUI for dvdauthor are two freeware choices. ImgBurn is one of the best freeware DVD burning programs out there.

I use WinDV to transfer the DV to the computer, then for editing, I use VirtualDub Mod and the Panasonic DV Codec. VDM is a good AVI editor. Lots of filters and options available. From there, I output to a MPEG encoder, then author and burn.

DV is generally good quality. If you have low quality in your DVD, then the quality loss is generally in the encode to MPEG-2. Best quality takes some effort to learn the programs and how they work.

But for a quick and easy conversion from DV, I use ConvertXToDVD.

You may have realized there is a lot more to all this. But we can answer most of your questions. But you also have to learn some on your own.

And welcome to our forums.

[themarina]

Wow. Just joined the forums and the very first post I head to appears to be the one I need.

Thanks guys!

[enutz]

Thanks everyone for the help.