Capture PC burn for mac

[TripScott]

I have a friend who would like me to capture his hi8 video for him and put it on a DVD as video files for his Mac. He wants to edit the files himself on his Mac but doesn't have the capibility to capture the video.

I cannot find any information on the best way to do this.
1. What should I capture the file as (mpg2, mpg4, avi)?
2. What format should I burn it as (mpg2, mpg4, avi)?
3. What quality should I burn at?

This is a 2 hour video. I am not a Mac user and know very little about how to get these files to him. I have Vegas 8, Pinnacle Studio 11 and Nero.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Baldrick]

DV would be best but it's way too big, 13GB/hour. You must choose something with better compression if you want it on one dvd but most such formats are not supported directly in most mac editors. I would probably use mpeg2 or mpeg4 and then he can use quicktime pro or mpeg streamclip to reconvert to a more edit-friendly format like dv.

What editor will he use on Mac? iMovie? Final Cut?

[redwudz]

The Mac should support the same formats as your PC. It depends somewhat on how he plans to edit the files and how big you want them to be and what editing programs he has. High bitrate MPEG-2 would be one choice. Or bigger, but better is DV AVI format. DV is about 13GB an hour, so you are probably left with MPEG-2.

One hour of video per DVD disc should give you good quality. I would leave it in MPEG-2 format, not convert to DVD. Use about 9500 - 9800Kbps bitrate for the MPEG-2 encode. You could leave the audio in PCM or WAV format, but you might have to put a bit less video on each DVD disc as it takes quite a bit of space. But it would be easier to edit with and he can convert it to the audio format he wants.