Can someone guide me twards some decnet software?

[spankey]

I just bought a Sony Digital8 TRV140 camcorder. I do NOT have a capture card, but the camcorder supports USB conection.

I know that firewire is much better but I am on a tight buget to go out a buy all kind of extras for the camcorder or pc.

My pc is a HP/1.3 Celeron/512 megs RAM/ ATI 32 Radeon

I want to be able to capture the movies I tape then convert them to VCD. I have the VCD making down its the capturing and editing of the camcorder that I do not..

Sony included a software called PIXELA IMAGE MIXER 1.0

This software seems dificult to understand and use.

Can anyone offer me any other types of software that I can download and try to get my idea of whats good or bad?

Also is there anyway to edit the video mpeg to clear it up. For digital it seems grainy and wavey looking? When I play the video back on the tv its clear but when I use the windows media player and play the mpeg its blocky and grainy?

Thanks and I appreciate any time from all of you..

Spankey

[tjclement]

I have tried all different DVD software titles, and found best one for all around DVD capture/authoring/burning is DVD Complete by Dazzle. I have no idea if there is a demo version. It is simple to use, has every option possible, and gives you different user levels from quick to a full blown hollywood style. The quality is awesome, and the menus it produces are the best i have found. It even includes several templates, or you can build your own. As for the grainyness, if you are down converting to VCD, you have to expect quite alot of loss in quality since you are going from 720x480 to 320x252. There may be a problem with the compression software you are using, as many are not acceptable. I have burned DVD, SVCD, and VCD, and as far as quality goes, the DVD and SVCD are superior to VCD. If you own a DVD, then make sure your player will support SVCD, and do all your videos in it. I am using a Sony TVR720, and have only a firewire connection. One of the most fantastic things about these cameras is that you can use it to capture ANY source. I use it to capture music video's on my digital cable, and the result is awesome.

[fahfooh]

I've got the Sony TRV140 also, with Pixela and the MPEGs it encodes are huge... I burned them to CD with Nero Burning Rom, which reduces the size, but the result is extremely disappointing. I was really hoping to put all of our home movies on CD-R... I knew enough to expect some loss in quality, but this is just stupid.

I download video clips from Kazaa all the time, burn them to CD-R with Nero and they play in my DVD player beautifully. How do they manage to produce such crisp movies? Is it because they're copying from DVDs and not tape?

Any help would be appreciated. I've wasted countless hours and several CD-Rs trying to perfect this... there just doesn't seem to be enough options in the Pixela software. Thanks in advance.

/edit: I forgot to mention I am using firewire for capturing.

[Craig Tucker]

the best way to capture from a digital camcorder is firewire, cards can be got for as little as £25

[cassey]

I also have the TRV140 by sony. I dont use the software the camera came with. You can try going through a vcr then into a tv capture card. I have had pretty good results with it ( I'm sure its not the best way but..)
Wintv go + Vdub + Tmpge + VCDeasy