Turning home movies into DVD

[JonnyOneNut]

I have a Sony Mini-DV camcorder and a shitload of tapes. I want to turn my tapes into DVD's. I have a firewire card and a dvd burner so i have the hardware. The question is what file format should i save it in?? I want to preserve the quality as much as possible when its on the dvd. Any help with this would be greatly appreciated.

jon

[Vejita-sama]

Do a forum search as this as been asked/answered and debated a lot. The general feeling is that for best quaility you should capture in the highest resolution and bitrate your PC supports, ideally in an uncompressed format. Edit as necessary, then encode with a code software encoder (CCE, TMPGenc, Main Concept), and author.

However, for VHS tapes, the quaility of the source is only so-so to start with. So I personally find it easier (time wise) to just capture to MPEG2, author and burn. This works well if you don't need/want to edit anything. Editing MPEG files is a huge pain in the a&&, so if you plan to add transitions, effects, etc. Capture as DV/avi.

It's a personal choice. For me VHS quaility is so poor that capturing to MPEG2 is 'just easier.' But you can get slightly better quaility (and edit the video much easier) if you capture to a lostless codec, then encode.

[Machine514]

How do you capture straight to MPEG2?

-Machine

[Vejita-sama]

I use the neoDVD Standard software. But there are a lot of programs that can do this. Check the capture guides to the left.

What I normally do for VHS is capture to MPEG2, demux with TMPGenc, then author with Maestro (maybe make a cheap/little menu first).

If I want to edit a bunch of clips together or something, I capture with VDub using the huffy codec. Edit with Ulead, output to avi, encode with CCE, then author with maestro.

[Machine514]

Thanks!

-Machine