OK, stupid Newbie needs some help... :-(

[sigol]

Hi

There I was all excited. I seem to have all the tools but it's all just too much for my simple brain

I have a Sony PC-110E DV camera. I have recorded several videos using my firewire card I have successfully saved the films on my PC as AVI files.

Stats:
19.1 GB, 1:28:39 long,
video 584 Kbps, 25 fps, 720x576 (4:3), dvsd Sony Digital Video
Audio 1024 Kbps, 32000 Hz, 2 channel, PCM

I have purchased a Sony external DRU-510A DVD writer (+/- RW).

OK, so what's the **EASIEST**, ***MOST FOOLPROOF*** way to get the film on to a DVD?

The Sony writer ships with "Sonic MyDVD" which is surprisingly good for simple stuff. My problem is this: Sonic thinks that my movie won't fit on a blank 4.7 GB disk!

I need to shrink the video down (which I don't know how to do anyway) before Sonic would allow me to burn it.

I just want a nice simple way to do it. The other piece of s/w that ships with the writer is VERTIAS RecordNow DX which complains that the video is not in the correct format.

Is there not one simple program I can use to burn my movies to DVD without going through all the complicated process of conversions, extracting audio, splitting channels and all the complicated stuff?

Yours "out of pocket and depressed"

Sigol.

[twodogs]

you're getting the movie onto PC as AVI correctly.

however, you need to convert the AVI into DVD compliant MPEG2 format.
a tool such as tmpgenc is the go for that.

once in mpeg2 format, you can author the dvd with Sonic MyDVD and burn with Recordnow dx.
I'm not sure that either of these softwares will convert AVI to MPEG2.
More info on the convert link to the left.

[sigol]

thanks twodogs!

[bugster]

There is one problem with SOnic MyDvd (unless it has been changed recently) and helps to explain why it wont fit it all to one disk. MyDvd supports only PCM (uncompressed) audio. If you feed it a 4Gig mpeg with mp2 audio, it will uncompress the audio making the whole thing somewhere in the region of 6 Gig!

Solutions? You could encode using a much lower bitrate for video allowing it all to fit on one DVDr but quality will suffer. You could use a different authoring package that supports mp2 or Ac3 audio such as Dvd-Lab or Ulead DVD workshop.

One other problem I just spotted. The audio in your DV avi is 32Khz. DVD requires it to be 48Khz. It can be upsampled but the quality will suffer a bit. Your cam can be set to capture the audio as 48Khz (its called 16 bit audio in the menus IIRC (I have the PC100 DV cam)). So for future captures, use that if you intend to put it on DVD.