Getting Ready to Make my First DVD...

[smaxdot]

Hi Folks,

Definitely a newbie to this forum, as well as the world of digital video in general...Excellent site with lots of useful information!

I'm getting ready to make my first DVD in a week or so as a present for my wife (basically a bunch of home movies of the kids).. I'm hoping I can share with you what I've done so far as well as what I'm planning on doing based on what I've read, and you can let me know if I'm on the right track (or not!).

Basically all I've done so far is capture ("transfer" would be more appropriate in this case, I believe) footage from my Digital8 tapes through my Sony TRV-530 to my PC. I used Windows Movie Maker 2 to do this, into the NTSC DV-AVI format. I have about 8 different AVI clips I've done like this.

In the future, should I capture with another program, or does Windows Movie Maker 2 do the job? I've heard that VirtualDub is pretty much king, but also heard it has poor firewire support, so I didn't even try it. Also, should I definitely stay away from Windows Movie Maker for a particular reason?

As I'm almost done with the capturing phase, I understand I need to enode these AVI's into MPEG-2 format. I do have a copy of TMPGEnc Plus and was thinking of following the guide at www.lordsmurf.com -- does this make sense? Also, I assume I don't have to combine these AVI's into a single MPG, correct? That is, I can simply convert one AVI at a time into a separate MPG, no? Regarding the audio, in some cases I've heard I should extract the audio out and then encode it separately -- should I do that in this case? The LordSmurf guide seems to indicate that I don't have to do this -- he's got "Audio + Video" selected under the "Stream Type" screenshot, which leads me to believe I can keep the audio right how it is. If this is the case, when *would* I have to extract and encode the audio separately?

Finally, I'm assuming once I have my MPG files I can just arrange and then burn...I have TMPGEnc DVD Author, and have heard it should suit my needs of making a basic DVD (with a few chapters). Is it difficult to set up the chapter points with this program? Any "gotchas" I should be aware of?

Thanks for your help, and I apologize if most of this has been covered before. I did in fact read many of the guides and articles, but didn't necessarily see answers to these specific questions.

Regards,

- Dave

[tito13kfm]

It sounds like you are well on your way to getting this project completed. Just be sure that you set field order to Field B (Bottom field first) (This is always, as far as I can tell, the order needed for a DV file)

Wouldn't bother extracting the audio and tackling it seperately unless it is explicately giving you trouble.

And no, I can't say that using windows movie maker to transfer the files would have been my choice, but there is nothing wrong with it. As long as you kept it as NTSC DV footage and not converted it to WMV or whatever that microsoft codec is.

Not at all difficult to setup chapter points in TMPG DVD Author. If you are feeling a little more daring. A program with more custimization of the menu's would be DVD-Lab . There is a 30 day trial version available for download, and the tutorial that is included in the help file is enough to at least get you going. I am very dissapointed in the options as far as making menu's in TMPG DVD Author, but it's ease of use is unsurpassed.

Some tips for your encoding. Make sure you set your motion search precision to motion estimate (fast) (read at lordsmurf.com for the reasoning behind this.) Also you may want to use CQ mode as I think it produces the best results in the shortest amount of time.

Good luck in getting this project done for the wife, i'm sure she'll enjoy it.

[sacajaweeda]

Do yourself a favor and save yourself the time and frustration and make a few short sample clips of your AVI source to test your encoding with. Nothing more annoying than waiting out a long encode job only to find you had a frame size, field order or bitrate setting wrong. Encode, author & burn them to RW disc and check them on your set top player. Once you've got something that looks good, then fire off the encoder and wait it out.

My $.02 to all noobs

[sacajaweeda]

edit: oops....double post.