Do I need a hard drive?

[bfleming]

I am just starting to look for a dvd recorder - it looks like there are several very knowledgeable, very helpful people people on this forum who may be able to steer me the right direction.

My objective: To use a dvd recorder to make presentations to send to clients. I want to use video from my minidv camcorder, still pictures from my digital camera and occasional scanned images/charts/etc. I want to be able to add titles, give it some polish with fade in/fade out, etc. These presentations will generally be 15 to 30 minutes long - probably never longer than 40-45 minutes.

My question: Do I need a dvd recorder with integral hard drive to do this right? or can I do it on a PC then burn the finished product on a dvd with a basic dvd recorder? if I can do it on a PC, what is the best software for something like these presentations and how much hard drive space would a 30-40 minute "production" take?

Thanks in advance for any help I can get.

[donpedro]

Based on what youn will need I will recomend using PC in all process..... There is an plenty of tools that will help you to do what you need. I am not going to recomend any. It all depends on your budget.

[lechtin]

I agree that a PC is what you need here, and also that what to get will depend on your budget and also you level of comfort with PCs, peripherals and software. You mention a miniDV camcorder, so keep in mind that every hour of (mini)DV footage is 13GB once captured on your hard drive and you'll need to keep room to breathe. I'd go no less than 40GB.

First look for the software to do what you want, then get the computer to run it.

[ejai]

I agree you need a PC because the editing you are planning to do most likely can only be done well using raw footage such as DV. Remember mpeg video such as video produced by standalone recorders should be the final process.

You can cut the mpeg video but as far as text and other related video enhancements it is better done using DV video on a computer and finally compressing the video to mpeg1 or mpeg2 (DVD,SVCD or VCD).

[spiderman2k1]

The two with hard drive's are Panasonic and Pioneer. A lot of poeple are big fan's of Panasonic I just bought one at www.6ave.com there rpice's are the best around. But Panasonic DVD some time's do not work in all DVD player. From what I have read low end DVD players have problem's

[daamon]

Hi bfleming,

The following is as a guide, not a recommendation, hopefully to give you an idea as to what you can do yourself.

I capture from a DV camcorder, via firewire, to my harddrive (80Gb, partitioned 40/40) into multiple AVI files (holiday footage).

I then use Adobe Premiere (fairly pricey, but powerul - there are others, check out Tools: Advanced Video Editors & Basic Video Editors) to arrange the video (includes fades / transitions / effects etc.) and add audio as required.

I then encode the exported DV AVI into DVD compliant MPEG2 using TMPGEnc Plus (other encoders exist, again see Tools). I find this guide:

http://dvd-hq.info/Compression.html

...VERY useful for the settings in TMPGEnc.

I then use TMPGEnc DVD Author (again, others see Tools) to author then burn the VOB files to DVD.

From which, I'm very pleased with the quality of the results.

The above is a high level summary of an approach not THE approach. Also, as it's high level, there is a lot more details but the answers will be specific to your circumstances.

I hope that the above provides a rough set of steps and (types of) tools to use at each stage.

Good luck...