Home Video to DVD to AVI/MP2/MPG to Pinnacle Studio 9

[kobayashi.maru]

Greetings, I've reviewed many of your articles and forums, and have even tried out several tool sets. However, I'm not sure I have the optimum setup. I've transferred my old Hi8 (2 track stereo) home movies to DVD, using a stand alone Sony RDR-HX900.

I now want to rip from the DVD to my HD, and convert to a file that Pinnacle's Studio 9 can read (AVI, MP2, MPG) without losing too much quality.

The Pinnacle folks recommended http://www.topshareware.com/DVD-to-MPEG-download-733.htm.

I've also seen a recommendation of DVD-Decrypter / DVDDecrypter / DVD2AVI / VFAPICONV / VirtualDubMod, which is a lot of steps for a newbe - fewer would be better, but not at the cost of too much quality.

What would the collective wisdom of this forum suggest?

[tmh]

what do you plan to do in Pinnacle? What is the final goal?

[kobayashi.maru]

I would like to create compilations, highlight reals if you will, from all of the tapes I've recorded over the years. My son's birthdays for instance, or perhaps the "exciting" parts of all of the football / soccer / track games we've taped.

Nothing really fancy, just cutting out the slower spots and/or bad camera shots, adding a bed of background music, straightforward transitions, and probably some form of menu.

[tmh]

Well, if video quality is important to you, I don't think converting back to AVI then re-converting to mpeg2 (after adding transitions/cuts/etc.) is the way I'd go.

If you waned to do more creative editing,t hen capturing as DV-AVI in he first place, ediing the AVI (Pinnacle if you have it, I do) , THEN converting it to DVD compatable (mpeg2) would be what I'd do.

However, if you just want to take the DVD's you've done and cut parts, then just copy the disk to the HD and load the video files into TMPGenc DVD Author (TDA). TDA can cut parts out, put the clips in the order you want them and add the menu.

Many of the other programs you mentioned might work also.