converting video from camcorder and avi from camera to dvd

[slim]

sorry, complete newbie to all of this,
first off, i have a sony pc101 camcorder bought 2 years ago. Using the sony program or pinnacle studi program found on my desktop, i captured the video to mpeg format and that's all i know how to do. Truthfully, the mpeg qualities look pretty bad. Don't know if it's just the software. And i wanted to learn how to convert to dvd because my friend will be handing down a dvd burner. Also, i want to learn how to convert avi's from digital camera to dvd. I've had my friend do this for me and for some reason the dvd from avi's look a lot better than those from the comcorder. I thought video from camcorders should look a lot better. Also, wanted to get an idea how much harddrive space i should have to do these tasks. Lastly, i would be willing to buy software if it's easier than downloading freeware that are less intuitive. Thanks for any input on where to start

[Rivers]

Ok, its better to capture the footage from your camera in AVI format to your hardrive and convert it to dvd friendly MPEG after you've edited it. If you are not confident of your skills use either Pinnacle studio or Ulead videostudio. Either will do most of what you want without you busting a gut! If you want to edit hour or more projects you will need a big hard drive, consider an external 160gb or more. Footage on dvds I've made look as good as the original AVI tape. Hope that helps........ By the way, is your video camera digital or analogue?

[redwudz]

If you are talking about DV from a camera, the way I do it is use WinDV through a Firewire card to the hard drive. DV is about 13GB/hour.

I edit with the free VirtualDub Mod, then frameserve to TMPGEnc encoder and author with TMPGEnc DVD Author. Frameserving saves disk space, otherwise you will need another 13GB/hour for the edited video.

The MPEG-2 encoded video will take another 4-5GB. You can see it's easy to burn up 30GB hard drive space for an hour of video. Figure double that for odds and ends and you have 60G. You will definitely need a lot of hard drive space.

There are plenty of other ways to do DV > DVD, especially with the editing. I like the TMPGEnc combination because it's fairly easy to use, good quality and relatively inexpensive. VD is a pretty simple editor with a lot of filters and options. It likes Type-2 DV, as does TMPGEnc.

[daamon]

Hi slim,

Welcome to the site and the forums. These two posts of mine may well be of interest. Have a read, follow the links and see how you get on.

Any questions, post in this thread and I'll see it and try to help.

www.dvdrhelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=809541#809541

www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=1107545#1107545