windows movie maker

[ray316]

l am a novice to all this movie making and would like a bit of help please. l have a toshiba multi-drive laptop with wm-maker pre-loaded when l bought it. l have a panasonic dv cam and a firewire lead to connect up to download from cam to laptop.From this l would like to put the home movie onto discs.Which discs can l use to do this.If anybody out there can go through all this in simple terms l would be very grateful. thanks

[redwudz]

Try this: WinDV to transfer the video to your computer. Type 2 DV. Install the Panasonic DV codec. From there you can edit and filter if necessary with VirtualdubMod. Then you encode to MPEG-2 with an encoder like TMPGEnc encoder. Then you author with a program like TMPGEnc DVD Author. I get the best results with that combination. VD and WinDV are freeware.

You can also encode DV with TheFilmMachine (Also freeware) and convert to DVD in one program after editing. Then burn with Nero.

Spend some time with the 'Guides' to the left. There are many ways to do what you want.

[edDV]

Got that Ray? redwuz' plan will get you an excellent DVD.
Avoid these issues with WMM
If you haven't updated to SP2, At least upgrade WMM to v2 so you can cap in DV format. When asked, select DV-AVI for capture. Transfer the camcorder video with or without "scene detection"
This gets your camcorder video transfered. Allow for 13.5 GB/hr. so I hope you have enough disk space.

Next you will edit if necessary, then save the result either back to the camcorder or to another DV-AVI file (also 13.5 GB/hr.)

Then you will need to encode MPeg2 and author the DVD in TMPGEnc or another DVD authoring program. These will also require blank disk space to work.

Bottom line: doing this on a laptop takes planning to deal with limited HDD space.

[Bic]

I have a question about Windows Movie Maker. When I click record a window pops up for specifics. In the lower left corner it tells you how much time is available on such a drive. How do I change that drive to the one I want to use?

[edDV]

Under Tools - Options - General

[Bic]

Thankyou.