Burning Camcorder clips to DVD

[jasd]

I need help!!!!

My wife and I are expecting our first child and like most first time parents, we have invested in a digi camcorder to capture those never to forget moments.

I have now managed to get the recordings from the camcorder tape onto my laptop hard drive. What I wanted to do was to copy these recording onto discs so that we could start a library which could be viewed on the laptop and the home DVD player. That’s where the problem starts!!

I have purchased some Phillips DVD+RW discs, and when I go to burn the recording to the disc, it comes up with “Problem Copying” error. In the dialogue box it says “Windows encountered a problem when trying to copy this file”. There is no error code. The only choices are to either retry or cancel.

The format of the recording on my hard drive is Windows Media Player. The format of the DVD disc I am trying to copy to is RAW. However, the discs (I have tried others) all show as full??????? Is it that I need to format the disc? If so, how? I can’t find anything on my laptop that will allow me to do this.

I picked up a spare disc that was lying around the office and tried to burn the recording to this and this time it worked. The disc format is CDFS. However, the disc has nothing written on it so I can’t explain anything else about it. When I go to play the disc in my DVD player (not my laptop), it does not work!!! It comes up with “Disc Error” on my DVD player.

So in summary:

Do I need to format my Phillips DVD discs? Are they even the correct ones?
As and when I do manage to get the recordings onto my discs, how do I get them to work in my home DVD player?

I feel really stupid because no doubt the answer is going to be really simple, however, this is really beginning to frustrate me. Please help!!!!!

[edDV]

You have two choices, work with highly compressed wmv files for low quality playback, or work with full DV format quality and then encode that to a standard MPeg2 DVD.

In both cases, I recommend you save the MiniDV tape originals because you will want to access full quality in the future as your needs expand.

Windows Movie Maker can capture your DV input (connected IEEE-1394 aka firewire or I-Link) and convert to compressed wmv. wmv files can be viewed directly on the computer but require a special DVD player with wmv capability to play. These are expensive players and grandma and others would need to use a computer to view the baby movies. Not very practical.

Standard and recommended technique is to capture (data transfer) DV in full quality DV format (13.5GB per hour) to the computer. Then edit the material in DV format. The editted result can be backed up to a MiniDV tape for long term storage or in 20 minute segments to a data DVD.

It can also be converted into a playable standard DVD by encoding the edited DV movie to DVD MPeg2 and then authoring a DVD.

To do all this you need additional software. There are all-in-one suites that do a good job and include tutorials. And then there are hobbiest solutions that require different programs for each step of the process.

For beginner all-in-one's I'd recommend the following.

Sony Vegas Movie Studio + DVD
ULead Video Studio 9
Adobe Premiere Elements

All have free demos.