Will Vegas Movie Studio 9 do it?

[ccm]

Hi,
I am a complete novice who would like to accomplish the following:
Capture digital video from my Sony DCR-HC40 mini dv tape camcorder
Perform minor editing. Mostly removal of unwanted scenes
Burn the movie onto a dvd that will play on our television and on a PC
Not pull my hair out trying to learn the software
I don't know what format my dv tapes are and I don't know what format I need when burning to the dvd.

My question is...will Vegas Movie Studio 9 accomplish these tasks for me?

Do you know of another "all in one" software suite that will do it better?

Thanks for taking time to reply.

[redwudz]

DV camcorders transfer the contents of the tape to the computer over a FireWire (1394) link most times, so you need a FireWire card and cable. It's just a simple file transfer in real-time, IE, the length of the video on the tape. It will be in DV-AVI format. But the framerate and frame size is the same as a DVD, so easy to convert. DV is very easy to edit, probably one of the best formats for editing.

For the DVD specification, format and structure, look to the upper left on this page for 'WHAT IS' DVD.

Vegas would probably work fine for you. It has a trialware version, so you can try it out and see if it suits you.

If you only have the one hard drive, you might consider adding a second HDD. DV uses about 13GB/hour of HDD space and you want to figure about three times that for editing and encoding.

[minidv2dvd]

it will, and it's not too hard to learn. the format the tapes are in is called DVavi.

the vegas studio family is very stable, does what is required, and is moderate in cost. another would be adobe premiere elements, but i think it's a bit harder to learn. there are others like cyberlink powerdirector 8, pinnacle studio, ulead videostudio, etc., that claim fancier effects and faster speed, but in my experience crash a lot.


why don't you try a couple out and see which you prefer? most have free downloadable trial software.