Making Movies is More difficult than I thought

[Alextaylor]

Hi,
Well I'm going to start when I dug my Sony TRv18 out of the draw that no one goes to normally. when I came to putting it all together I found I wanted a program to start with, so I bought "Dazzle" I read all the instructions and it seemed very difficult to understand, in fact I could not get on with that as there was a card that needed to be fitted and my knowledge was not what you would call great on fitting cards into a computer, so the TRV18 went back in the bottom draw for 2 or 3 years '

About a month ago I thought I would attempt to take a few more movies, which I did, then I thought I would look around for a program, which would turn my movies into a DVD, I looked around and saw "Magix Video/DVD 5".
It said on the write up it was a 3 click job and there would be a film made in a flash, now I didn't really believe that but it did sound simple.

After buying the program I thought here we go, well I managed to Capture the movies I had taken into the computer quite where it is I don't know, but one thing I do know is I have read the instructions from cover to cover and I just can't get going on it.
I would really welcome some help with this program, I really didn't think it was going to be that difficult, or shall I say I didn't think I was that dim. I would just add at this point I have Parkinson’s and that does slow down the old brain a bit, that’s not an excuse it’s a fact and I might add the reason why I’m trying to take a new hobby.
I'm sure if I could just get going on it I would pick it up, I have found even the "get Started" difficult to understand,
Magix support team are not very helpful, they just don't seem to want to know. So I'm stuck once again,but one way or the other I am determined to not put this project back in that bottom draw.

[guns1inger]

It would help if you filled in your computer specs, so we know what you are working with, but I will assume you are running XP.

First, the camera is a mini DV camera, so you should be capturing via firewire. I suspect that the card you didn't fit has the firewire ports on it, although most modern motherboards now have at least one port as well.

So step one is get the firewire card installed into your PC. Have someone do it if you are still unsure yourself, but installing a PCI card is pretty straight forward.

Step two is to transfer your video. For this you need 13 GB of hard disk space per hour of footage transferred, plus more space for the edited video and another few GB for the authored DVD. You also need a program to transfer the video. WinDV is small and reliable, but most editors can also transfer the video pretty reliably.

Once you have it transferred, you can edit it, encode it, author it and then burn the disc. How you do all of this depends a lot on how much editing you need to do, and what software you have available. I do know this Magix software, so I can't really give you specifics.

Other software you might consider is Ulead VideoStudio - great for beginner to intermediate, or the consumer packages from Sony and Adobe (Vegas Movie Studio and Premiere Elements respectively). If you don't need to do a lot of editing, you could even use Windows Movie Maker, which is installed as part of windows XP. Just make sure you export as DV AVI. After than you could use free software like FAVC to encode and author a basic DVD.

Another option that is very simple, if editing isn't required, is to go direct from the camera to a DVD recorder with firewire. Basically you get a realtime transfer and authoring processes with minimal hassle.