MiniDV to CDR in best quality.

[Matthew.King@axon.co.uk]

I want to move my MiniDV camcorder footage to my PC for minimal editting (if any) and burn to CDR in the best quality I can, to playback in my domestic DVD player.

The best I can do now is move MiniDV via USB to MPEG1 on the PC, burn as a VCD to CDR which does play back on my domestic DVD player.

To up the quality at minimum cost, I assume I will need move MiniDV via Firewire to MPEG2 on the PC and burn as a PAL SVCD via Nero.

I want to avoid the cost of buying a DVD recorable drive.
In line hardware encoding cards are too expensive.
Is the bandwidth of USB too limited to capture AVI or MPEG2 as good as Firwire can?
Is MPEG2 the best quality? Is MPEG2 what DVD uses for the actual information stream (i.e. not the menus etc)?
If I capture in AVI then convert to MPEG2 will quality be compromised?
Can MPEG2 vary in quality?
Is SVCD basically DVD quality but with shorter running time?

Many thanks,
Matt.

Sorry, I know I could probably dig out individual answers from previous conversations, but it could take ages.

[bugster]

You are right you need a firewire card. Use that to transfer the movie from your minidv tape to your PC. This is basically a copying process and no data is lost from original. It will be stored on your HD in avi format. Be warned though DV is quite large with 1 hour of video occupying approx 13Gig of disk space.

You can now edit this footage at your leisure. Once you have finished editing you should transcode it to either mpeg-1 VCD or mpeg-2 SVCD format, depending on what your standalone DVD player can handle. The transcoding can be done from within the editing program if it has a decent quality mpeg encoder or alternativley, save an avi and transcode using a seperate encoder such as Tmpgenc or CCE.

Read some of the guides at the left of the page for more details. There are also guides on how to author VCD or SVCD once you have your compliant mpeg after the encoding proccess is complete.

Hope this helps.