Burning from Sony D8 Camcorder to DVD

[technomoron]

I posted basically this same question a while back however I now have a completely different computer....here's my dilemma.....I'm a Police Officer and have a Sony D8 camcorder in my patrol car and want an easy and efficient way to take the video and burn it to dvd. The audio is generally more important than the video. I accumulate about an hour and a half of video on an average day therefore I can't spend six hours a night putting it on dvd (as i did last night just to see how long it took).

What are my options as far as formats? I had heard you can burn up to about 12 hours of video/audio to one dvd but in what format would that be if it is possible.

Also, I burned to a dvd a few days ago and I had thought I had read that you could then add more to a dvd at a later time but upon trying i couldn't (i realize there are dvd-rw's but i thought i had read you could continue adding to the unrecorded area on a regular dvd).

I appreciate all the responses last time, you guys really know what you're talking about. My computer knowledge is basic and I'm not interested in becoming a movie maker, just wanna explore the possibility of using the dvd burner if it can be more efficient than saving tons of tapes.

Thanks again

[technomoron]

Oh, and i forgot to add, will it be necessary to purchase different software? My options right now with the computer are the windows movie maker, 'click to dvd' software. Some have told me the pre-installed software is fine but others have suggested software such as Nero....thanks again

[Tommyknocker]

Hi Officer. If the video quality is not that important, you can load your video into Video Studio 7, and make one long DVD compliant MPEG file (up to about six or hours or so. Load this file into TMPGEnc's wizard and have it convert the bitrate down enough to have the MPEG file fit on one disk. Use Video Studio to actually burn the disk. Once you become a little more computer savvy, you can just use a bit rate calculator to tell what to set your bit rate at, etc.

What program did you use to burn your six hour DVD? Again I recoomend VS7. Capture it with DVD settings, and burn that way. I have never heard of rewriting a DVD-R, but you can always add to a file you already burned to a DVD, by merging the video to it, and burning it another disk. Hope this helps.

[technomoron]

I appreciate the response...it sounds like from what you're saying that I can't 'add' to a dvd then unless it's an rw....I musta heard wrong about that.

The program I used for the 6 hour movie quality dvd (ha ha) was 'click to dvd' that came with the computer. I did just find a setting on the same program for burning in an mpeg format so i might try that tonight.

[Tommyknocker]

Well, it looks to me like multi-session is for DVD-RWs only, but I cannot verify it.