One more dumb question.... Video Camera to DVD Burner ?

[scott015]

there may be a "guide" or something to read on here but I couldnt find it, so if there is, i wont waist your time, if you could just gimme a link

anyway, other than backing up all my dvds that I own, i would also like to make some dvds.... my wife and I have been married for 3 years and have a 2 year old son... anyway, we have been taking pictures and videoing him since he was born... so I thought it would be a neat surprise gift to make her a dvd with clips from all of our home videos and make snapshots from scanned pics.....

is this even possible? im sure it is, but is it possible without too much trouble? my video camera is not digital, i have tons of tapes... so how do I get them onto my computer to burn to a dvd ?

also, is there a way to make menus and be a "narrarator" saying certain stuff?

[ImaWeTodd]

Just the other day I made a DVD for my brother in law. It didn't take much sittin at the computer time (probably 20 minutes, reall). I do have a digital Cam, but if I didn't, I could have used my $30 capture card. See Capture Cam over on the left for how to do this.

Now if you want to make menus' and background music and all kinds of nice graphics, make a pot of coffee cause you're going to be at it for a while. Most of that should be covered under Author.

[scott015]

well what is a capture card? and which one would I need for what Im doing?

[dcsos]

This is a list of CAPTURE CARDS that capture to the correct format to burn to a DVD using an authoring program
https://www.videohelp.com/capturecards.php?CaptureCard=&mpeg1=1&mpeg2=1&Submit2=Search&Search=Search

[ImaWeTodd]

I have an Avermedia card. It used to have a $10 rebate, so it's now $40 at buy.com. There are verious kinds of cards. With some you can even capture in mpeg2. If you have not done encoding, this might be an option. Do some research. I'm not sure how easy you want it, or how much control you want. My process is:

1) Capture with a Bt8xx type card. Many manufactures, good drivers available, much support. I use VirtualVcr to capture (which is much better than provided sw), using high quality mjpeg compression.
2) I then chop up and clean up the capture using virtual dub.
3) I encode using mainconcept and author the dvd with maestro
4) I burn with nero

I made the dvd for my BInLaw by 'capturing' via firewire using dvio (i think), because this is a way to go from my cam to the pc. After that point, there is no difference.

Hope this helps. There is alot of info on this site. Gettin it right takes time. But once you've got it, it's fairly fast.

[ImaWeTodd]

By the Way.

When my son was 2 (he's now 3 1/2) I wanted to make an SVCD (didn't have a dvd burner then) from my home clips with menu's and music. The whole deal.

It took me forever ( I did make my xmas deadline). I could do it all much faster today.

So be forwarned. If this one shot item is your only reason for doing this, you can probably get some expensive software/hardware that helps a lot, or find a commercial place that will do it for you.

I encourage you to go the do it yourself route, but get that IOU ready if you are short on time.

[ktnwin]

There are a few options:
1) if you need it in a short time, then get a friend who has done this stuff over and over to do it for you. Don't forget to bring an apple pie over.
2) if you want to edit the video to add nice things to it then this will take sometimes. The best way (for analog camcorder) is to buy a analog to DV box and a Firewire card for capturing, it's usually bullet proof. Analog capture cards tend to have all kind of problems (dropped frames, lip sync, etc...). You can save money by trying an analog capture card. For example the AverDVD capture card with neoDVD software sells for 40$ at CompUSA. With this alone and a PC (> 1.2 GHz recommended), you should be able to make DVD in no times (given that you buy a DVD burner too). This only gives you a head start, there are more stuff to learn down the road for fancy menus, etc...
3) if you do not want to edit video, then the fastest (and probably the cheapest) is to buy a standalone DVD recorder. It's like a VCR but it records on blank DVD disc instead.

[scott015]

well im not really sure what exactly it is I want to do... just thought it would be neat to kinda make a movie.... i am sure people do this all the time, so what are some things people do? i figure there to be a menu and then you can either go to "still pictures" then have other places you can go and watch actual clips from my home videos.... but dont really know how to make it "nice".... do people usually just sort them by "birthdays" and "christmas" or just kinda do what??? i dont really know what I want... just know I want to do something.....

[Vejita-sama]

Here's an outline/intro of how the whole process works.

I. Transfer media from source to your computer

For the pictures you have to scan them. Which is easy enough. Once you have them scanned (normally in tif or jpg format) pretty much any program can work with them.

For the video tapes, which I assume for VHS, you need to capture them to the HD. There are lot of capture cards out there. For a total newbie that doesn't want things to get to hard the BT8xx cards are a good choice. The AverDVD EZMaker is $50 at CompUSA (and less online). It also comes with the neoDVD standard software.

neoDVD will allow you to capture directly to MPEG2. And while the quaility is not as good as capturing uncompressed, then encoding, for a VHS source it's 'more than good enough IMHO.'

II. Encoding and pre-paring the files

If you captured to MPEG2 you're done. If not you now need to encode your captued files to MPEG2. Popular programs include: TMPGenc, CCE, Ulead, and Main Concept.

If you want to add special effects or transitions to your videos it's best to capture uncompressed, edit as necessary and then encode. Ulead, Adobe Premiere, Vegas Video, etc. are good choices.

You will also need to generate any menus you might want. If all you want are still menus you make them in about 5secs with the nicer authoring programs (eg. Ulead, DVD Lab, DVD Menu studio, etc). If you want motion menus or other cool effects it gets more involved. In the end you menus are nothing more than regular MPEG files (still or motion) with a subpicture (a overlay picture) that defines the buttons.

You can also create you narration audio stream now. Just use a mic and any recording program. Most will save as wav (aka PCM). Which is fine. However wav files are uncompress and rather large. So you might want to conver them into ac3 files with a program like BeSweet GUI (see http://www.doom9.org under the Guides | Audio).

III. Authoring

Once you have all your pieces together: video, audio, menus, narration audio track, etc. you are ready to author. This is where you import all your streams and asign the menu buttons, set the chapter points, what the next/prev video are, etc. etc. This is also where you would place you audio tracks (including narration track).

You can make the narration a seperate audio track, or like a commentary track where you are speaking loud and the regular audio is much softer (again you can do this with a program like Cool Edit prior to authoring).

There are a lot of good authoring programs out there (I personally use Nero). But DVD Lab might be a good choice for you. To be honest, I'm not sure which program support authoring multiple audio streams (Maestro does and I believe DVD Lab does too).

IV Burning

Oddly enough not always easy But compared to the above no big deal