Setting up to Make DVD with VHS8 Tapes - Needing Advice

[rcpeters]

Just got a Pac Digital CDR-R drive and after several days of frustration, I produced a 10 minute movie with title, transistions, original sound track supplemented with WAV background music. Have not burned the DVD yet; waiting to complete about 1/2 hour show made from edited clips from 8 years of camcorder travelogues.

With the CDR drive came a CD with trial software. Each has a different problem. So now I am reading through the material on this great Web site and downloading shareware capture, AVI editors, joiners and converter software. I have NEODVD for converting AVI to VOB and that seems to work fine and will probably do fine for burning the DVD-R.

As one poster recently claimed, WinProducer looks like a do it all product and I have the trial version 1.0. However, this version aborts now and then, mouse use for selecting output range is touchy, not very easy to edit out segments (I find it better to do that with other software and then import joined together clips) AND it writes their name on my screens! AND costs too much to buy.

Most of the AVI capture/edit programs I have downloaded and tried either want clips to be timed (as opposed to start and stop) and usually produce error message or abort or even hang my computer. It seems they have some problems with my AITECH Wavewatch TV card and even though I have the only driver available for Win2000, my remote for capture on and off is gone now. Maybe I will have to get a new capture card.

Any advice on what to try next will be appreciated.

P4 2.4 GHZ, 80 gb, 256 mb RAM, Asylum AGP, NVdia FX5200 Video, SB Live.

[yamato72]

Yikes where to start...

Are you happy with your capture program? You didn't say what you had so I assume it came with your TV card.

Anyway, start simple. My suggestion: Capture your video, edit out the junk, and clean up the video with VDub. If you want some transitions and titles, download a trial version of ULead Video Studio. Once you've created your masterpiece download TMPGEnc and encode to DVD-compliant mpeg2. Then download DVDLab and use it to author your DVD. Use a rewriteable DVD and do some tests. I cap from Hi8 with a DV capture card, clean up the video with VDub, edit with Vegas, encode with TMPGEnc, and author with DVDLab. I spent 2 MONTHS trying different filtering and encoding settings till I got it "right" and the end result looks great.

If you like this method, buy the full versions of the above and you're out $50 for TMPGEnc, $80 for DVDLab, and $100 for UVS.

You will not get better results without spending some serious bucks on a prosumer package.

Visit this site religiously. The guides will tell you everything you need to know about each step.

[rcpeters]

Thanks Yamato72, your input helps and your experience doing what I am getting into confirms that this is no easy task. Let me provide you and others with a brief progress report as of today:

1. CAPTURE: The only software that is usable so far, is the capture funtion of the AITECH Wavewatcher TVPCI/Net98 software that came with the card. I have had it for at least a couple of years and since I went to Win2000, the captaure function is only available from a mouse click on the TV screen, no start-stop, just pre-set the time. Cumbersome, but that is what I used for the first 10 minute movie. The others I have tried are: CapturePro, CP Studio, Ferro, HS Video Capture, and Ulead Media Studio 2.5. These either capture video only, no start-stop, limited to default resolution, abort during capture or won't load and run at all. I even tried to use CODEC's other than the one that came with my TV card; they are not recognized.

2. AVI EDITORS: VeeDubp4 works o.k. most of the time, WinProducer 1.0works, but aborts sometimes and writes a water mark on my movies
I have also tried AVIEdit, AVIUtl, Fancy Movies, Video Edit Magic and Zweistein. Most of them run o.k. but either have unfriendly user interfaces, leave watermarks on the screens etc.

3. BURN: The drive I bought was new, obsolete and inexpensive. It will only write DVD-R and RAM. So I guess I will buy one RAM CD and use that to test the burn function.

4. NEXT STEPS: Try out the software Yamato72 is using.

Russ

[Renegade6]

yamato, good advice. I am going to give it a try myself