Help Me! What do I use?

[oiscoot]

I am new to this whole DVD thing, so please bear with me! I have a ATI AIW 8500 vid card and a Firewire card. I am trying to figure out the best way to capture from my JVC miniDV recorder to the PC with the least amount of converting. My final result I would like to see: A program that can capture, edit, and burn to DVD. Does Tmpgenc DVD Author do this? Does the Ulead Movie Maker do this? What do I do to get the best results? Thanks in advance !

[tfrazier]

Hi,

I'm fairly new at this too but I've now cranked out about 10 family movies converted to DVD (maybe what you're doing too?) and have leared a few things I could share.

Ulead Movie Factory 2 can capture, author, convert, and burn. However, of those 4 things, it can only do one well (author). In all fairness, I have never tried to capture with it. It does not play nice with my DVD burner, and it's video converter only gives so-so results and is unable to make an accurate assesment of the size of the finished file. This is pretty important unless you want to wait 10hrs for a conversion process only to find it won't fit on a DVD evean though MF2 told you it would.

So why did I pay $61 for it? Because I love the way it authors, I love how easy the authoring is and the final result looks great to me.

Here's what I do:
Capture in Microsoft Movie Maker (free with my PC)
Convert with Tmpgenc
Author with MF2 to .iso
Burn .iso with NTI burn software

I would recommend you download the trial of Ulead Movie Factory 2. I did and that's what convinced me to buy it. You may find it does everything satisfactorily for you. I did a couple that way and then decided I would not let MF2 do any conversions of a movie over 60 minutes, because it was doing a poor job of any movie over that size.

That's my $.02 - hope it helps you...
T

[housepig]

if your camcorder is miniDV, it's already "captured" the material in a digital format - all you need is a firewire card to transfer that data over to your computer.

[macm]

Yes, as housepig said, you have already a digital video inside your miniDV camera. connect it to a firewire and transfer to PC.
to make a DVD, try TMPGEnc to encode it into MPEG-2, DVD compliant file. Take a look in the guides here, at DVDHelp. Also do basic authoring and burn with TMPGEnc DVD Author, it is pretty good, stable and gives very nice results.

[oiscoot]

So, what you are saying is use something like DVIO to copy the DV file from the camera to the HD and then TMPGEnc to encode it, then TMPGEnc DVD Author to edit and burn to DVD?: Hummmm...Sounds easy enough, but will any other codecs be required? It just seems too easy with Ulead, why dont other software companies (like TMPGEnc) do something like them?

[andkiich]

You got it. Just run through the steps that you outlined above and you should be good to go.

[oiscoot]

The only issue at this point, is that the JVC MiniDV Camcorder is not true DV I am thinking. I tried the DVIO, but it does not see any files let alone hardware. The camera actually uses those Mini DV tapes, so I am assuming this wont work. If I use the Windows Movie Maker to capture, what format should I be capturing as?