Authoring a captured MPEG2 file and burning it in DVD format

[Darius1]

Hi there,

I'm totally lost now. I've been trying for a few weeks now to put my homemovie on a DVD. I think I do everything right at this moment but the endproduct is still not satisfactory!

My problem :
I have got a Sony DCR PC-330 digital camera and I film 16:9 pictures with it. When I capture this film in AVI format and then author and burn it on a DVD it is not displaying the right aspect ratio when I play it in my DVD player (it's shown in an aspect ratio somewhere between 16:9 and 4:3). The sound and picture in this case are totally synchrone with eachother.

To solve the aspect ratio problem I captured the film in MPEG2 format with nero vision 2 and then authored and burned it. Although it took several tries to capture it in MPEG2 format (a lot of times the programm just stopped capturing and started saving the 'buffered files') and there occurred some hickups in the picture the aspect ratio was perfect but my sound wasn't playing synchrone with my picture!
When I just play the captured (and not yet authored) MPEG2 file on my computer the sound and picture are totally synchrone.
I captured and burned the file in stereo sound.

My question(s):
- Is the file I captured allready corrupted and is this only showing after the authoring proces or is the authoring process (and thus the programm I'm using for this process) just not of very high quality?
- Is there something I should set in my programm (nero vision 2) or OS (win xp pro) to solve this or at least to tweak the system for optimum use?
- Any idea why 9 out of 10 times when I try to capture in MPEG2 format the programm stops at random times (i.e. after a few minutes but allso after half an hour) and starts backing up the buffered files thus actually quitting the capturing process?
- Is there a way to capture in AVI format and keeping an aspect ratio of 16:9?
- Will there be a quality difference in the end-product between capturing in AVI and burning on DVD and capturing in MPEG2 and buring on DVD?
- Which programm would you reccommend for good authoring and burning a MPEG2 file?

My system:
- OS win xp pro
- AMD Athlon 1 ghz
- 512 mb ram
- Fire wire card to link the camera to the computer
- 2 harddisks, the one I'm capturing to is the second disk and has no OS on it and is connected via a pci entrance and is 120 gb big. The partition i'm capturing to is 80 gb big and has about 50 gb of free space.
- The file system is NTFS
- I recently re-partitioned my system with partition magic 7 and changed my file system while keeping XP installed and running.

Many thanks from my girlfriend (who is getting crazy of all the time I'm spending with this and not with her) to the one who can help me out!

[davisond]

Is you original AVI keeping it's Aspect Raio?

[Darius1]

Nope. The AVI is losing the 16:9 apect ratio to something in between 16:9 and 4:3.
Furthermore I discovered that after capturing another tape that this new capture had perfectly synchronised sound and picture. Now I'm even more lost! What went wrong with the other tape......?