General questions about video capture & editing

[ricky]

Hi. I recently bought a new PC - Pentium 4 3.0 GHz with 200GB Hard disk. Other specs. are in my profile. Being new to the DVD game, was wondering if someone can answer the following questions:

* Transferring my home videos from my Sony digital video camera to the hard disk - does it make a difference whether I use USB cable, firewire cable (will have to buy this - but PC already has 2 x FireWire/IEEE 1394), or the more common cable (name escapes me) which has three output jacks for the PC (yellow, white & red). What differences, if any, are there between the three? Anything to do with analogue/digital and speed of data transfer?

* What constitutes a good firewire cable, or are they all the same? Also, approximate price if possible.

* As a trial, I have transferred some home videos to the hard disk using the three-jack cable mentioned above with Medion Power Cinema 2.5 (came with the PC). Before I burn this to DVD, I wanted to cut off some bits from the video, especially at the end of the video. Is this easily done? I have Nero but not sure if it is able to do this.

Thanks in advance folks.

[housepig]

if you transfer with a USB or Firewire cable, you are transferring the digital information from the tape to the computer, an exact copy. the only difference between the two is speed, Firewire is faster.

if you use component outputs (the red, white & yellow RCA cables) you are converting from the DV tape (digital) to the analog realm, and then re-digitizing your footage upon hitting the capture card. it's an unnecessary conversion, and the less conversions the better, generally.

if the Firewire cable works, it's good. unless you are working in a production environment, most any consumer-grade cable should be fine. I've always had good luck with Belkin brand cables.

for editing, if you are just cutting stuff out, or resequencing, Virtualdub is a great tool, and is freeware. If you want to do effects, complex titling, lots of transitions, fades, etc., I suggest Sony Vegas or it's little brother version, Screenblast. Adobe Premiere is also a good solution. I don't care for Ulead products, but they are also an option.

Personally, I don't use Nero for anything but burning discs. For authoring your dvd once your editing and encoding is done, I suggest DVD Lab - it's super-customizable, and has the most bang for the buck of any commercial app I've seen.

hope this helps.

[redwudz]

If your camera has Firewire output, definately use Firewire. A Firewire cable should be less than $20US. You can use the free DVIO or WinDV (My favorite as it has a preview window.) or Scenalyzer to transfer the DV file to your harddrive. Download the Panasonic DV codec and you can edit the file easily with Virtualdub. Then you encode with say, TMPGEnc encoder, then Author with say, TMPGEnc DVD Author and burn to DVD.

Firewire cables are basically the same. Keep them short and make sure both ends are compatable with your camcorder/computer. Firewire is a simple data transfer, nothing complicated. You can use Windows movie maker also, but the quality usually sucks. There is a DV forum here, and you might read some of the posts there, most problems should be covered.

EDIT: housepig, you beat me to it.

[ricky]

Thanks for your prompt response. Appreciate your comments.

[Josef K]

Transferring my home videos from my Sony digital video camera

Start digital, stay digital, use firewire.