Newbie needs help please!

[BigNige]

Hi

I have bought my first digital video camera. I was told that by having a DVD writer on my PC together with a TV card I could capture the video recorded on the camera and burn the content as a video to DVD.

My PC also has 'Nero Smart' on it. The instructions with the camera do not mention anything about how to get the video onto the DVD.

There is a lead provided with the camera which has a USB connection. The lead goes into the camera in a hole next to the memory card (which seems to be for recording still photos on the camera) but when I start the PC I can't see any files or folders that contain the video that is on the camera...Am I using the wrong connecting lead?

The guy at the shop where I bought the camera told me that this was easy!

Can anyone help please? The camera is a Panasonic NVDS65B.

Thanks

Nigel

[gastorgrab]

Does your PC have a FireWire port?

You don't really need a TV card to transfer video from your MiniDV camera if you have a FireWire port, but if you have A/V out ports on the camera it is still possible. The video that you captured in your camera would have to be recaptured by your PC.

Using FireWire you can transfer the video data directly from your MiniDV camera to your PC without any quality loss.

The USB option likely requires drivers to transfer the video from your camera.

The FireWire option is basically "Plug-and-Play".
(meaning that as soon as you install the FireWire card, any device would typically work as soon as its plugged in)

[trickyman]

After u install your firewire card you'll need to import your video. Whatever software you're going to use for editing should be able to do this (i'd recommend using Windows Movie Maker 2 - it's a very basic and intutive, a good place to get started w/ video editing). Then export the finished video as a AVI, then convert it to MPEG-2 ( i've had great success using TMPGnc), and then finally author and burn the DVD using the resulting MPEG-2 file, u can use TMPGEnc DVD Author for this. There are some all-in-one tools where u can import edit and burn a DVD but these never yeild the highest quality results...

[BigNige]

Thanks for noth replies!

How do I know if my PC has a port for a firewire card?

How do I get hold of a card - and any idea how much they are please?

Thanks,

Nigel

[Tommyknocker]

Most fire wire cards start around $15.00. An fire wire port will look like one of these three ports: