Advice for Windows User

[stagescrew]

Greetings.

Last Christmas, my father (75+ retired from a career in Television) created a DVD with video and sound, captured from family slides. As far as I know, he used a home made shadow box, captured slides and audio on his video camera, and used some consumer grade DVD recorder. I was impressed. He complained however, that using the DVD recorder was clunky, any changes and edits required some laborious, flintstones like processes.

He now wants to move to the next step. He now has a G4 (OS 8xx-I think), has a DVD R/W (uninstalled as of yet). He is some what computer savvy, and I am looking to steer him in the right direction as far as software and hardware is concerned. Clearly I am not a regular MAC user, and would appreciate any advice:

What entry level software should he be looking at to author DVD's from home video?

What hardware/software pitfalls are out there with his older OS?

Thanks for any advice.

[goat]

If you can upgrade his op. system to OS 10.xx, I think you will have more options with software for the ripping and re-building of the DVD. I'm pretty new to computers but doing this kind of stuff is pretty easy and fun with a Mac!
I have used:
Ripping: MacTheRipper, YadeX ... or others
You can rip into VIDEO TS folders , VOB or Streams (mpeg2 & ac3)
Demuxing (if in VOB): BBdemux, ffmpegX ... or others (splits the file into mpeg2 & ac3)
Converting the audio from AC3 to AIFF so you can edit it: MPEG2WORKS
Editing video and audio: Final Cut Pro or iMovie
The build to DVD use : DVD Studio Pro or iDVD
Have fun!!!

[havema-1]

I'd suggest upgrading to Mac OS X 10.3, if possible. It is very robust (i.e. does not crash at the end of a lengthy encoding).

The Mac should be as fast as possible (G4 or G5 based -- G3 is _very_ slow). For example: my 1.25 GHz G4 PowerBook encodes & burns 1 hour of iMovie via iDVD 4's Best Quality setting in about 3 hours (if I don't do other CPU intensive processes at the same time, that is). I wouldn't want to encode DVDs with my old G4 450 upgraded PowerMac 8600 anymore because it is way too slow.

iMovie and iDVD have their share of old bugs but they work very well with my PB. I hope iLife '05 finally fixes some annoying bugs that currently need workarounds.

http://www.sjoki.uta.fi/~shmhav/iMovie_4_bugs.html

iDVD 4 officially works only with internal DVD burners but you can tweak it with an unofficial easter egg to work with external burners or to burn as a disk image that you can burn with Toast or Disk Utility.

A more expensive and more flexible software option is to get Final Cut Express/Pro and DVD Studio Pro. The learning curve is also much steeper.

[MerlinMacuser]

Tips that haven't been mentioned:

1) Get a BIG hard drive...video eats drive space like crazy. Figure on at least double to triple the size of the raw footage to accomodate editing and multiple saves. With an internal ATA card you can get drives in the 100-250 Gigabyte range for about $1/G or less. See OWC (www.macsales.com) for clearance items!

2) Final Cut Express is cheaper than FCPro but is more advanced than iMovie. The iLife bundle from Apple includes iMovie and iDVD which are great learner programs for creating, editing and authoring dvds. A new version of iLife is expected soon. See the Missing Manual series of books and Apple's discussion groups for excellent support.

3) Upgrade to Quicktime Pro (via the online Apple Store) so you can use other plug-ins and shareware.

4) You can use a digital video camera as a transfer device if you have a firewire connection. OrangeMicro makes USB/FW combo cards if you have a PCI slot open.

5) Check your local phone directory for a photo processor that will digitize slides for a fee. Usually this is more cost effective than buying a film scanner or manually loading photos. My local processor charges ~ $10 set up fee then $1 per slide. A very good slide scanner can cost $500-$1,000 or more. A decent all-around, flat bed scanner with slide tray can be had for ~$300-$500 or less.

6) Finally and perhaps most important....have plenty of RAM loaded. Not sure which model computer you have or it's max RAM capacity. I have a G5 with 2GB of Ram and am very happy. I had 1GB (the max) in my G4-upgraded A/V 8600 and it was very happy with most graphic and sound editing programs but slow to render video.

[stagescrew]

What a great set of resources and responses. I'm sure it will take some time to research.

I do have a few specific questions however.

1) I gather if my father does not have a digital camera (I'm not sure at this time) he would need then some sort of analog to digital converter. Right?

2) I also assume he would still need a USB/Firewire card?

3) Windows boxes have gone through a migration of USB 1.1/USB 2.0/Firewire support built in. Near about any box you buy now has USB 2 and Firewire already installed. Did his G4 have some native USB, and due to its age, could it be USB 1.1 ?

4) The iLife Bundle (seems to go for around 50$) seems like the best idea for his entry level needs. Why upgrade to Quicktime Pro? Does the viewer in iMovies not have support for anything not created in iMovie?

Thanks again for all the helpful advice.

[MerlinMacuser]

Don't know what happened to my original reply....

1) analog to digital converters have been discussed on this board. I like ADS Pyro, others have their preferences. Check the MacWorld magazine (online) for recent reviews of capture devices.

2-3) if his Mac only has USB 1.1 which is too slow for video capture, he'll need an upgrade...USB 2.0 requires OS 9.2 or higher. The combo cards give you multiple choices.

4) iLife is a great way to get started. QTPro allows you to read some things and use some plug ins but is not a prerequisite for using iLife (iMovie and iDVD). The viewer in iMovie will certainly allow you to view what it has captured.

Good luck!

[eigna]

mac makes a G4 that still runs OS8???????????????????????????????????????

[sjk]

Final Cut Express is cheaper than FCPro but is more advanced than iMovie.

Definitely. I got FCE with my iMac G5 and still not sure how to go about learning it. Just being able to watch someone experienced use it for a bit would go a long way to picking up "tricks" that might take a while to figure out on my own.

[MacDSL]

OK, in reading from the beginning, there are some stepping stones to consider...

There is a lot of work involved in getting this machine up to the level necessary to do Video and/or DVD burning work. Especially if you are a Windows-only user and your father is still on OS8.

There is a BIG jump to go from OS8 to OSX Even more so for someone who is 75+ years old. Not to say anything about anyone's intelligence or something, It's just that I have taught people over the past 15 years of all ages and going from 8 to X is a Major difference.

The speed and RAM and Harddrive space of the G4 in question is crucial to whether or not this will even work. Please let me know everything you can about the computer, and the component DVD-R you are going to add.

It may be cheaper to just buy a new iMac or iMac MINI than upgrading the current machine to a level that is useable for this.

[MacDSL]

The G4 has Firewire, you will not want to ever use USB for video anything. Not 1, 1.1, or 2.