Help with creating original DVD (MD audio & editing).

[LonelyRoad]

Thank you all for helping.

Long story short: In high school (a few years ago) my band played a concert in front of our entire school during school hours. It lasted about 45mins and was recorded with two camera mixes onto VHS and with a digital MiniDisc recorder. One of the cameras is just close ups, the other just a long shot.

My dream would be to edit the two VHS' together and because the audio is poor quality on from the VHS, to somehow use the CD quality audio recorded from the mini disc as the DVD audio (I also have it recorded onto CD).

Is this possible? I know there are simple DVD/VHS stand-alone units that copy VHS to DVD's but I want to edit the video and also (if possible) use external audio (MiniDisc/CD).

I have a DVD recorder on my Mac and can burn that way. Would/should I get a stand alone unit or would a computer based system work for this project?

Thank you all for helping me in this. It means a lot and I don't know who else to ask.

Luke

[guns1inger]

Very possible, and not too difficult, although it may take a bit of time. Here is how I would tackle it

Capture the VHS footage to your PC as two continuous clips - one for each tape. Do the same for the audio - assuming it is a single clip on CD, and not broken down by song.

Put both video clips on seperate timelines and sync them together.

Now add the new audio track to it's own timeline, and sync it to the audio. This may take some trial and error. If you have the video tracks in sync, mute one of them so save resources.

Once you have everything in sync, you can start working on the cuts to your video by dropping transitions back and forth and adjusting them until it all hangs together.

[LonelyRoad]

Thank you for your reply.

However, I have some questions.


I have a Mac (not a PC)

I assume I need some kind of program (I have iDVD for Mac). How do I go about taking a VCR and hooking it up to my Mac (if that's how you do it).

Thanks for responding. I may need some more help with the editing and other questions like timelines as I'm still learning about advanced computer concepts.

Thank you.

[guns1inger]

I suspect the best option for a Mac owner would be Final Cut Pro. Aside from that, I don't know what else the Mac has to offer. Do you also have iMovie - which would be better suited for editing ? Multi-timelines make multi-camera editing. Having a single timeline makes it much harder to sync everything up.

[LonelyRoad]

Yes I do also have iMovie. Would that work instead of Final Cut Pro or do I need that too?

Also, how do I go about loading the VHS film footage onto my computer?

Thanks

[guns1inger]

Does the PowerBook have a firewire input ? If so, you could use analogue pass-through on a DV camera to get the video across to the Mac. The other simple option is to use a DVD Recorder and then rip and edit the footage from the DVD.

I don't know what capabilities iMovie has - you have it, so start reading the manual. I suspect it only supports a single timeline, which is limiting in this case.

Final Cut Pro is not cheap, so unless this is a very important project to you, or you are going to do a lot more editing like this in the future, it is probably not worth the cost. Also not sure how well it would run on your laptop.

To be honest, I think you would be better off PM'ing one of the mods to shift this to the Mac forum where people with more Mac knowledge might see it.

[mikiem]

To be honest with you don't know what NLE type apps are available for MAC besides something like Avid Xpress & of course FinalCut, & equally not sure if it wouldn't be cheaper to buy a cheap PC & use freeware.

That said, what you're talking about doing is just standard editing, and think you'll actually find most of it surprisingly easy once you've got the video in an NLE with at least two vid tracks so you can switch between video a & b. For the audio end I think I'd try to replace the audio in the video file 1st with the mini-disc recording -- definitely easier with 2 or more audio tracks. Unless the replacement audio was locked more or less to the video, could be a nightmare trying to sync after the fact if this is your 1st try.