Novice trying to burn high quality DVD's from MiniDV - Help!

[wej1971]

I am a novice at converting MiniDV video from my camcorder to DVD's. I have tried importing my MiniDV video in Roxio Easy DVD Creater but the quality of the image gets reduced to crap! For example Roxio will import an a video as an AVI file. The AVI file could be 800megs but Roxio reduces it to approximately 200 megs when it prepares the video to be burned. The quality of the burned DVD's is awful compared to the beautiful video quality I get when I play my MiniDV videos on my plasma tv using the camcorder. I assume this Roxio program is an entry level program that will not create great quality videos. I'm not looking to do a lot of editing. Most importantly, I just want to retain the high quality video on my MiniDV tapes when I convert them into DVD's.

I've read a few forums and it looks like I need to follow a process of encoding the MiniDV video, edit it, author it and then burn it. Can someone give me an idea of the specific software/hardware I need and steps that need to be taken to convert my MiniDV home videos to great quality DVD's? Can Adobe Premier Elements do all of this for me (high quality video) or should I use other software.

My camcorder is a Panasonic PV-GS400 with 3CCD technology. It makes high resolution video with overall great picture quality. My computer has an Intel Pemtium 4CPU - 1.7GHZ with 512 MB of RAM. I am running Windows XP. I also have an NVIDIA GeForce FX 5600 Ultra video card. In addition, I have a DVDRW IDE 1008 DVD burner 8x speed.

Thank you.

[CogoSWSDS]

First, let me ask a question. Are you transferring the video from your miniDV camera to your PC using a USB connection or a Firewire (also known as IEEE 1394 or i.link) connection? Regardless of what your camera manufacturer suggests, Firewire is the better quality transfer method. You should be getting about 13 Gigabytes of data for each hour of video. If you're only getting 800 Megs for an hour of video, there's your biggest quality loss right there. If your computer does not have firewire, you can add it by installing a firewire card.

After you get the video on your computer, you will need to encode it to MPEG-2. There are a variety of tools available to get this done. Some, such as QuENC, are free but require you to install and learn to use Avisynth (you don't need much Avisynth knowledge to use QuENC). Others don't require you to use Avisynth, but do cost a few dollars (TMPGEnc+ is less than $40US).

After converting to MPEG-2, you'll need to author the DVD. This is where you would put in chapter points, menus, etc. Some free packages include DVDAuthorGUI, GUI for DVDAuthor, and there may be others. There are commercial packages as well ranging in price from under $100 up to the thousands of dollars.

Once you have authored the DVD, it's time to burn it. If your authoring application can make an ISO image, you can use DVD Decrypter to burn it. Otherwise, a burning application such as Nero will do just fine.

For more information, check out the Guides section at the left side of this page. There are as many ways of getting from MiniDV to DVD as there are tools and people that do it. My personal path of choice is:

01. Capture with WinDV.
02. Convert to MPeg2 using TMPGEnc (slow on my 2GHz computer) or QuENC (requires use of AVISynth but conversion is 1 to 1.25 x realtime. QuENC also gives me AC3 audio instead of MPEG2).
03. Author with DVDAuthorGui.
04. Burn with Nero on DVD RW.
05. Test resulting DVD in DVD player. If OK, burn with Nero to DVDR. Otherwise go back to step 3 and reauthor and burn and test again.

[InXess]

...or try one of the ALL-IN-ONE solutions like Ulead Video Studio (demo available from their website). Not a big fan of it but seems to be getting lots of praises. Simple to use with good output.

[wej1971]

Thank you for your help. Also, I do have a Firewire connection. The 800 meg example above was just a few minutes of video from my camcorder.

I've seen a lot of talk about video capture cards. Do I need one? (is my current Firewire connection linked to a capture card?)

[InXess]

wit firewire you are transferring video from camcorder to a DV Avi file on your pc. No need to capture, just connect camcorder and pc with firewire cable (you must have a firewire port or card in your pc, if you don't just go to the computer store ~20 bucks) and transfer video. Use type 2 DV format to save it. Get the Ulead and check it out. Once you understand the process use whatever you please (Ulead will fully suffice for now).
Ulead Movie Factory will do as well...

[pijetro]

I've seen a lot of talk about video capture cards. Do I need one? (is my current Firewire connection linked to a capture card?)

Okay, it's questions like these that let me give proportional feedback...

Your MiniDV camcorder is the capture device..Since it's digital.
If you're sources were analogue, broadcast, film, etc...then yes, you'd need a separate capture card. But since you have a GS-400, that can also be used as a capture device, via pass through..

Anyhoo, CogoSWSDS is correct..
Transfer the footage...edit the footage...export to DVD, or export for preparation to DVD..Burn..

Since you're new, i'd take the suggestion of InXess, and fart around with the all in one packages..It can be quite overwhelming..