my experience as a newbie to the world of video

[nipun77]

Hi,
I have recently bought a camcorder and would like to share my experience with you all in the hope it might help someone in the same situation that I had found myself in.

I recently bought a SONY DCR HC36E MiniDV camcorder. This is the first time I am using a camcorder and I was(still am) a newbie on how to use the camera and create VCD/DVD through it.

Searched through a lot of websites and came up with the following point:
The best way to capture video from miniDV cassette is to use Firewire and to save it in DV-AVI format.

I could do neither of the two 'cause I do not have a firewire port on my laptop and not enough space on my HDD (a 60 minute video would take ~14GB of HDD space !!!)

SONY picture package which comes with the camera captures video in AVI format which made it useless to me (A SONY technican had come to my house to give a demo and clear my doubts about the camcorder as part of their service and the guy summarily rejected the PP software telling me to forget about it and to go for WMM and NERO. If SONY employees dont recommend the software then why go for it)

Having spent a fortune on the camera, I did not want to spend more money either on new hardware or software.

Did a lot of research on the cheapest way to get my minDVs onto a VCD and came up with the below info.

Following is the method I follow to capture my videos and create VCDs

1) Since I just have a USB port on my laptop, I use it to capture the video from the camera. Contrary to popular belief the captured video quality is good enough for a newbie making a home video with little or no extra money to spend !!

I use Windows Movie Maker to capture the video through the USB port and save the captured video in wmv format. This takes up ~600 MB of HDD space for a 60 minutes video.

2) Windows Movie Maker is quite good as a video editing tool with basic features required for a home video. Nothing fancy but gets the job done.

Created my home video with some titles and transitions thrown in and unwanted footage cut out.

Saved the final output also in wmv format.

3) Used TMPGEnc to convert wmv to mpeg1 format for creating VCD

TMPGEnc is the only freeware I could find which worked with wmv files. (www.tmpgenc.net)

4) Used VCDEasy to burn the final VCD on CD-R.

VCDEasy is now a paid sofware but the version v1.1.5.2 is a freeware. VCDEasy was not able to detect my CD Drive (Matshita UJDA770) but I installed the Adaptec ASPI drivers as described on their help page and it was able to detect my drive after that.

Thats it !! Now I can easily create VCDs without spending a lot of money (except the cost of a blank CD-R) and share the CDs with friends and family.

Its been a long post but I hope someone benefits from it. If you need any more info then please let me know. I'll be glad to help out.

[lordsmurf]

Given your limited hard drive space and lack of IEEE1394, sounds good to me. Congrats on finding yourself a solution to your problem.

[guns1inger]

The issue with USB transfer has been solved with newer cameras that can transfer full-D1 video through this port. Unfortunately for many, this is hardware dependent, and older cameras with USB connections are still limited to low res, low quality transfers unless they have firewire.