Complex authoring question

[orloman]

I have what appears to be an involved editing and authoring question. I had several 16mm films (40-50 years old) digitized to Video_TS folders. I am using MPEG Stream Clip as well as ffmpegX as editors and converters since I work on a Mac with OSX. I also have available Toast Titanium, Popcorn, and Burn-OSX (http://burn-osx.sourceforge.net/) to use for authoring/burning. My goal is to edit the various VOB files (since there is no order in how they were digitized), creating about 8 separate videos, which I then want to place on one Video DVD (playable on an ordinary DVD player, not computer) on which I can place menus so the viewer can choose which video to watch. Any suggestions? So far I have created the 8 separate videos in several formats (dv, mpeg, H.264). I don’t know how to burn these 8 videos onto one DVD with menus. Thanks in advance.

[whatsmyname]

On the Mac you'd use a converter like VisualHub to turn those 8 videos into dvd-compliant mpeg2 files, then use iDVD (Within iLife) to Author the DVD containing those 8-videos and with menus.

[mysts]

To orloman:

How did you convert the film to pc. I have a bunch of 8mm film that I would like to convert to pc.

[usually_quiet]

I am a PC user so I can't recommend tools, but I have authored a lot of DVD's using video from my DVD recorder. I can offer you some brief advice on editing and authoring.

If you want to put your home movie video on a DVD with menus that will play on as many DVD players as possible, I would also recommend that you stick with MPEG-2. DivX plays on many newer DVD players, but not all of them, and not on older ones. H.264 is still too new.

Assuming the source VOB's you have are already in MPEG-2 format, all you should need to do is edit them to get something that an authoring program can use to create a DVD, no conversion necessary. Don't try to change the files you have already edited and converted to another format back to MPEG-2. If you convert from something else back to MPEG-2, the quality of the video will suffer. Go back to the original VOB's, and edit again.

If your captures were done professionally and are in 720 x 480 frame size, you probably should put no more than 2 hours worth of edited video on a disc (which would take up about 4.2 GB assuming the captures have an adequate bitrate). If this means using more than one disc to hold them all, consider doing that. Authoring additional discs will be faster and easier than re-encoding to reduce the size of the video, and will likely produce a better quality result.