General DV / MPEG2 Editing Advice

[Blitter]

I want to get back into the video editing hobby... I used to have an analog 8mm camcorder with a Dazzle DVC II capture card. Well, my camcorder broke and my Dazzle does not work with my new system's K7S5A motherboard. So...

I'd like to some general advice on how easy (or difficult) it is to edit using DV video, with the ultimate goal of putting the edited movies onto DVD.
Is DV editing in Premiere pretty good, or does it take forever to preview the effects, etc ? Also, since I need to go from DV to MPEG2 for the DVD playback, is this a horrendous process in terms of time to re-encoding from DV to MPEG2 or am I better off going straight from my DV camcorder into a new MPEG2 realtime capture card thus alleviating the need for the recoding the video ?

Any ideas, advice is greatly appreciated. I'm mainly interested in taking some old home movies and putting them on DVD after doing some edits, wipes, etc using Premiere. I'm quite familiar with Premiere and the DVD generation process, but I've never worked with DV so I don't what to expect.

Thanks in advance.

[Xesdeeni]

I'm doing exactly what you want to do with my daughter's first year video. So learn what you can from my saga:

I have 11 1-hour miniDV tapes of her first 12 months. I went through all of the tapes and captured about 3 hours total onto my hard drive in DV format using Premiere 6.0. That was about 30GB of data in about 165 files.

I then edited the video from these 165 takes (My goal was to get this below an hour, but even throwing out some stuff I wanted to keep, I still only got down to about 90 minutes).

For a quick VHS delivery (the great-grandmother's 80th birthday), I dubbed the edited video back to my camcorder (the tapes hold 90 minutes in LP mode, so that was an absolute limit for me), and then transferred the video to VHS via the camera's analog (S-Video) output.

Now I'm working on authoring the DVD. Unfortunately, I can't save the finished video into a DV file before I encode it as an MPEG, because AVI files are limited to 4GB, and 90 minutes is closer to 15GB. Besides, that's a waste of hard drive space.

Instead, I used the AVISynth plugin for Premiere to export the video and then imported it to TMPGEnc. The 90 minute video would have taken about 8 hours to compress via this process on my 1.1GHz AMD. Unfortunately, I also have the 4GB limit for my MPEGs, since I'm using Windows ME and the FAT32 file system, so the render didn't complete.

But that's OK, because I realized I didn't want to do it that way anyway. The menu I wanted to set up was a calendar, with the months of my daughter's first twelve months. So I went ahead and segregated the video into the individual months in Premiere and exporting them one at a time. It took me a couple of days of my evenings to encode the 13 months plus the intro MPEG. Some took 15 minutes or so. Some were closer to an hour. But I had to start each encode manually.

Anyway, I chose 6Mbps (384Kbps for audio) because I knew that 90 minutes of video at this rate would not exceed a 4.7GB DVD. The total of all 14 files was about 4.45GB.

Well, my DVD burner (an OEM Ricoh 5125) came with DVDit!. Now as I understand it, this is better than MyDVD, and it has shipped to over half-a-million customers, and it retails for a whopping $299, but it's a piece of crap.

First, I made my 720x480 menu with the 13 months layed out like a calendar. The documentation said I could make buttons with Photoshop, so I did the 13 months as well by cutting each month out into its own file. Then I imported the bitmap and the buttons. But when I started to place the buttons on the bitmap, they were larger than the months on the bitmap!

Looking through the documentation, I found a note that confirmed my suspicions. DVDit! scaled DOWN my 720x480 menu to 640x480 when it imported the bitmap. But it didn't scale the buttons. Worse still, when I finally was ready to author the menu, it would scale it back up to 720x480. How ridiculous!

But, I was willing to live with this, so long as I could create a reasonable-looking DVD. I fought through this and scaled everything to 640x480, so that the buttons would match, and set up the menu.

Next, I imported the movies and connected them to the buttons. Then I started to author the DVD. At this point DVDit! kindly reported that my data wouldn't fit on a DVD because it would take over 5GB!

Thanks to Bladrick here on VCDHelp.com, I discovered this wonderful piece of software (and I found another reference that says that it's little brother MyDVD does it too) uncompresses audio from my nice 384Kbps MPEG audio stream to PCM for the DVD! Great! No wonder the thing got too big to fit onto a DVD.

Well, I wanted to see what things looked like, so I deleted one of the 500+MB files and just went ahead with the authoring. DVDit! took about 10 or 15 minutes to convert the MPEGs to VOBs.

But I didn't let it burn the DVD. I used Nero, my trusted friend, instead. The DVD worked fine and looked wonderful. Of course, I still have a number of things I'm going to have to tweek (like my menu has too many thin horizontal lines, so it flickers, and it came back to the menu at the end of each month, etc.), but I was very happy with the actual quality.

The issue of the authoring is still an open one. At Baldricks suggestion, I downloaded SpruceUp (he also suggested some others). Apparently this was discontinued for Windows when Apple bought the company, but you can still find the demo around here and there.

I haven't completed my first authoring pass with SpruceUp yet. So far I like it better than DVDit!. First, it doesn't mess with my menu. It is more difficult to build the right type of Photoshop file for the buttons, but that difficulty comes with more flexibility. That's where I am now...working on the buttons.

While I was reading the manual, I went ahead and imported the MPEGs into SpruceUp. Here is where I was very disappointed. When you import the MPEGs, it takes a LOOONNNGGG time to process each one and create 4 other small files. I think it took something like 30 minutes to import my files. That might get pretty annoying later. But whether I put up with that depends on whether I can actually author the DVD as I want.

I'll keep you posted.

Xesdeeni

[Blitter]

Xes - thanks much for your reply! It contained a good deal of insight. Tell me, when you edit the DV footage, is it reallllly slow, and when you re-encode it does it take forever or is it still worth doing ? Also, how do you get the DV footage from your DV camcorder to the PC -- a DV bridge, or capture card ??

Thanks again.

[mdm]

I'm in the process of DV to DVD also. I've just started doing the capturing with Media Studio Pro's capture utility, breaking it up by scenes (to keep the files managable), then using TMPGenc to convert to MPEG2. I'll probably use DVD Workshop for authoring. Since the authoring software usually creates VOB's not bigger than 1gb, I shouldn't run into any file size limitations (am I correct?).

[mbellot]

Xes:

Why don't you pick up some 80 minute DV tapes? WalMart has them for ~ $10 each (pricey but convenient...) but you can get 2 hours on a tape in LP mode which makes it nice for transfer to VHS.

Blitter:

You need a DV card to maintain the high quality, capturing the analog signal from a DV cam would be kind of pointless. Good news is CompUSA sells one for $30 that is fabulous.

Rendering transistions isn't too bad, assuming you have a decent PC (I use a 1GHz Celeron). Your real concern should be HD space. I have 140GB of storage, 60GB of which is dedicated to storing video.

I haven't gone the encoding route yet, I do my editing and then just transfer the finished product back to my DV cam.

Mark

[Xesdeeni]

Blitter -

When I edit the DV footage, I don't think it's all that slow. Transitions and titles do take time to render, but I'd estimate they are about 4:1, so a 1 second transition takes about 4 seconds to render. You can control when this is done too, so it doesn't bother me much. Also, I don't use a huge number of transitions. One of the classic mistakes of novice video editors is using tons of transitions. They become tiresome very quickly for the viewer. I typically use only cuts, with some fades to/from black, and the occasional crossfade.

I'm not too happy about the MPEG rendering time, but I knew that would be the biggest bottleneck, so I try to arrange to do that overnight, or during the day when I'm at work. Maybe next year I'll be able to upgrade to a 3+GHz machine for a reasonable price (I seem to consistently upgrade my machine when I can triple it's clock speed: 40 -> 133 -> 350 -> 1.1). In any case, I really think the rendering is very worth it. I'm using DVDs so that the video lasts for a long time, and my daughter and her kids and grandkids, etc. can enjoy it. Tapes just don't last. Besides, it's much quicker to make a copy of a DVD for family that a VHS tape.

I bought a $50 Firewire card to capture the video from my digital camcorder. There really is no better way to do this. Since it's digital, there is no generational loss. And miniDV files hold more per MB for the same quality than MJPEG (miniDV is about 5:1, you need about 4:1 for equivalent MJPEG), which is the only other reasonable choice if you want to edit your video. Since my camcorder also has analog inputs, I also use it to capture from analog sources (part of my daughter's video came from her daily 'sitter on VHS).

mbellot -

Hmm....I've been using the Maxell 4-pack tapes from Sam's, that run about $18. Maybe I'll grab one or two of the 80-minute ones for this purpose, and for when transferring FROM VHS (I've got some old football and basketball games on already degrading VHS that I'd like to save).

THE SAGA CONTINUES...

OK, back to the story: I played some more with SpruceUp last night, and now I'm less impressed.

First, as I said, I made 14 different MPEGs. One is the intro, and the other 13 are the months of my daughter's first year (if she'd been born on the 1st of the month, I guess I could have done only 12 ). One of the reasons I did this is because it made it easy to drag-and-drop each movie onto a button to associate it. But it seems this also means that when each movie (month) is finished, it comes back to the menu.

Ideally, I'd like to have a "play all" button that played the whole year, and then let each month play just the month when selected from the menu. But in reading some of the things I've read, this would require me to be able to input some specific script-like code and have a state variable available. This seems to be possible with DVDs, but I think it's a bit much to expect in a consumer-level product.

Barring that, I would rather that the selection of any month would play that month until the end of the entire year. This was one of the few things I could do with DVDit! that I can't seem to do in SpruceUp. You could choose the action to take when finishing a movie. In SpruceUp, it looks like I would have to create one large MPEG file (again having to deal with the 4GB barrier) and then create chapter points for SpruceUp to work this way.

Anyway, that's only a minor annoyance compared to what happened when I started to build the DVD with SpruceUp last night. Even though it had taken a LOOONNNGGG time to import the movies, it took an even LOOONNNGGGEEERRR time to author. It took about 1 1/2 HOURS to do this! That is absolutely ridiculous! Even DVDit!, while decompressing my nicely compressed audio, didn't take but about 20 minutes.

Well, I left it over night and started the DVD burn this morning. I'll take a look at the quality tonight. Obviously, I know what the video will look like, but I want to see how the menu looks based on the buttons I created.

But I'm once again pretty disappointed. At this point, I'd settle for a utility that took a text script and an MPEG file and created the title set (VOBs and IFOs) from a command line. At least that way I'd have full control, even if I didn't have a GUI. I also assume such a utility wouldn't be much slower than a plain copy of the MPEGs from one file to another, since VOBs are just the MPEG data with some additonal flags in them.

So, back to the drawing board, looking for an authoring title that doesn't suck. They want so much money for these things, and they are nothing but cotton candy (did I mention I hate the way DVDit!/MyDVD looks?). But at least they provide trial versions for download....

Xesdeeni

[Blitter]

Thanks all for good replies... So I think Im decided on getting a digital camcorder so I can edit the DV and encode it to MPEG2 (despite the long render time).. I'll need to bump up my HD space... my processor and RAM shoud be decent (2100+ XP and 512 DDR RAM).

Once I have footage on my digital camcorder, how do I get it over the computer.. if I buy a fireward card, don't I still need some other product to dump it from the camcorder to the computer or does it just copy directly out of the camcorder to the firewire card? If so, what's the deal with all these products like DV bridges, etc... what are they needed for??

Thanks.

[spiderman2k1]

This is what I would do get a mother board that work's with yuor Dazzle 2 I use MSI K7T266A mother board stick with analog use the dazzle at 8000000 bitrate and turn of VB so it's make's it CBR I make copies from satellite dish and it look's the same you will not see a drop in the picture if your not happy with it you can push the bitrate to 10000000 but you will have to re-encode it DVD player's only go up to 8000000 now use MPEG2VCR to edit your video real easy I would say if your making home movie's do it the easy way. I would use DV camera's but I would capture it with the Dazzle 2. Now if I was making a movie and I mean a real movie I would use DV with AVID thats one of the best or Final cut pro or even ADOBE PREMIERE 6.0 if I did this as a full time job. I Hauppauge working on a new card that will record with the firewire as the DV video hit the card it will make a MPEG2 file where the Dazzle 2 is analog capture. This would be great if this new card come's out turn DV to MPEG 2 with firewire

[Xesdeeni]

Blitter,

The camera does not look like a hard drive or other media through the Firewire card, but my Firewire card came with a Ulead product that can import. I use Premiere 6.0 to import instead, and there are some other programs you can download that will also import. It's really as easy as capturing with an analog device, but the quality doesn't degrade.

Also, if the capture program has device control capabilities (like Premiere does), you can batch capture. That way after you've reviewed the video and made notes of what you want to capture (called logging), you can give Premiere a list of the pieces it should capture, start it going and go do something else while it controls the camera and captures the video.

Xesdeeni

[mattjh]

Ulead VideoStudio and MediaStudio can do a real-time conversion of your DV to MPEG-2 as it is captured.