What is the best way to get from miniDV to DVD ??

[catdog6]

Just bought a Canon ZR70 and a Sony DRU-500AX setup last night .
I used the trial version of Ulead Movie Factory and made a five minute
DVD onto a Memorex DVD-RW and it works good in my Mintek 2110 at
a quality setting of 7. I then set the quality to 15 and it was somewhat
jerky. Can anyone tell me if I need more cpu, ram or what??
Also, is DVD Movie Factory the best software for this?? Freeware would
be preferred.

Thanks,

Kevin Trotter

[mpb]

Just bought a Canon ZR70 and a Sony DRU-500AX setup last night .
I used the trial version of Ulead Movie Factory and made a five minute
DVD onto a Memorex DVD-RW and it works good in my Mintek 2110 at
a quality setting of 7. I then set the quality to 15 and it was somewhat
jerky. Can anyone tell me if I need more cpu, ram or what??
Also, is DVD Movie Factory the best software for this?? Freeware would
be preferred.

Congrats on your new toys! Canon does make nice camcorders.

I use their ZR-45, which is the same as what you have for the purpose of what you're asking here.

I would actually suggest doing your capture through the firewire with a program called DVIO - freely available from the download links to your left. It's a small, no-nonsense tool that just rips the data straight from your tape (or your DV passthru) and saves the AVI on your drive.

If you don't need to edit, skip this step: For editing, I use plain ol' Windows Movie Maker 2. For DV-AVI it's good, for anything else it's really bad. If you do edit, save your output file in DV-AVI format also and then you're ready to encode. If you want to edit and do anything really advanced, like music videos or intricate effects, you'll need to use somethign better than MM2. I sometimes use Adobe Premiere, but that's not exactly freeware.

Follow those same links at the left to a program called TMPGEnc. It will encode your video FAR BETTER than Ulead will, to Mpeg2. For home movies and stuff you film on your camcorder, I suggest VBR, with Mpeg-layer-II audio. Set your VBR to 8000 max, 2000 min, pad to minimum, and then your average can be anywhere from 3000 to 4800 and you'll get decent results... tweak to fit your available space. (You'll figure out how to do this in TMPGenc - they let you set the parameters and then they give you one last look at the whole shebang and you can fine-tune the average bitrate). You do not need to deinterlace.

Once you have your MP2 file, you need to author and burn. For freeware you can use IFO edit. There are other programs too but not too many freebies. I usually import the video right back into Ulead DMF2, since it won't re-encode (it's already encoded), and author my DVD folders and burn from there.

Good luck!!!

[catdog6]

Thanks for the great info. I really do appreciate it.

I tried the DVIO and got video but no audio. I assume it should get
audio?
I'll try the rest of the stuff tomorrow..

Thanks again,

Kevin