Any suggestions about the easiest way to capture and burn to dvd movies made on a digital video cam?

I have 15 digital tapes made on a Canon digital video cam by my wife and need to capture and burn to DVD. I'm hooking the video cam to the pc with a firewire. AOK

My first try: I captured a 30 minute tape with MS Movie Maker and a compact 200MB mwv movie file. What to do with this? I dunno.

Then I installed Pinnacle 8.3 and for a 60 minute tape got a 13GB avi file. What to do with this?

Then I installed ULead Movie Factory 3.0 and got a 3.5GB mpg file of the same 60 minute tape which the same program offered to burn to my Plextor DVD burner.

Things look good with this latter solution. Obviously there are some tradeoffs regarding quality and how much data one can put on a dvd, perhaps some major compression issues.

What suggestions do you have? This is a one time project. And I won't be doing it on a regular basis.

Hi rikytik,

I got few questions for ya.

What is the quality of your output video, you are looking for? Can you record from you camcorder in DVD Quality?
Since you are about to burn your video content to a DVD, I assume you are after DVD Quality.
I doubt the WMV file is DVD Quality. However u can use (Roxio Easy CD Creator 6 Platinum) your DVD Burning software to burn it in DVD Video format - provided that it has got the MPEG2 Decoder.

You can always import these files to your DVD Burning Program and burn a DVD Compilation. If your DVD Burning Program has a MPEG2 Encoder, that's the easiest way to go.

For DVD Quality, you will have to encode in MPEG2 format; expected bitrate is around 4500 Kbps; Resolution: 720 * 576.

In my case, I will just burn that 60 minutes video in WMV9 format to one CD. I will maintain near-DVD Quality, but I won't be able to watch it in a DVD Player yet.

Leaving others to add more,
McoreD.

Good Luck!

It's some hours later, and I'm getting the hang of this.

I'm using ULead Movie Factory 3.0 and it works beautifully for capture, editing and burn. Doesn't take much reading, just a couple practice runs.

Still be interested to know what your favorite capture and burn software is. So far of the 3 I tried, I like ULead Movie Factory best. Haven't tried Sonic yet.

Guess we both reply at the same time..;)

Yes rikytik, go ahead with Ulead Movie Factory 3.0. If it suppors buring DVD Compilations, no doubt that it supports encoding to DVD Quality.

I just said Roxio Easy CD & DVD Creator 6 because that was the only DVD Burning Software I have tried successfully. I gave shot with Ulead Video Studio 7, but the quality was so poor.

Cheers,
McoreD

I have used Studio 8 using the background rendering and the automatic function for dv quality and have successfully burned them right to a dvd. Viewable on most dvd players

Thanks McoreD. Yes we posted at the same time. I was up at 0245 this a.m. worrying about how I was gonna get this job done, not knowing wtf I was doing. :)

ULead Movie Factory gives about 4 levels of dvd quality and yes, I'm recording at the highest, so my wife will not get mad at me. I thought of going to lower quality but the trips we made were to exotic places and pricey, so no point skimping: Sri Lanka, Madras, Papua, Cambodia, and so on.

I decided to stick with ULead Movie Factory for the moment because it works flawlessly. Since she made videos of varying lenths, the program automatically fast forwards the tape, rewinds it and then captures it. Amazing. Then in a second pass, I burn it. This is good because if the size is ok, I can combine more than one on a dvd and either join them or have them as menu options.

I can't believe how good this stuff works and how fast things have evolved.