i was used to save videos from my Sony DCR-TRV120E Pal Camcorder to the computer in mpg format via Dazzle* Digital Video Creator (US$199). i was able to hold one full 8mm cassette to one VCD so i was fulfilled how the things went. today i tried capturing video using the moviemaker 2 and i was so impressed to see some very useful automated features in moviemaker 2. these features were not avaiable in MovieStar (the program which comes bundled with the Dazzle* Digital Video Creator).

moviemaker 2 can automatically determine the best capturing configuration for my computer. the help describes it better.

according to my computer's performance, the audio configuration is wma9 vbr 75% and the video configuration is wmv9 768kbps. trust me it is better than mpg vcd quality and half the size. one hour of video is only 275mb. so one 650mb could hold 2.5hr video! but my cassettes are 60, 90m, 120m so it is more than enough.

what really surprised me was moviemaker could also control my camcorder! it can rewind the cassette. fast forward/rewind/play/pause/stop everything.

i got no probs if i wanna create a vcd someday. when burning vcds in nero it re-encodes to mpg vcd format. so i am pretty much satisfied with the way i am sticked to now. there may be advantages/disadvantages regarding this method. any comments are welcome. :)

useful links:
http://www.dvdrhelp.com
http://www.tmpgenc.net

p.s. didn't know where to post this, to share my feelings with my BetaONE friends. :)

damn. too much hopes leads to misery. i just thought to capture a whole tape tonight and started recording a cassette in the best conguration computer has decided. i couldnt go too much. i was noticing the hard disk free space was rapidly decreasing but i never thought that would happen because one year back when i was testing moviemaker (1) it was realtime encoding. so what? this time it was first recording the video as uncompressed and then only it was encoding to wmv.

i tested the same thing choosing lower bitrate (instead of choosing automatically decide the quality that could play in a local computer). and it didnt record as uncompressed first. may be the it is because of a slow processor (PII 400), wmm determined not to real time encode in wmv format, when we chose automatically decide the best quality to play back in a local computer. for faster processors i think it will encode real time. i am not sure, i havent tested in a fast processor yet.

:cry:

i haven't quite figured out how to use moviemaker but I think I will try harder now

Adobe Premiere!!!!

Nice post ;)

I have to play with Movie Maker again and again :lol: