I hear that you can copy TV programs and cut out the commercials before making a DVD if you have one of the combos with a harddrive. Can you also use such a machine to edit old home video tapes before recording to the DVD? I have a Mac G4 and at present have to go from the VCR into a sony DVMC DA2 to go (anolog to digital) into my Computer. I think I'm loosing quality and the quality isn't great in the first place (old 8mm film put on VHS tapes). i want to edit these, make chapters with titles and bun to DVD and get the best quality possible. Any suggestions out there?
I've recently bought myself a Liteon 5005 from Argos (£110-ish) and can record programmes to DVD-RW, take them to my computer, rip them and then edit out the adverts before adding menus and burning it back to DVD. The format seems to be compatible and easy for my PC to deal with. DVD Decrypter, MPEG-vcr, TMPGEnc DVD Author, and a burning program like Nero will sort you out!
Thanks I was wondering about that. someone on the Mac forum said that it was extremely difficult edit from a DVD because of the compressed format (MPEG-2). that didn't make much sense to me and i'm glad to hear someone is doing just what I was considering. How is the quality? Do you know of any way to enhance old film put on VHS as it is transfered to the Lite On?
I've found a copy of the guide which helped me out while I was starting to do this - http://www.dvdguideuk.dsl.pipex.com/dvdguide/editing1/editing1.htm It goes through how to get files to the PC succesfully and editing them. I believe you can 'de-mux' the file to get raw streams which can then be processed and cleaned up in something like Virtual Dub, and 'frameserve' the images to TMPGEnc Converter in the correct format. Its all a bit tricky and takes hours though, the original recording would have to be something really special to warrant doing this. Plus you can always rip your recordings and clean them up at a later date, should you want to.
When you are editting movie files that are compressed (ie mpeg2) the computer has to do much more work in uncompressing the image so you can work on it and recompressing it to save the finished movie back to the hard disk. Some applications can save only the modified parts of the movie which can save on processing time. There is also degradation of the image with continual re-compression. Whenever I copy from VHS to my PC I always store the video in avi format which is uncompressed. It will take up a lot more space on the hard disk but there is no loss of quality while editting the video. The conversion to mpeg is done just prior to copying the finished item to DVD. This will give the best quality although don't expect great results from bad VHS video.
