I've got a load of MiniDV tapes to put onto DVD. My camcorder is a Sony DCR-PC101E and has firewire connection. I've connected it to my PC and am using Nero 6 to capture. Now before I embark on this exercise I want to be sure I'm getting the best quality. Nero comes with some wizards to do this stuff so I choose the one for making a DVD. It seems to capture at 25fps. The resulting DVD is OK but not fantastic (or maybe I'm expecting too much). My questions are: 1) Should I be capturing at a higher rate than this ? 2) Should I capture in AVI first, then convert afterwards ? 3) Are there any special Nero options I should look out for ? Thanks for any help.
Hello Ricster, Standard NTSC broadcasts are 29.97 fps, so if you fall under the US NTSC standard, I would say that 25 fps is too slow for smooth video. I am uncertain about the fps settings for PAL if you are overseas. You should always capture in uncompressed .avi format, then you can use Nero's Recode 2 to convert to mpeg2 and then burn to DVD. I don't use Nero to capture or author, as I prefer Adobe Premiere Pro and Encore for those duties, but the process is pretty much the same. Good luck, T
I don't use Nero either. I suspect that it's encoder isn't much good. Capture in AVI then edit then convert using something else and see if it's better. I use Video Vegas for capture editing and re encoding which gives excellent results.
Yes, I'm in the UK so it's PAL. Nero tells me that 25fps will give about 1 hour of high quality footage on a DVD. That sounded similar to the HQ on commercial DVD recorders so I was assuming that was about right. I'll up the frames and see what happens.
Ah, that's what I needed to know. Thanks. General question - how should the results compare with playback from camera to TV ?
Should look pretty much the same. The usual mistake is to encode top field first (DV is bottom field first) The other mistake is to think that what it looks like on the PC is going to be what it looks like on the TV (PC monitors don't do interlaced very well)
