I am a digital camera user. I do not own a DVD burner. I have recently burned some video cds from AVI files (640 by 480 and mostly 8 fps) Of course, the results when played from the DVD player on the tv set were poor - jerky and very low resolution, but at least it's something that can be shown to a group in the living room. Will the results be that much better if I buy a DVD burner and create a DVD from the same clips? I am planning to upgrade my digital camera to one of those improved hybrid digital cameras which permit 30 fsp video with sound and better quality video. Do most users of digital camcorders burn to dvd's or is it more common for users to connect the computer/camera to the tv set? Is suitable software for burning DVD's generally included with dvd burners or with those cameras? If not, is there any good dvd conversion freeware out there?
The best quality you are going to get from yours or any other camera is the original format that the camera records in. So if you have to do conversion to make it play on a certain media then you are going to degrade the quality of the picture. So if you were to take those AVI files and Convert them to a DVD compliant format the picture isn't going to look any better, but slightly worse. So the best advice here is to get a camera that will record at higher quality and you will get better quality. You can't make a poor picture better, but you can make a poor picture worse.. It looks like you are headed in the right direction with a 30fps camera much better than 8fps.. The only advantage you would have with a DVD writer in your case would be the amount of video you could put on it about 5x more which you may need with the new camera?
Thanks for your comments. I read somewhere that VideoCD is 320 by 240 (approx), so I was thinking that conversion of 640 by 480 clips to VideoCD reduces the number of pixels by 1/4. If this is the case and DVD format is closer to VGA resolution, I was reasoning that a DVD created from the same files would look a lot better. Is this so? I have been downloading and looking at lots of clips from various digital cameras online and I notice that, although all the clips are all 640 by 480 at 30 fps, some look a lot better than others - generally the ones from more expensive cameras (higher MP ratings). Evidently there is more involved than just the number of pixels.
