I have many footage on MiniDV and I would now like to burn these footage on to DVD so my friends and family can watch. I have managed to capture the footage using window movie maker onto my PC, however I have realised that it took almost 13GB. I was now wondering would it be possible to shrink this file and then burn this to a singular DVD without losing too much quality. I have used DVD santa using the Direct to DVD feature but when i tried to watch my footage it was in very bad quality. Is it possible to burn a 60 mins footage on to DVD where the quality is fairly decent. I have read other links such as http://www.digitalvideoclub.com but without much success. Is anyone able to shed any light. My Digital Camcorder is Panasonic NVS15EB, My computer spec is AMD athlon 3000+, 120GB HD, 512MB.
You certainly should be possible to do that. If you are putting one hour on a singel layer DVD you will not have fairly decent quality, it will be good quality. What you need to do is encode your movie with a good MPEG-2 encoder. As stated in this article, http://www.digitalvideoclub.com/basics/encoding.php , you can use a stand alone encoder or use a DVD authoring program that includes an MPEG-2 encoder. Stand-alone encoders in general offer better quality and three popular ones are TMPGEnc, Canopus Procoder Express and Mainconcept MPEG encoder. Mot important setting to look at when you use an encoder is the bitrate. For one hour of video you should set it at around 9300 kb/s.
Shahinali, buy yourself a copy of Nero 6 Reloaded. It comes with everything you need, as it contains a programme called Nero Vision 3. This has features very similar to Windows Movie maker, but also allows you to create a menu and burn to DVD. As long as you capture the video from your camera as either type 1 or type 2 DV you can burn upto 60 minutes on a blank DVD and I would defy you to notice any loss in quality from the original tape (certainly on a normal TV). You can also burn 2 hours and the loss in quality is still very slight. My one word of warning is Nero Vision also allows you to capture the video (therefore you have no need to use Movie Maker at all), but always capture as DV, never as 'DVD' video. When you do this Nero trys to compress the video real time to the MPEG 2 standard of DVD. It is not very good at this and I have found the video to be very jumpy. However once it has captured the uncompressed video (DV type 1 or 2), the programme can successfully convert this to the MPEG 2 standard perfectly well during the actual 'burn DVD' step as I mention above, but be warned that with the PC you mention, I would expect a 60 minute video to take 3 to 3.5 hours to process and burn to DVD.
TPFKAS, wallen69, I would like to take this oppurtunity thank both of you for helping me. Your help is very much appreciated. I have taken both of your advice on board, initially I used NeroVision 3 since I had this program already installed, the qaulity turned out to be much better than any of my previous result. I then decided to install a TMPGEnc, and straight away i have noticed a huge difference in quality, well to be honest it probably the same qaulity as my footage, very impressed. I will be completing my first footage on to DVD shortly and will let you know of my result. I would like to know which programmes you would reccommend for capturing, encoding and also editing. I dont mind them being stand alone programmes. Out of the encoders which one is best, TMPGEnc, Canopus produces express or Mainconcept MPEG encoder.
For capturing it does not matter which program you use. The quality will always be the same as long as you do a direct DV transfer over Firewire. There are even small freeware programs for that. Here you can find a small collection: http://www.digitalvideoclub.com/downloads/freedownloads.php For editing your choice is realy very large. It pretty much depends on what features you want, what learning curve you're prepared to go through and how much money you want to spend. This article may be of help: http://www.digitalvideoclub.com/basics/editing.php . At bottom of that page there is a listing of the best known programs. About the quality of the three encoders you mention: there is no general agreement on that. Different users have different opinions about the ranking. This indicates that the differences in quality are realy very small. Anyway, as long as you use these programs, more important for the quality are the settings that you use.
