I am looking for advice on software to edit my movies on High8 and Digital8. I currently have Dazzle to capture, any reccomendations?
Well what I am actually doing currently is capturing with dazzle, then editing the capture in Nero 7. When I do it in Nero7 it converts to an MP4 but its captured by Dazzle as a VTS DVD File, I am concerned I will loose quality after editing. I am doing a test burn of the edited files that are in MP4 to see if it plays good on DVD players. Should this be a concern or am I being Anal?
generally speaking, you should be doing all your editing, adding text and so on in its native or base format. Once all the editing is done, that is when the conversion takes place and is finalized into a format that is useful to you. In terms of losing quality goes, you are quite right. MP4 is a lossy compression and therefore you are losing a tad upon the conversion. Since I don't know the program (dazzle) I can not comment but if you are going to be burning these 20 years worth to DVD, do a few test runs and decide if the quality is acceptable. If you go from camera to VTS file and then to MP4 for editing, I would assume that you then are going back to VTS in order to be able to be burned as a DVD. You may try a basic movie editor package like DVD movie factory, that does all the work and then saves the project to a DVD a bit better. One more thing and this is fairly important. Since we are talking about 20 years worth of home movies and all this effort, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE, use a good quality DVD media as the final burn. I would recommend using TY or Verbatim media and no other. Good luck
First off I want to thank everyone for helping, this is a pretty big learning curve for me, and I dont want to regret any of this hard work coming up. I purchased the Pinnacle 10.5 Titanium edition and spent 4 hours trying to load it onto my computer. After many computer crashes and searching their database for help, I gave up and downloaded a demo of Ulead's 10. Its a shame because I would have loved for the pinnacle software to work. I will probably purchase the full program today and play with it a bit more. The software prompts to capture to AVI is AVI a good format?
HEy EFFEDUP, First of all, if you have Digital8 I would not use the Dazzle box. Just connect your camcorder to a Firewire port. This way you will retain original quality. The files will be DV-AVI and about 13Gigs per hour, so you need enough space on your hard drive. Next use any video editing program and always keep working in AVI until the very last step where you encode it to MPEG-2 to burn it to DVD. You are not the only one with that experience with Pinnacle, compatibility is an issue with them. Ulead has nice programs and it may work OK for you. But of you really want to kick it, go for Adobe Premiere Elements. It is a derivative of their professional package Premiere Pro and offers excellent value for the $99. The only drawback is that you need to take some time to go through the learning curve, but once you mastered it, the sky is the limit...
is this the program you are talking about? Photoshop Elements 5.0 Plus Premiere Elements 3.0 by Adobe I never thougnt of using a firewire, hope its on my xps700, and hopefully I can still find the cord (lol)
You don't need Photoshop Elements, but Premiere Elements. Photoshop is for images, Premiere is for Video. It's here: http://www.adobe.com/products/premiereel/ But if you also want something to work on your images, Adobe gives you a good deal if you buy both programs in one go.
