I am new to digital camcoders and i know the basics. Connect it to pc via firewire and save it as mini dv file. Then use something like windvd to edit it and again save it in mini dv file because it offers best quality. Then use something to make vob files out of it like winavi and burn it to dvd. But what i want to know is which program is best for special effect? You know, adding different backgrounds and stuff that wasnt there while i was filming? Im looking for something fast and easy to use for a newbie. One more question: when i use windows movie maker it offers me to save the file as mini dv-it gives best quality, but when i use intervideo windvd creator it only offers to save the file as high quality dvd mpeg. Are those files same in quality? If it gives less quality then win movie maker then its better not to use it!! p.s-intervideo creator only offers to burn vcd and not dvds?why? I got that program with my sony camera. -Whats better roxio easy media creator 7 or serif-movie edit?
What you need for that is a decent video editing program. There are many of those around varying from quite basic (like Windows MovieMaker) to very sophisticated (like Adobe Premiere Pro). Waht is best for you pretty much depends what sophisticated things you want to do and how much money you want to spend. A listing of companies active in digital vide editing can be found at: http://www.digitalvideoclub.com/siteinfo/suppliers.php At that site you will also find a review of a couple of editing programs. Anyway, if you want to do sophisticated stuff, be prepared to spend a couple of days behind your PC to go through a learning curve. Your second question:. Saving in DV-AVI gives the best quality, but it takes a lot of disk space (13GB for one hour) and is not very suitable to play on a PC. It is merely meant to store it back on miniDV tape. To create a DVD you will have to encode it to MPEG-2. MPEG-2 is more compressed than DV-AVI. But you can set your own compression rate (bitrate) which than determines the final quality. Although quality of MPEG-2 will always be less than the original DV-AVI which you captured from tape, if you use high bitrates (say around 8000kb/s) and a decent encoder you will hardly see any difference on your TV screen.
