I'm very much a novice on this topic. I have a Sony Digital 8 camcorder and want to store my tapes on a CD or perhaps a DVD. I have Pixela's Imagemaker software that can transfer the tapes to my PC in mpeg or avi format. Which format is better, avi or mpeg? Should I create a CD or a DVD? I don't know where to begin. Any suggestions would be appreciated!
Capture to an AVI file using either the HuffYUV codec or one of the available MJPEG codecs. These are available for download if you look around; HuffYUV is "lossless" and free; MJPEG is nearly lossless and inexpensive. Then use TMpegEnc to encode the AVI into MPEG-2 format. Then use a DVD burning program to create a DVD.
First of all, forget that poor-quality Pixela Image Mixer program. Capture your video via WireFire instead, you'll get your video in DV format. It takes up lot of space on you HDD, so be prepared! After that you can use commercial SWs like Adobe Premiere or ULead Video Studio (they both can be downloaded for trial) to export DV to either VCD, SVCD, or Divx. But you can also use a freeware VirtualDub to convert your DV to Divx and split big AVI files to multiple CDs. Good luck!
Instead of Firewire, can I used USB 2.0 ? Thanx for your help. HDD space isn't a problem but thanx for the warning.
Yes, you can use USB2.0 as well. One thing you may need is Sony USB driver. The reason I recomended WireFire is that you can get a card for almost nothing (mine costed $20, although the cable costed nearly the same amount), and if you use XP, you have nothing else to do except to plug the card in, and start uploading from your camcoder.
I suggest using adobe premiere 6.5 to capture at dvd resolution then you can edit it to do anything you could possibly want to do then use ulead moviefactory 2 or vegas to make yourself a menu and burn the guy...2 simple steps, no problem.
