How to burn holiday video to DVD

Is the Camera Digital or the old format. Old format is a pain, Digital is difficult unles you have the proper software, but reproduces perfect .

LHN,

I have a Sony DVD camera which came with some bundled software. I haven't used this but purchased Ulead Video Studio 9 - great software. It is easy to upload to computer, although I use a USB2 connection to do this.

The video footage doesn't look that flash (about 85%) on the laptop - but when it is finished and burnt to a DVD the playback on TV is 100%.

Also does the 16:9 (?) ratio (widescreen) which makes DVD's look pretty flash.

If you haven't got USB2 or firewire you may need a capture card - this may come with it's own capture software.

Ulead video studio 9 or 10 are both excellent bits of software they will allow you to edit your video, add music add titles and burn the finished product to a DVD.

I prefer using firewire to transfer video from camera to PC, if your PC does not have a firewire port you can add a firewire card for about $40.

DVD quality can be variable and depends on the settings you use when creating the disk. One of the factors that will affect the final quality of the DVD is the amount of footage on the Disc, the more you try to fit on the disc the more the video will be compressed and the lower the quality.

You should be able get 1 hour of footage on a DVD at the highest quality, however a digital hanycam that uses DV tapes uses an uncompressed format for storing the video, DVD uses a compressed format. Compressing video takes time for a computer to do well. Some software packages try to speed the process up and the end result is lower quality video.

Some packaes have the option of doing a two pass render which takes twice as long but gives a better quality in the end.

Get some DVD rewritable disks and experiment.

Cheers

Hi LHN,
You may have a couple of issues here.
Firstly, Windows Movie Maker in XP is fine for what you want to do.
You may have a poor video card that limits your input/output.
You may be using low res output settings for your DVD export.
If you don't have options to export to DVD using Mpeg-2 you may need to put up with your export quality or get a better vid card. To get TV quality output you need 720x480. This will be a large file, and without USB2 or firewire, I am not sure how you could manage it.

Simply if your hardware is up to it, use "High quality for playback" using DV-avi encoding with Mpeg-2 (mpeg-2 is the "standard" DVD encoding used with all commercial DVD's).
The reason your handicam may look better, is there is no encoding changes, and the resolution should already be at 720x480 (or thereabouts depending on widescreen issues)

PS, I have used Adobe Premiere for years using a dedicated Capture and edit card and gave Windows movie maker a go when XP SP2 came out. I was surprised at the ease and speed it offered for a standard system. I then used it for my quick & dirty edits and outputs. I also used the Ulead Video Studio and it works fine but not much better than WMM unless you buy all the extras.
Cheers Cam

Hi LHN

I down loaded from the web a 30 dsy trial version of the Ulead Stuido 10 and did the basiscs beofre spending the coin. Ulead reads far more video formats to make importing easy.

Is your DVD player a DVD burner as well or just a DVD player and CD burner??

Regards

Trevor

Try Pinnacle Studio V10. It is easy to use and allows you to create professional looking home movies. if your video camera is a digital format they you can capture straight to PC via a firewire card. If you are still using an analog format (8mm, Hi8) then you will need an analog capture card, I think one of the Pinnacle Studio products bundles an analog capture card with the software.

Take the opportunity to tell the missus that you just have to go and buy a dvd hard disc recorder and then use that.

And a plasma screen theatre sound system too of course (although I wouldn't bother with the latter, if I was doing it again.)

Ken

Thank you to everyone who has replied. I got a firewire card and the DVD's are as sharp as when burnt. I got Ulead 8 with the firewire card and it seems to work fine.
cheers and thanks again

I have put a firewire on my computer as I wanted the best quality picture etc..

I would say to you first though that you are getting your pics to the computer now so when you do the thing in Movie Maker save it to your hard drive as a DVI (Pal) format... then use a burning program like MyDvd to make the DVD..

I have not tried to make a movie with this yet although I have just finished a large photo slideshow with titles and credits and about 200 photos all edited and animated etc... the result looked very professional and the picture quality was great even on the 42" plazma tv although it was definitely clearer on the old 68cm Tv..

Hope this helps you out..