[Mulderator]

Originally Posted by daynascreate

I started off with what is called DVD Express. It cost me $77.00, and it came with the ADS Tech Box, which you can plug up RCA cables to the back of. It works great!!! I have done many videos with the box, including videos from my VCR. It came with these softwares-Ulead DVD Moviefactory 2 (which is great, and alows you to make menu screens.) And also with Ulead Video Studio 7SE,(which is also very neat, because you can add 3D effects with it.) That is a great value for the price. You may can find it cheaper on the internet. I bought mine at Wal-Mart in December. All you do is hook it up to your USB port, and install and you're ready to go. I have also bought Pinnacle Studio AV/DV, which is a capture card for the PCI slot, but you have to have a Sound Card with A line In available for your sound. That comes with Pinnacle Studio 9, which is a great software also. These are just some suggestions.

I purchased the ADS Instant DVD + DV which has the capability to capture from DV as well, so you can capture from a VCR or your digital camcorder via firewire. I used it to capture all my home movies to MPEG-2 on my puter. Very good product--I would highly recommend it.

http://www.adstech.com/products/intro/products.asp

[Michelli]

Is there anyway to make a movie shorter? I wanted to let my friend borrow a movie I got on DVD, but he doesn't have a dvd player or DVD rom in his house, so I need to put it on a VCD so he can watch it, but the movie is 707 MB, I need to drop a couple of MB so it will fit on a 700mb CDR. Any ideas?

Also, I thought because it is an .avi now, do I need to have it encoded to an MPEG-1 before I can burn it as a VCD and have it work in a DVD player, just in case? Thanks in advance

[Mulderator]

I wanted to update this thread because there is finally a product that does a good job encoding to MPEG--an external hardware encoder so this is the product/method I would recommend:

http://www.adstech.com/products/USBA...p?pid=USBAV702

With the above, you can encode MPEG in real time directly from a VCR or camcorder to the hard drive. With that, you eliminate Step 2 in my guide (encoding to MPEG):

If you have a digital camcorder, this is the same product with a firewire port:

http://www.adstech.com/products/USBA...p?pid=USBAV703

[Mulderator]

Originally Posted by Michelli

Is there anyway to make a movie shorter? I wanted to let my friend borrow a movie I got on DVD, but he doesn't have a dvd player or DVD rom in his house, so I need to put it on a VCD so he can watch it, but the movie is 707 MB, I need to drop a couple of MB so it will fit on a 700mb CDR. Any ideas?

Also, I thought because it is an .avi now, do I need to have it encoded to an MPEG-1 before I can burn it as a VCD and have it work in a DVD player, just in case? Thanks in advance

You can split a portion of the movie out with this:

http://www.honestech-e.com/us/product24.asp

[Michelli]

thanks mulder.

[yandupalli]

how to post new thread.
i have a valid account on this site.
plz help

[sldwaa]

I have experimented with different software and hardware to burn from my mini-dv camcorder disc to to various formats. As I have lived in both the US and Asia, I have experimented with VCD, DVD, PAL, NTSC, etc... In my humble opinion, I have always found the conversion process to be the limiting factor for clarity. Hardware conversion is typically better than software, but sometimes you have no choice. Now that I am back in the states, I have experimented with the Sony DV Direct (VRD-VC10) DVD burner and find it has extremely good clarity in converting from mini DV tape to DVD. You can direct burn from the camcorder to the DVD burner while bypassing the PC. The disadvantages of this burner is that is only connects via S-Video or AV cables form the camcorder to the burner (no digital), and that to direct burn, it only uses DVD+R, and not DVD-R (I have not found this to be an issue as of yet on any DVD player I tested the results on). Also, if you direct burn, you lose out on some of the editing features you would have using the software configurations recommended in this thread, and you cannot preview the results unless you use RW. So, my question is, for the $230 price of this burner, should I keep this burner to convert my mini DVs to DVD, or should I go back to the "3 piece" strategy recommended at the start of this thread to allow for maximim flexibility? I am also curious if the recommendations in the into thread will ultimately have the same clarity of this "direct burn". Many thanks to any consideration given to my questions...

[Mulderator]

Originally Posted by sldwaa

I have experimented with different software and hardware to burn from my mini-dv camcorder disc to to various formats. As I have lived in both the US and Asia, I have experimented with VCD, DVD, PAL, NTSC, etc... In my humble opinion, I have always found the conversion process to be the limiting factor for clarity. Hardware conversion is typically better than software, but sometimes you have no choice. Now that I am back in the states, I have experimented with the Sony DV Direct (VRD-VC10) DVD burner and find it has extremely good clarity in converting from mini DV tape to DVD. You can direct burn from the camcorder to the DVD burner while bypassing the PC. The disadvantages of this burner is that is only connects via S-Video or AV cables form the camcorder to the burner (no digital), and that to direct burn, it only uses DVD+R, and not DVD-R (I have not found this to be an issue as of yet on any DVD player I tested the results on). Also, if you direct burn, you lose out on some of the editing features you would have using the software configurations recommended in this thread, and you cannot preview the results unless you use RW. So, my question is, for the $230 price of this burner, should I keep this burner to convert my mini DVs to DVD, or should I go back to the "3 piece" strategy recommended at the start of this thread to allow for maximim flexibility? I am also curious if the recommendations in the into thread will ultimately have the same clarity of this "direct burn". Many thanks to any consideration given to my questions...

Actually, until recently, I could not find a hardware encoder that did as good a job software encoders. You could get good ones, but they are very expensive--anything inexpensive did not work as well. But MPEG encoding has come a long way.

I personally don't like the idea of burning home movies to DVD. I would recommend using this external hardware encoder:

http://www.adstech.com/products/USBA...p?pid=USBAV702

I used it to encode all of my home movies to MPEG on one 200 Gig hard drive. The qaulity of older analog recordings is not as good as todays digital, so you can record it all at the lowest quality setting and get about 100 hours of video stored on a 200 Gig hard drive with virtually no loss in quality. For higher quality digital recordings, you can use a better quality or a best quality setting, but the files get bigger of course. Then just play the videos directly on your television using a media DVD player with network connection (they'll be lots them coming out).

Why burn to DVD? You have to catalog everything and DVDs are a much less reliable storage media. I just pop up a menu on my television and select whatever home movie I want to watch--all of them are right there at a touch of a remote. Burn all your old movies to a hard drive, buy another one and back them all up and store it at work or a relatives house so in case of fire, you won't lose all your movies.

I was very pleased with how this worked. I'd just pop an VHS-C tape into the a VCR and record it directly to the hard drive with real time MPEG encoding all in one step. Before doing that, I was all set to record all of those onto DVD and I am so glad I didn't. In fact, I bought 50 DVDs bulk for that purpose and have them sitting in my closet collecting dust! I'll use them all eventually I guess!

[Mulderator]

I'll tell you what else I don't like about burning DVDs--there are more variables, which means more potential problems. You have the issue of the DVD burning software, the DVD burner and the DVD media. DVDs quality varies among brands and even within brands and DVD burners can be good and bad and of course you can have problems with the software used to burn the DVDs. There is a lot more consistency with a hard drive in terms of writing files then writing to a DVD. It is not unusual for me to have problems with the DVD playing correctly. When I burned all my old movies to hard drive, I did not have one glitch. Try that burning 50 DVDs!

The other nice thing is you can use all your old movies to make video productions--burn that onto a DVD to send to Grandma--she'll love it!

[Speedracer1]

I have been using Ulead's MovieFactory 2 SE for about a year to convert my analog Hi8 tapes to DVD and had no problems. I use LeadTek's WinTV2000 TV Capture card. It has been about five months since my last "movie" and when I started to capture my video, it ran for about two or three minutes then posted a notice that it could not create a capture graph (or something similar involving a graph), advised me that the captured file was corrupt and was being deleted. Since that occurred, it will not even begin to capture a single frame and posts that same notice every time. I have experienced a couple of instances in which I got a blue screen with a notice of a device driver conflict and my system crashed. I have not installed anything new onto my system other than the standard Windows XP updates (other than SP2, which I have not installed). When I tried to capture the video in Nero 6.2, the picture captured perfectly, but no audio was capture. I can find no reason for this. Do you have any suggestions for resolving either or both of these problems? I have uninstalled the entire Ulead suite and reinstalled it, but that did not solve the problem either. Also, I have run AdAware and Spybot Search & Destroy to removed all instances of adware, malware, etc. and did not provide any relief. Thanks in advance for any help you may be able to provide.

[Mulderator]

Originally Posted by Speedracer1

I have been using Ulead's MovieFactory 2 SE for about a year to convert my analog Hi8 tapes to DVD and had no problems. I use LeadTek's WinTV2000 TV Capture card. It has been about five months since my last "movie" and when I started to capture my video, it ran for about two or three minutes then posted a notice that it could not create a capture graph (or something similar involving a graph), advised me that the captured file was corrupt and was being deleted. Since that occurred, it will not even begin to capture a single frame and posts that same notice every time. I have experienced a couple of instances in which I got a blue screen with a notice of a device driver conflict and my system crashed. I have not installed anything new onto my system other than the standard Windows XP updates (other than SP2, which I have not installed). When I tried to capture the video in Nero 6.2, the picture captured perfectly, but no audio was capture. I can find no reason for this. Do you have any suggestions for resolving either or both of these problems? I have uninstalled the entire Ulead suite and reinstalled it, but that did not solve the problem either. Also, I have run AdAware and Spybot Search & Destroy to removed all instances of adware, malware, etc. and did not provide any relief. Thanks in advance for any help you may be able to provide.

I would try a repair of Windows. But you should post this in as its own thread--this is really not a good place because it will get less attention here in this thread.

[wolfworx]

Wow! I thought I was the only one having problems with the movies I burned to DVD. Now it seems I'm having less problems than others.

My inxepensive DVD player ($35) has very few problems playng the DVDs and CDs I burn. I have stopped putting labels on my DVDs so my CD Stomper is gathering dust.

Recently a movie that played fine on my DVD player would not play on her unit. Her computer drive could read the DVD so we copied the data to her hard drive and burned another another DVD from her computer. The resulting DVD ran without problems on her DVD player!

[rubeckf]

I'm also a real newbie on this stuff and not sure if my problem is related to this or something else. I posted a separate thread last eve but have gotten no comments. I can copy a DVD on my computer with my plextor DVD/CD copier but then it won't play on my VCR/DVD player recorder on the tv which is a toshiba. I can copy one on that off TV, like a concert or something and it won't copy or play on my computer. They both say they use the same type DVD's and what I used for both is DVD-R DVD's. I also want to copy some of my old movies from VCR to DVD. Is there something special I need to do to get them to play? I haven't tried that yet. Then after they are on DVD I would like to copy some of them on my DVD copier on my computer. I use Roxio Easy CD/DVD creator 6 platinum. Thanks for any help with my problems.

[twink]

Hi guys. Another newbie.
I have a rather large collection of old vhs tapes dating back to the early 90s that I am interested in trying to figure out how to digitize and consolodate onto DVDs. Aside from some analog problems with capture (all tapes recorded on my sony tv/vcr combo have serious problems with tracking when played on my other vcr--and my other vcr is the only one that has "out" slots for rca cables) I am curious about what the best method for high quality capture would be.

I have number of different programs I can use for this (and am not afraid to purchase another one if it's better) but generally stick to either Windows Movie Maker or Wideo Wave 4. My capture method is USB Video Bus which is an external USB plug with RCA and S Video connector capability.

So far what I "know" is that I need to get the video captured in .avi format to start with. The issue at hand is that it seems like no matter how large size file I go for when capturing video the end product always ends up rather pixelated and washed out and grainy.
For the most part, a lot of what I am capturing was recorded from rabbit ears network tv so it isn't the highest quality anyway but I am hoping that the finished product looks at least comparable to the original. Thus leaving me without guilt when I tape over or throw away the original at some point.

So the question is, to get to the point, is there a trick to capturing from VHS to digital without the unsightly "computer" look?
And then once I do that, I'm gathering I need to get it encoded. But should I just leave it in .avi and then encode it from there? I'm not really well versed in that process yet.

Thanks for the help.

[Rusty1952]

rubeckf, when u say that u can copy a dvd to ur computer using the Plextor I assume u r meanin that ur ripping the dvd to the hardrive ? If so, are u usin a ripping tool that breaks the encryption such as Dvd Dencryptor or a comprable ripping tool ?