+Doc+

Whats the easiest way to get Video Camera images (about 2 hrs of film) to DVD without losing quality and size etc?
I`ve connected my video camera to my pc but the file sizes are enormous and take ages to process, when they have processed they seem jumpy and the quality has suffored.
Any ideas?

lightning101

DVD - required MPEG2 compression and 2 hours of film would be about 4.3 gigabytes approx at 720x576.

You need to recompress or lower the resolution, using an encoder - most are free off the net.

Scooby Dooby Blue

Are you using firewire to connect to your PC?
If it onboard or a dedicated firewire card?
What format are you capturing the video in?

The converting to a DVD is the easy bit, it's the ensuring you're optimising the cature that is a bit more complex

GC8

Without a doubt, the best way to do this with both analogue and digital camcorders is to buy a DVD+RW video recorder. They cost just over £200 now and you can capture and record from any source in real time; the quality is superb, certainly better than Ive ever seen achieved by using a PC. Dont be tempted by DVD-R or a DVD-Ram device though; they are totally inferior to DVD+R kit.

Simon

Gizmo555

Ditto GC8

Bought a Philips DVDR75 which has a firewire connection in the front for connecting to camcorder.

Also use it to archive off Sky+

Cheers

Mark

Nimbus

GC8,

Why do you say that DVD+RW is better than DVD-R / DVD-RAM? the quality depends on the equipment used for the encoding rather than the disk type. You can achive very high quality results with a PC encoder. You just need to use the right one and know how to get the best from it.

Depends what you want to do I suppose. If all you are after is a quick capture and basic authoring (no menus or fancy titles) then maybe a DVD Records is the thing to get. If how ever you want to start creating proper DVDs with titles, menus etc then you need to use a PC and DVD software. There's lots to choose from. Again, depends on how involved you want to get.

I think you will find that most (if not all) are not free.

Mr Gee

Is your camcorder Analogue (8mm etc) or is it Mini DV ?

+Doc+

Thanks for the advice people very helpfull.
In the end I opted for a DVD recorder so I can record Sky films, old videos etc onto DVD seemed the easiest and most economical way (as I got one quite cheap).
Thanks again.
Doc

GC8

Nimbus; if you re-read my post you will see that I have not said that the standard has anything to do with quality, what I said was: "Dont be tempted by DVD-R or a DVD-Ram device though; they are totally inferior to DVD+R kit" and they are. Go to http://www.dvdplusrw.org/Article.asp?mid=0&sid=3&aid=11 to see why.

Iain Young

What a strange review. I've written tonnes of dvd-r discs and they play in every dvd player (both standalone and computer) that I've tried them in.