Home movie to DVD problem?

[pete1336]

Hi all,
I recently bought a cannon 630 digital camcorder with which I'm using Pinnacle Studio 8 as my editing software. I am an utter newbie at this but I'm learning slowly and enjoying adding music tracks and transitions etc to family footage. I recently tried to burn (using studio 8) some mpeg and avi files to a dvdr. The footage was just over an hour and a half in length. When Studio began rendering it, I was told that it would not fit on the dvdr unless the quality was lowered. I agreed to this (not knowing any better) and the software told me that the quality was only 54%.
What I want to know is this. Once I've shot my footage and captured it to disk on my computer is it possible at any stage before I try and write it to dvdr to compress it without losing much quality? Isn't this what divx is supposed to be about? If anyone can point me in the direction of a good online tutorial I'd be grateful.
Many Thanks,
Pete

[vonhosen]

Quality of your output is going to depend on a number of things.

Firstly you want your footage to be as clean/high quality as possible.

There are a number of cheap applications out there that will lead all the way through from start to finish (capture, editing, encoding, authoring & burning). Your output is only going to be as good as your weakest link in this process.

Some people (like me) prefer to look for & use different quality applications for each of these processes.

When it comes to the what actually goes onto DVD (& you've already got your video captured) the MPEG encoder is going to have the largest say in what your DVD is going to turn out like (IMHO).

With some "all in one applications" encoding quailty & options for you to adjust the encode are where they fall short.

The actual filling of the disc for quality is a question of bitrate management. Your DVD doesn't have to hold one hour of video.

The better your encoder is, the lower you can go with the average bitrate, resulting in the more video you can get on at good quality.

[pete1336]

Thanks for your reply...so which encoder would you recommend?

[vonhosen]

Depends what you want to spend.

I use Canopus Procoder (it ain't cheap) which is a software encoder (& more besides.)

There are hardware solutions (again expensive) but if you are looking for decent quality budget encoders try demos or look at these



TMPGEnc

CCE Basic

MainConcept

[pete1336]

Ok, thanks for the reply...can I throw another question into the pot? The camcorder that I have is the canon mv630i. I can transfer to PC and back again with the firewaire cable and even record edited footage onto vhs with the cables that came with it. I'm struggling with recording old vhs footage onto the camcorders dv tape. I want to edit some old stuff on the pc and put it onto disc later. What type of cable do I need then to send vhs footage from my video recorder onto dv tape in the camcorder? IS it an s video connection?
Boy I'm confused.
TIA,
Peter

[vonhosen]

Unless you have a S-VHS recorder it won't have S-Video connections.

I'm not familiar with your particular camcorder but you would have to use either three phono to three phono, or scart to 3 phono, from the VHS recorder to the AV in on your camcorder.

[pete1336]

Thanks vonhosen, I appreciate your patience, anyone else able to help who maybe is familiar with the canon mv630i ?

[pete1336]

Ha, sorted it. Bloody hell, the problem was so simple....like many things...I just couldn't see it. The wife did in fact, not me...I always knew she was good for something