ps.
beachy said:
did i do right in copying the finished movie to the pc again or should i have gone straight to mpeg conversion and dvd copy, the reason i ask is it is only 50% done with another 180 minutes to go and it seems pointless copying again if it is not necessary.
If I understand you, you mean should you have resaved your edited video back to the PC?
Unless your software has a plug in for mpeg conversion (meaning you can launch that process from within it) you have to have your finshed edit as an AVI. WMM does
not
So the answer is Yes it
is nessesary even if it seems to take a while.
During your editing ,the software makes " references" to the originally captured video file and only creates new material at points of transition, video effects, titles etc.
After editing, the "new" video file then has to be created. This process combines the ( unaltered) parts of the originally captured video with the edited ones to form a new video ( the edited one) This is called rendering : The onward conversion from avi to mpeg is encoding. So if you start as avi and end up with avi, you have rendered your effects etc. If you turn this avi to mpeg you have further encoded. With MM2 you can only render back to your newly edited avi as it has no built in mpeg encoding ability.
It is this newly created (edited) avi file that you import to nero vision or uleadVS9 (your originally captured one still remains your HDD)
When youve imported this edited version avi into nero or ulead for encoding to mpeg2 ( for DVD) mpeg 1 ( vcd). you have one more step to making a Video DVD
Burning finished mpegs to a DVD in thier "raw" form will produce a data DVD with videos playable on the PC but not in a DVD player.
The creation of a DVD video playable in a DVD player is called DVD authoring. Typically a DVD video is made up of a structure readable by DVD players containing menu(optional) and chapter points for navigation and the video clips themselves.
Nero Vision and Ulead VS can import video files ( avi or mpeg) , encode( or rencode) them and turn then into DVD videos as an all in one process but it is important to know that encoding to mpeg2 need not nessesarily be followed immediately ( or at all) by DVD authoring.
In your case as a firstimer it is better to allow the process of going from newly edited avi via mpeg to dvd authoring to occur simultaneosly like that in logical sequence but as suggested above , leaving it overnight and going to bed hopfully finding it all done in the morning!! ( it does take time and even more so with a PC with only modest amounts of grunt)
HTH ( a bit longwinded....I know
)