What else do I need????

[Jamsa]

I have a P4 1.4 PC with 256Ram, 40 GB Hard rive . Firewire and USB2 ports and a Gforce 2 Mx100/200 graphics card.
Can anyone suggest what else I should have to edit quality DV into DVD/SVCD?
I will be using a Canon XM2 , additional senheiser microphone and a good tripod.
Any advice appreciated................
THANKS

 

[Brian110507]

You need a capture and editing programme, if you have Windows XP you will have Windows MovieMaker, check your PC if you have version 1 you need to upgrade to version 2, you can do this for FREE by going to the Microsoft website and downloading it.

Unfortunately MovieMaker 2 will not create SVCD's or DVD's so you need an encoder and CD burning package, try TMPGenc for encoding and Nero for burning.

To burn SVCD's you will need a CD burner and to burn DVD's you will need a DVD burner. *Most* DVD burners will burn CD's but not the other way round.

If you prefer one programme to capture, edit and burn your SVCD/DVD have a look at Ulead VideoStudio 7, a free trial download is available at www.ulead.co.uk

you will also need to increase your hard drive size either by adding a second internal drive or by an external USB/firewire drive

 

[MarkE19]

You could also do with doubling the amount of RAM to 512Mb otherwise everytime you do any rendering it will take forever. Then you have the time it will take to encode the AVI files to MPEG before copying to CD/DVD. If you can afford it I would even suggest going to 1Gb.
To give an idea of how much disk space you will need - every 4 minutes of captured footage will take 1Gb of disk space. Therefore a 1 hour tape will take approx 15Gb and then you need to double that to allow for editing and conversion.
Another popular 'all-in-one' editing to CD/DVD creation prog is Pinnacle Studio and version 9 has just been released and is said to be a big improvement on v8.
Another good prog for file conversion and adding chapters and menus to DVD's is Ulead DVD MovieFactory 3. This will also create VCD/SVCD's. A free download is also available for this from the above link.

Mark.