New to video editing, advice sought.

DoubleCheese

DoubleCheese

DoubleCheese

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So, I went on holdiay and took an old DV camcorder along with my D200. Captured 3 tapes worth of footage and now I want to get round to editing and putting it on DVD for family.

I have two PC's, and XP box (C2D @ 2.4Ghz, 4Gb RAM, soon to be W7 when the disc arrives) and an A64 3700+ CPU with 2Gb RAM and Win 7 RC.
I've captured the tapes onthe XP box with MS Movie maker as it has Firewire then copied the video over to the Win 7 machine to edit with MS Live Movie Maker.
The first tape was about 13Gb of AVI and it took at least 3-4 hours (I left it going overnight in the end) to make into a DVD. Being new to this, is this typical or is something wrong? The DVD quality wasn't anything near as good as the DVI capture. I expected some IQ loss due to compression, but not that much.

I'm currently trying to edit all three tapes into one "movie" of the main parts of the holiday and I'm dreading how long it'll take. Each capture is about 11-12Gb!!
So, what can I do and use to get good quality DVD's? Is it Software related for good image quality and the slowness is due to an incapable single core CPU?
 
Definitely stick with the C2D for processing as its faster, dual core (IIRC Movie Maker will utilise both cores) and has more RAM, don't think the OS would really make that much difference. You didn't mention what res/bit rate your DV cam captures as, this may make a bit of difference in the processing stakes. I haven't worked with DV stuff so can't comment.

Personally before letting it all chug along creating the complete DVD I would edit a chunk of say a few minutes and process that as a test run, that way you can see what settings produce the best quality without waiting hours for it to complete.

Windows movie maker is fine for basic work, more so than Live Movie Maker which I found ridiculously stripped down compared to the old movie maker, however I would try and invest in something like Premiere Elements or Sony Vegas as that would give you a lot more control over the production process, I use Vegas and found after a day or 2 of playing with it it is very nice to work with. Obviously if you are only wanting to edit this one batch and not do any further work in the future then the outlay on a dedicated app may be a bit too much.

Again I would say to do some test runs on smaller sections, and once you are happy with that then produce the whole movie with those settings.
 
13gb of avi down to 4.35 of dvd is going to make a huge difference in quality, you're losing nearly 2/3rds of the data.....in my experience, MS live movie maker isn't the fastest or best program, quality does take a massive hit, and it's slow....
If you're going to do this a bit, invest in a program, you'll appreciate the speed increase, I'd reckon more like 2 -3 hours to encode something from 13 gig to dvd...
 
12 to 13GB of footage per hour of video in true DV quality straight from the camcorder is about right , it will be compressed and turned into vob files after encoding and put onto DVD . You want to use a decent video editor program as a good starting point .
I like Vegas and have versions 4/5/6 and bought Movie Studio [Platinum Edition ] when it was only £24.99 from Amazon .Generally I use Pinnacle 9 as it is VERY good at capturing . Have used this for years and have never had a dropped frames yet from either my Panasonic or Sharp cam's .It is 'simples' to use and will capture , edit and include , transitions, effects and titles then write the whole lot directly to disk without any trouble . Of ,course there are lots of other progams to try , Ulead for instance and another favourite of mine by Serif . The serif one is also very good , Movie Plus 4 or 5 are great and you can do some really good effects like picture in picture and use overlays very easy with these programs , the downside is you need a third party program to put your work onto disk . However the programs are supplied with the software ..........SonicDVDit and is very easy to use , producing good DVD's . The latest version of Serif's editing program was X3 and I thought was diabolical and now refuse to use it .
So, take alook around the net for prices , but if you want to quickly capture , edit and put on to a DVD without to much effort I would recommend Pinnacle .
 
Thanks for the replies, this is turning into a mine field!
So Windows Live Movie Maker is pap and I should be using something else.
I'm looking at the Pinnacle SW on that rainforest site and was wondering whether The MovieBox 12 Plus (I have to grab some video of an old camcorder too) has decent software bundled with it or is it just cut down versions?
 
a 4gb file in full frame avi from a camcorder is approx 20 mins max hence 1 hr = 12gb

windows movie maker will chop edit cut it no slower than the pinnacle cheapo stuff, in fact it will prob be faster as you will render adding starts/stops/background music etc etc in pinnacle.
personally sony vegas is very good for video i think.

a simple way would be use vdub/avi chop to chop it up in to the files you want and add them together then encode this in to vobs. if you use direct stream copy in vdub settings you wont loose any quality at this point, you can then keep the new files in order together and then bring them back in to windows movie maker etc. then make menus and add background music if you wish.

windows movie maker is not as bad and as for encoding it would appear you may have other utils grabbing all your system resources ,,when you ready to encode reboot close all stuff you dont need and let it work from there.
 
to throw my 2 pennies into the mix ..... I've started using "CyberLink PowerDirector 8 Ultra". On AVI files it can upscale the footage to near HD + loads of lighting/tweaking effects to make your movie look professional.

My home DVD of my summer holiday to France looked stunning using this software.
 
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