I'm having lots of subtle problems with DV in general and can't believe that I'm the only one that has encountered these issues... but the readily available software that I have demo'd all seems to have serious shortcomings. REQUIREMENTS: #1 - I need to be able to set a size limit to break the raw capture footage up into sub 4.7G files so I can burn them to DVD-Rs. (can't save everything on HDD cause I'd have terabytes of data and recapturing it seems quite silly) #2 - The system should be able to capture an entire DV tape without ANY interaction. These 1+ hour tasks are going to be done while I do other things and I don't want to babysit software. #3 - The render process must be able to seemlessly connect scenes that were separated in the process described in #1. #4 - I don't want to repeat the "scene detect process". It seems like this info should be storable somewhere, even if it's not IN the avi file itself. The process takes WAY too long to do it EVERY time I need to use that footage file. SOFTWARE ISSUES ENCOUNTERED: Roxio MovieCreator does a fine job on capturing (automatically breaks file into 2G chunks) and scene detects during capture. Unfortunately it seems it doesn't build decent DVD menu's... so I gave up on it. NeroVision Express 2 came with my DVD burner. At first the software seemed awesome... but I was only tinkering. I downloaded the Nero 6.6 Ultra Demo to get NeroVision Express 3 so I was at least evaluating the most recent version. I ran into major problems with Express 3 not being able to capture video to a FAT32 filesystem! This is unfortunately necessary because I share that drive with a linux install (for large disposable data files) and can't be bothered with NTFS for that purpose (perhaps my install was corrupted or something... I intend to cleanly uninstall Nero 6 and install 6.6 from scratch again). If I do break down and use NTFS for capture storage, my DV tapes come in as a single 12+ Gig file which I can't store anywhere! This violates #1 I ditched Express 3 and went back to Express 2 to see if that would capture to FAT32 and it did... so that is what I've been playing with since.... Unfortunately, when it hits the 4G FAT32 limit it just STOPS capturing. So now the capture process is time consuming and interactive... violating requirement #2. MY CURRENT WORKAROUND: I'm using MovieCreator to capture to get the manageable AVIs. Then using NeroVision Express 2 to edit my video. Unfortunately this means I need to spend forever "scene detecting" my AVIs since nero didn't capture them! Then I edit in Nero and author my DVD. I haven't done much yet because I don't want to waste time with software that won't be a long term solution... MY IDEAL SOLUTION: #1 - Capture with file size restrictions (user specified) and automatically generate multiple files. #2 - Scene detect during capture and save it in a "scene file" along with the AVI so I can move/rename the data together. #3 - Editing seems fine in Nero. #4 - The DVD authoring in Nero seems nice... Roxio's software couldn't even handle chapters! I find it hard to believe that anyone would write software without these features unless they've never even tried to use the software they've created! Does everyone else just capture footage from multiple tapes and spend hours getting everything pulled in and then make the video and delete all the raw footage? Is there software out there that meets my type of requirements? The promo info for all the software I've seen makes lots of vague claims with typical marketing hype, but never gets into these details... so I'm left looking at what I can demo free, or see on friends computers. I would be disgusted and furious if I paid good money for software and then found it had these shortcomings. What are other people doing to manage the volumes of data this process generates? Sorry this got so long... but I wasn't able to express this effectively in 2 paragraphs Thanks for your insight! -Russ
don't know what your budget is, but your real "ideal solution" would be to get yourself Adobe Premiere. You can capture all your DV footage, easily edit, render, and even export directly to DVD. Also, why do you want your capture files to be under 4.7 GB? Those capture files are in AVI DV format, DVD uses mpeg-2. Your 4.7 GB AVI DV capture file doesn't have anything to do with your DVD export. Just capture the entire tape, which is usually 12.6 GB, and Premiere has a built in mpeg encoder, where you can select your compression ratio, and define how much data/footage to store, then burn directly to DVD. When capturing in premiere, you can set in/out points in the tape, so you don't have to babysit it when capturing. Like I said, I don't know what your budget is, but Adobe Premiere Pro will EASILY take care of all your capturing, editing, and exporting problems.
