I have been trying to make the best looking home videos possible for the last week and have been having good success except for the time issues. I have to get the videos off old VCR tapes. 1 hour transfer from VCR to digital camera 1 hour transfer from digital camera to PC via firewire(DIVO) 1 hour audio decompression in Virtual Dub 2 hours mpeg encoding(elementary) in Canopus .5 hours authoring in DVD Lab Pro 1 hour to compile video in DVD Lab Pro .25 hours to Burn in DVD Lab Pro = 6.75 hours of recording, encoding, decompressing, authoring, burning but what i get looks great. Does my method produce the best quality video i will get in the end? or will a simple product like Sonic MyDVD look the same?
Your method will produce much better quality The time seem about normal unfortunatley encodin/decoding video into DVD compliant files just takes time. You could maybe save an hour if you had a video capture card in your PC. This would eliminate the need for the digital camera, and if it was a really good card you could capture the vide already in DVD compliant files thus saving even more time. Looking at what you have though you are probably doing it the best way possible and if they are comming out great then the added time is probably worth it..
I agree with the responder on this. You can't just rip video onto DVD. It has to be done in real time. No matter the non linear (computer based) editing system you have, capturing the video, be it your method or directly through a good capture card is all done in real time due to bandwidth and other factors that preclude non real time capturing at this time. Now disc based material may be another matter (read DVD camcorders and the like) as those you could probably rip but most likely will need to be played/recorded in real time as well. The good news is that once on the PC, editing takes up much less time than tape to tape editors and therefore can be done much more efficiently and saves time in that respect.
Another suggestion. Get yourself a DVD recorder, such as from Panasonic or the like and record your video tapes onto that and then put that DVD into your DVD drive in your computer for editing etc. Just a suggestion. I'll be using that method too once I finaly get my friend's old 8mm video camcorder. I'll just plug it into the DVD recorder and go from there.
