1. I've captured my home video using a Bungee and encoded it as MPEG-2 using Pinnacle's TRex. 2. I then edited it in Movie Maker - it's about 1.5 hours with 8 MP3 tracks attached. 3. When attempting to save as AVI (DV NTSC), it says it will require 20GB of space. I've searched through numerous postings and it seems possible to encode using DivX to create a compressed file. Is this true? Is it reasonable to expect it would compress from 20GB down to less than 4.7GB? If so, how do I do this? Is there a way to hook the DivX encoder to the Movie Maker save process, or would it require separate steps? Secondly, I'm now saving it in Movie Maker to a WMV file. I hope to convert the WMV to AVI, then burn it to DVD. I expect there will be some degradation but I don't know how much to expect. Sound reasonable? Sorry for the long-winded spam and thanks in advance for any help. Jay
I just realized I didn't state my end-goal. I'm trying to burn my home videos on to DVD-R after editing them in Movie Maker. Jay
You'll want to encode your movie using something like DivX or XviD Easily down to the <2GB range. There's a quick step-by-step here: http://www.hazza.dsl.pipex.com/faq.htm#VIDEO No idea -- you should be able but thats just me guessing (check for an option somewhere to change the video codec) There is degradation when you (a) make the initial WMV, (b) convert to DivX/XviD and (c) when you encode to DVD however if you play things carefully, it will be negligible
I finally got back to this and the info provided is awesome - thanks. But I still haven't been able to use the compression. At this point, I'm able to capture the home video using an ADS DVD Express device and the included software. I then use Roxio to edit the video and burn it to DVD. Here are some of the issues I'm still having - please help if you can but it's less critical now that I'm at least able to burn DVDs - 1. Using Roxio Video Edit, I can't burn the production directly to DVD-R. I have to burn it to DVD-RW, then use a disc copier to get it to DVD-R. When using the disk copier, I have to set the speed to 2x despite having a 4x disc and writer? Any ideas? 2. Often times, my file is ~2GB but it says there's not enough room on the blank disk. 3. I've been able to use the VirtualDub to compress the video to AVI but I've had no luck finding a software that'll burn that AVI to DVD. I've worked mostly with DVD Creator which seems to pretty much suck. It always errors out telling me to depress the speed even when I'm trying to burn at 1x. My key priority at this point is to find a way to edit in Roxio, save to MPEG, compress using other software, then burn to DVD. Sorry again for the long-winded spam and please let me know if you have suggestions. Jay
NeroVision Express(NVE) will convert your AVI and burn them. It will also allow you to create chapters and a menu for them with a chance to preview all (with a software remote control) before you burn. This gives you a chance to go back and change anything that doesn't suit you. It is in the Nero Ultra 6 package.
