M<aking DVDs from a digital camcorder

[AllYourBase]

My Father want to make DVDs from his digital camcorder footage. Am I right in thinking I would need some sort of TV card for his PC, a DVD writer and a piece of software to link them all up?

Whilst the cards and the writers seem fairly uniform and standard in terms of price and features, there is variation in the sorts of software I can see that does this sort of thing. Can anyone reccommend a free or low priced peiece of software that could be used to make simple titles and index files for such DVDs? It would also need to accept the incoming data from the Sony camcorder.

[Mrs_Pegasus]

Most digi camcorders will come with the software to transfer to the computer.  Ask your dad if he has the instructions etc from his purchase.  I purchased a digi camcorder at Xmas and the Cd came with it.  On this will be all the drivers and a simple piece of software to enable you to make a simple copy.

Also have a look at the Sony website, there may well be the drivers and software listed there.

You will definitely need the drivers so the PC can recognise the camera.

[Ralph]

If you're using Windows XP, you probably have all you need, or very nearly. Have a look in your start menu for Movie Maker which comes with XP as standard. If you can't find it, go to C:\Program Files\Movie Maker and double click moviemk.exe.

To get the video onto your hard disk, you'll need a firewire cable, also known as IEEE1394 or frequently i.LINK on Sony stuff. You'll also need a firewire port on your computer, you can get a firewire PCI card for around �20 or less.

When you've got the camcorder and PC connected together and turned on, you go to the File....Record menu in Movie Maker and "capture" the video to your hard disk. You then add titles, a soundtrack and effects and burn it to a DVD.

If you haven't got Movie Maker (or want something fancier), I suggest you buy a copy of the Digital Video Made Easy magazine with the DVD on the front. They have trial versions of most of the main video programs and maybe even a free one or two.

Good luck and have fun!

[benalva02]

Aunsoft Final Mate, a great and useful camcorder assistant software, has everything needed to directly capture/backup AVCHD (*.mts, *.m2ts), AVCHD Lite, AVCCAM, NXCAM, TOD, MOD recordings from Hard Disk Drive/SD Card Camcorders to PC, to import, edit and create spectacular movies on a timeline. It is also powerful enough to play/convert native 1080 60p/50p footages and Dolby Digital 5.1 surround.

Powerful timeline-oriented editing features like split/trim video, splice clips, crop, do color correction, deinterlacing, replace audio, adjust volume, etc help you create satisfied film results. Merge/combine avchd (*.mts, *.m2ts), AVCHD Lite, TOD into only one file without any re-encoding or recompression.

Export/convert edited camcorder video to other editors (Sony Vegas, Adobe Premiere, WMM, Pinnacle Studio, etc), media devices (iPad, iPhone4, droid x, nokia n8, galaxy s, hdtv, projector, etc), or common formats (mov, avi, wmv, mp4, mpg, mpeg-2, etc) with the high quality and least amount of clicks. Ultra extreme performance with support for NVIDIA® CUDATM and Intel while encoding.

http://www.aunsoft.com/final-mate/