Copying camcorder video onto dvd-r

[rollers333]

Not sure where I should post this, so here goes...

I recently got married and a friend videotaped the ceremony. When he transfers the footage to his computer using xp media center it's in window's media player format, but it's around 7 GB... I want to take this file and be able to put it on 4.7 GB DVD-R's, is this possible and if so are there guides of how to do this?

Thanks for the help in advance,

Morgan

[video_magic]

Hello, here are the basic steps of what you need to do:

You need to connect your camcorder to your PC - i.e. connecting it by cables to some kind of video capture card, or some camcorders can connect to firewire.

In your capture program, you will want to capture the video to an AVI using a lossless codec (this compresses the video picture information without losing any detail to achieve the smaller file) such as Huffyuv or Lagarith. You probably should capture your audio as stereo PCM wave file (16 bits, 48000).

Then you can encode your video to DVD compliant mpeg-2, and your audio - if you need to compress it- to dvd compliant AC3.

You would then put your mpeg-2 video stream (*.m2v) and your ac3 audio stream (*.ac3) , into an authoring program together with a menu or chapters information if you wanted, which would produce a DVD set of files which you would burn onto a DVD recordable disc.

Here are some links:
From the main doom9 page http://www.doom9.org/ click on 'GUIDES' on the left menu.

Check out these programs
AVISYNTH - this can serve the frames of your captured avi video into an mpeg2 encoder to produce an *.m2v mpeg-2 video stream for your dvd. It works on very easy little scripts (like just 1 or 2 lines) which you save as a small text document with an *.avs extension, and you open that little *.avs file in your encoder rather than the original AVI video file
visit www.avisynth.org

There are several programs to encode your captured avi wedding video to mpeg-2 for DVD and also lots to encode your captured wave audio to ac3 for dvd, so check these doom9 forums - use search

[jggimi]

The edited footage is now in WMV format, capture assistance won't help. Rollers is looking specifically for WMV -> DVD-R.

If you search with keywords "wmv dvd" you'll find this has been discussed before ... for example:

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=97046&highlight=wmv+dvd
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=95603&highlight=wmv+dvd

And others.

There are commercial products such as Ulead VideoStudio (30 day trial available) that can do this, also.

[video_magic]

Oh yeah :o - sorry I had got caught up in the thread title

rollers333s' friend is probably better off re-capturing from the tape to lossless AVI, and then encoding to mpeg-2, - rather than going from his existing WMV to mpeg-2, because of the quality (assuming the wmv was captured lossy).

Additionally, he is better off re-capturing at the video resolution which he will be using for DVD - also so he won't have to reszie and lose more quality - same sort of reason for capturing the audio at 48,000.

If he were to use his WMV however, I think you can often use that with 'directshowsource' in AVISynth, and a few other parameters depending on the type of WMV.