DV for Dummies resource?

[wmansir]

Hi guys,

I'm getting a MiniDV cam for my mom for Xmas, but I know nothing about it. Now for me I could read here and use these cool free tools and stuff, but my mom can barely print color photos from her digicam. I'm looking for a resource to walk thru the basic stuff and perhaps some program recommendations. I picked her up a firewire card and she has a CD burner which I will eventually upgrade to DVD, but perhaps not soon.

I looked thru the links and FAQ stickies but did not find anything really appropriate. Of course I realize this place is much more advanced than what I'm looking for, which is why I was hoping for an alternate resource recommendation.

[jggimi]

Your mom probably needs a single application that can capture DV, edit it, encodeit , author a disc (VCD, SVCD, DVD), and burn (CD/DVD). You might try walking her through one of the commercial "consumer" tools, such as Ulead VideoStudio. Most of these have trials available, and are all around US$100.

[bb]

I guess Pinnacle Studio is very appropriate for beginners because of its user friendliness. But note this: to do video editing your mom will have to learn much more than what is necessary to print photos...

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[wmansir]

Thank you for the responses. I will check those programs out. I really don't expect her to do any fancy editing, but I would like her to at least be able to do a strait transfer from tape -> DVD. From what I have been reading some of the consumer programs come with a wizard type interface for simple stuff like that.

[DDogg]

wmansir, I might get some kickback for this, but look no further than Windows Movie Maker II (for your mom). The present version is actually, and I know this is hard to believe, quite good, useful, flexible and robust. Perhaps more importantly for mom's, it is about as beginner friendly as it gets while offering some extremely handy features.

Oh, another program all moms, sisters, and other PC challenged folks should have is Photo Story 3 (free) - A bunch of digital snaps and a few clicks can accomplish what it took several thousand bucks of pro grade software to do a few years ago. http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/digitalphotography/photostory/default.mspx

Click on the "See it in action" links - bottom right, one of them is simply one pic zoomed and panned - Kinda Ken Burns in a can :)

[bb]

wmansir, I might get some kickback for this, but look no further than Windows Movie Maker II (for your mom).[...]
You'll be surprised, DDogg, but I second your advice :)
Windows Movie Maker 2 is indeed very user-friendly and easy to use. But you have to take care that you don't output everything in WMV format...

Although it's a little off-topic: I recently used PhotoStory 3 to create a nice show for some of my friends. All was done in a few minutes, using mainly standard settings. The automatic background music generation is awesome, if you ask me. Again the small drawback: it uses WMV (these free tools from Microsoft seem to be WMV marketing tools), but at least you can generate output which is optimized for DVD creation.

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