Oh heck!
I have bought a camcorder DV and have installed the card on the computer. I can transfer files ok to the PC. Iam having a major drama transfering / recording the camcoder footage to CD or DVD on the PC. To play on the DVD player for the relies in UK.
Please can someone help in clear very non technical terms.
Thanks in advance Dolly

Hi dolly,

Did the camera come with any software e.g. nero or easy DVD creator ? You can use that to make a DVD with the footage or windows XP has a program built in called Moviemaker that you can use.

If you didn't get any software, when you plug the cam in, does windows detect it? If so it should ask you what you want to do e.g. make a movie.

HTH,

Andy

Hi ill have a go with movie maker. Its all very new to me! Thanks for your reply

no worries.

start moviemaker, it should detect the camera when you plug it in, then, press record and it will play the tape and record it. once you done the project you can then burn it to DVD. takes bleedin ages though !

andy

I don't think Movie Maker makes you a DVD you can play on a conventional DVD player, but you can burn the avi movie file it creates onto a DVD and watch that through your DVD drive on the pc.
Theres a really good site for Movie Maker at http://www.papajohn.org/

Good luck....

Dolly
I had the same problem and gave up in the end!
I bought a DVD recorder in the end (needed one anyway) and download direct to that from my camcorder with no problems.
Bloody computers!

Andrew

Making DVDs that will play in the "normal" DVD player is a morass!

I struggled for a year before eventually getting an authoring program that works - most of the time. The problem often occurs that the sound gets out of synch - it's to do with the time coding. Look on the net for free or free trial DVD authoring programs,

A very good editing program is VideoReDo: user friendly and intuitive - but you still need to author the files onto DVD with a program that makes all the DVD file formats. It's very complicated and I don't profess to know how it works.

Luckily I have a DVD played that plays AVI's, Mpegs and most things. Quite a few of them do now so if the people you want to see it can play AVI's you could use movie maker to create the AVI and then burn it with your standard burning programme.

I find movie maker a very unstable programme and likely to get out of sych...

Did your camera come with any editing software? - if so you will need to capture into this and then you can edit if you wish (tricky and time consuming but fun).

After that you can export the finished product into a file hopefully it will have an Mpeg encoder.

There are a few cheapish video editing software out there but they aren't very good for editing but probably good enough for capturing and converting.

A good editing programme like Premier Pro or Avid is very pricey.

good luck!

This program called "ConvertXtoDVD" will do exactly what you need. It does a very good job too.

ConvertXtoDVD

Before we emigrated we bought a camcorder to send movies back home, which we were informed by two shops definatley streamed as well as copied to internal dvd disc, so that it could also be used like a web cam like you see in shop windows.

Once here turned out to be load of crap. It burns to the dvd disc in the camera but unless you finalise that disc you can't move it to your computer so if you are only half way through it's a right pain.

Now it is mainly an ornamental camcorder, must start using it all those pounds down the drain otherwise.

I use EasyDVD Creator 8. Cost about £60, loads of programs in one for making DVD's, CD's etc.

Play the tape, record it thro the software, burn it. Plays on our DVD players no problem.

Andy

It's something to do with the file system ours uses. Sony Handycam when the dvd is uploaded to the pc is in mpg form and most programmes won't recognise that or change it to wmv to email. Don't think ours will stream to DVD recorder to record as it won't stream to PC. Have quite a few different DVD programmes and none of them want to touch it.

My aim was to be able to send them over net not just in post.

Thanks for all your replies seems its harder than first thought - Technology! Dolly

Try a trial version of VideoReDo - it really is easy to use to edit.

Friend of mine was doing some editing with one of these mini disc recorders..
This is what they did to fix it:

I used the software that came with it - I think it was called Pixela - to
capture the clips (note we - pluged into the USB rather then using the discs). If I remember correctly I captured into mpeg2 or at least
saved as mpeg2 somehow. Then I used U-lead Video Studio 7 to edit it as it
can handle the mpeg2 file. I think they have a U-lead Video Studio 9 now
which is probably better.

Video studio is nothing special but I got a copy free with my PC so it cant be that expensive,