Page 1 of Digital Camcorder--to--VCD ?

Hi all.
Anyways....Had the pleasure of purchasing myself a new "fandango" Digital Camcorder, and with that my thoughts turn the practical uses for such a device, and more importantly a way enlightning the family and friends with the resultant festive shenanigans by means of gettin it on to disc and fire it it into the old DVD player.

Does anyone posess the know-how for this one...

Idiots guide please. ( I may wish to try and explain it to someone !!)

Thanks In Advance.

The best site I have found for this kind of info is http://www.vcdhelp.com
Should tell you all you need to know

Also have a squiz at
www.321studio.com

I need to copy some Dv tapes to CDR as well in the very near future. I know about VCDHelp but do not have the time to trawl through the site and experiment to get the best results. I have firewire on my PC, and would like some advice as to the best software and settings for the software to enable me to make VCD`s from my tapes.

Thanks in advance,
Steve..

Firewire.....right....?!
OK I ahve heard of it, is it a new Graphics card or part of one ?

Cripes..Am i able to do anything without it ?

I have software i got with the camcorder but this is...wooooahhh...

Feel free to set my ways...

OH, And a Bloody Great New Year to ONE AND ALL !

I have a bit of knowledge about this having tried it earlier in the year. I don`t have a firewire input and given the precarious nature of my PC (sneeze and Windows crashes) I bought a Dazzle box i.e. camcorder inputs through a black box into a USB port. This came with MGI Videowave 4 software which handles the film and you can edit etc.

I then burned the VCD using EasyCD 5 Platinum. It took a while and it worked BUT as my PC is only a 450 AMD KIII (no laughing at the back please) it can`t cope too well with video and I found that it only downloaded 1 in 10 frames.

The software seemed fine only the hardware let it down. No doubt my new 5.6ghz chip with a 1024 GB hard drive will handle it well enough but by the time I get that we will all be dealing in holograms ;-)

Sorry I can`t be too specific on your query Steve but I`m always willing to impart my little knowledge and, it seems humiliate myself in the process!

Pete

Rigger,

Did you get a wire that plugs in your camcorder and one of your computer sockets?

If it doesn`t plug in your PC then you can buy a kit to install yourself or try the big softie cheapo option that I did (above).

And a Happy New Year to you as well!

Pete

Thankyou Commrade.

I did get a USB cable.....
The camera is capable of takin " email video clips " and " digital stills " this i have been able to transfer across.....

Think i`ll have to look at the kitz..Looked in Amazon, and saw one for about £ 30... we`ll see, but thank you very much for the Gen.

Steve.

Pete,
Thanks for the input I was checking some thing on my PC and found I have a programe called Power Director pro which I think will let me input the film. I can then use Nero or the writer that appears to be supplied with Power Director to see what sort of results I get. Other than that I`ll have to see if I can get Videowave 4.

Steve..

The main gotcha for recording the VCD is that the low-level format of the disk is different: it isn`t the same as a CD-ROM. Back in the early days of video on CD, there were a couple of Anime films which were put on CD-ROM as VCD-compatible files, and they don`t work.

So older CD-burner software is no good. Current versions of Nero work fine, but the MPEG conversion untility provided is not all that good. It`s better to do any re-sizing and encoding with other software. There`s been a couple of giveaways of video editor software on coverdisks.

If you do digital still photography, you can put that onto VCD as well. I know of two programs which can handle this, and they work in distinctly different ways.

The Ulead software uses the VCD still-photo resolution, which is close to that of DVD. The UI is a bit basic, it`s a fiddle to adjust slide-show length to match the music, and you can`t get fancy transitions between pictures.

The Magix software avoids all those problems, but the fancy transitions mean that it has to record the show as a VCD movie, halving the available resolution.

The info available suggests that SVCD is better for movies if your player can handle it, but many can`t. What I`ve seen about "MiniDVD", which is a DVD file system on CD-R, suggests that it`s a format best avoided. Hardware players often can`t spin the CD fast enough, and it isn`t any sort of standard.

Properly created VCD is a safe format. Putting the MPEG data onto a CD-ROM will lose playback on standalone hardware, but is a good backup. Older DVD players don`t seem to support SVCD.

Getting the video data into a computer -- that can be the hard part. :(