HELP! Holiday Video Editing!

[Queenie]

A few months ago I transferred our home video from my digital camera onto the computer and I want to make it into DVDs for us, friends and family. The only problem is all the files are HUGE! The 13 minute video of Illuminations is 2.85 Gigabytes alone, a 29 second clip of the Hulk Coaster is 104Mb!! Obviosuly they won't fit onto DVDs, unless I used hundreds of them!

They're all in avi format right now - I used Sony Vegas to transfer them from the original tapes. I've tried using software to put them into other formats like Mpeg but it takes hours (literally a 15 minute clip was telling me a time of over 10 hours to convert - I just can't do it that way.)

Anyone got any ideas what to do? I want them on DVD before we go on holiday in Sept as I'm afraid to record over the tapes. My original plan was to make the DVDs up with menus so I could eaily find anything without having to trawl through hours of film, but I also wanted one "play" button on the front menu that would just play it all in order - anyone know if that's possible?

Thanks!

 

[bazzanoid]

You could create the DVD image using a bit of 'standard' dvd software, such as Sonic's MyDVD, try to restrict to about 3 hours of footage per disc.

Save the image to hard drive rather than burning straight to disc. It'll take up a huge amount of room on your hard drive, and then you can use a program such as ElbySoft's CloneDVD to take the image file and crunch it onto a standard DVD5 recordable.

Once successfully recorded (and checked thoroughly, of course, for both the purposes of actual checking and the enjoyment of watching), delete the image to free up disc space.

 

[Queenie]

Sorry but that may as well have been in Chinese - no idea what any of that meant!

Basically I have about 5 hours of footage on the computer, this is all in clips varying from a few seconds to 20 minutes. The size of all these together is almost 70 Gigabytes so no matter what software I use that ain't gonna go on a disc or even 2. I tried making a DVD using "Sony DVD Architect Studio" with a few clips the other week. There was maybe an hours worth of stuff on there using smaller clip sizes - it took over 20 hours to render and burn. It's rediculous, I just can't figure out how to put it on a disc. Whenever I try just doing it with the files as they are now the programme tells me I can;t burn it as it's too big for the disc. My blank DVDs are just under 5Gb each - at that rate I'd need 12 just to get 5 hours of footage on!!!

Sorry, I've just been trying to do this since October and it's starting to get me very upset as I spent a lot of money buying a camera, cables and a DVD Recorder drive.

 

[bazzanoid]

Sorry Queenie - I tend to forget a lot of people aren't techy!!! I blame the crowd i hang around with (translation: the gimps here at work)


I would recommend splitting your 5 hours into 2 lots, so maybe have a think about what clips you want on each disc - 5 hours won't look very pretty on one disc in terms of visual quality...

 

[dazeddaisy]

What you have is DVD quailty images, or uncompressed mini DV footage.

You nned to compress the footage by either changing the file format or doing it at the end with your chosen editing software. This will take time, there is no short cuts about it. Doing it the way bazzanoid is exactly the same thing, but you will have no control of image quality and it will eat into the sound quailty.

What you are best off doing is editing your "home movie" and when its complete see if its possible to put onto 2 dvds. (about 4G each dvd) and then editing it down by changing the compression ratio.

There is no short cut way to lower the size of your movie and it will take time from an hour to many hours. That all depends on what you are compressing it too, and your computer.

All editing software will do it, its just a matter of personal choice. (i like final cut pro and avid, but they cost £££)

 

[Richard Bruvofetc]

I use Pinnacle software. Once you've done all your editing the software will compress your finished footage onto a dvd. I usually limit myself to 1 hour per dvd.

Depending on the "power" of your computer, the processing and burning could take 5 hours.

 

[jockey]

I use Pinnacle software. Once you've done all your editing the software will compress your finished footage onto a dvd. I usually limit myself to 1 hour per dvd.

Depending on the "power" of your computer, the processing and burning could take 5 hours.

I have also used Pinnacle, I found it to be the most stable on my PC! Very user friendly too!

 

[timlewis]

I agree with the others Pinnacle is good - I would recomend upgrading your RAM if you are going to be doing this regularly and a large hard disk - the bigger the better (I have about 400gb +) and at least 1GB of RAM. Ram is pretty cheap these days and will dramatically speed up your processing even more than a newer processor. I would also keep the master tapes - just buy new ones they really cheap - better to have originals for backup vs price - If your disk crashes etc. etc. you could lose all those holiday memories !!! (The tapes will be in full quality - your burnt DVD's will be compressed so not truly masters)