Mini DV's to PC to DVD?

Your problem is NERO! It compresses too much and does it poorly.

You need to transfer the video to your PC as perfectly as possible. Non-compressed!

Nero will compress and force whatever you have to fit a standard DVD, no matter what it takes.

Get Pinnacle 10 or Ulead Media Studio Pro. They will transfer your tapes to the PC in RAW uncompressed raw format (AVI).

From there, you can use Ulead MediaStudio PRO, or Adobe Premiere, to edit and create an MPEG-2 (*.mpg) which is what is used to make a standard DVD.

Use these software programs:

- Ulead Media Studio Pro (Capture/edit video)

- DVDlab Pro (Create DVD menus & VOB files)

- Nero Burning ROM (Make DVD video from VOB files)

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NOTE:

When using Ulead, you have a choice between CBR and VBR. Always use CBR!!!! You can control the size of the MPG-2 file, by changing the bitrate. I use 6,000 kbps, sometimes 9,800 for super quality. You can use 5,400 for average stuff, and it still looks good.

It's not your original source it's the Codecs for making the DVDs.

First understand Mini DV is rated at 530 lines, while a DVD is rated at 480 lines, so you are losing about 10% in quality. Also DVDs use MPEG compression which is higher than AVI compression, so you are picking up extra artifacts.

But the DVD should look close to the original AVI file.

So maybe you need different burning software or Codecs.

I had good luck with Nero. It took my original AVI files and automatically turned them into very nice DVDs.

I also had good luck with Video CDs in another program. While my DVDs look slightly better, the VCDs weren't bad and played on some DVD players.

But do understand there will be some quality loss. Especially noticable on things like titles or dates embedded into the images. AVI files will be somewhat crisp and sharp, while DVDs turns out a bit soft.

Should that be mini DVD or mini DV? If it's mini DV (tape), then you must have converted your avi video captures to MPEG at some point - have you converted them to DVD standard MPEG2? It's possible you're converting to MPEG1, which isn't great quality, or MPEG2 with the wrong settings. If you could describe what you're doing in more detail, I could give you a clearer answer.

You need a Firewire (IEEE1394) port installed in your computer. Then get a firewire cable that hooks that camcorder with your computer. Irregardless if you have a tower or a laptop, they sell firewire cards for both. This is easy to do, I own 3 MiniDV tape camcorder and have one dedicated as an all time webcam, make the best webcam you can get. Then use the import feature on your NLE to import the video. I use Pinnacle Studio 14 HD ultimate to Import my my MiniDV tape Camcorder footage to a hard drive, either on my computer or LAN. Then when I close the import feature of my NLE, it puts the video i just transferred onto the project bin of my NLE. From the project bin, I can just click and drag this footage to the timeline, where I can edit, ad effect, transitions, titles and what ever else. Then I can make a DVD by clicking Make Movie, set ti to make move, put a blank DVD into my drive and click make movie tab, it renders and makes a DVD for me. Simple to say the least. I would offer to do this for you, but the problem we have is, you tapes will not play good in my camcorders, I have seen this swapping tapes between my 3 camcorders. So I decline from doing this for you.