made first DVD video and need some guidance

[happyhero]

Hi I have old camcorder tapes which I am hoping to transfer to DVD. They are Sony Video8 tapes. I transferred my first tape to WMM thinking that this program would be for making movies for DVD. I spent hours and hours editing adding music and transitions fading the music in and out and cutting some short. Seemed like a great program. But when I got to the end you can imagine how I felt, oh no what do I do now. Anyway after loads of reading I got hold of Nero essentials and Ulead 11plus.

Quality was very important to me so as advised on the net I saved a copy of my project on the HD as a DV-AVI which made a huge file of about 13GB.

I then used Nero to burn it and was surprised that it took over 2 hours to burn. I also added a menu or title screen in Nero.

Quite happy with the result, I played it on a Panasonic DVD onto a 42” plasma but I can’t say it is the best it could have been.

What has lost me the quality and what could I improve on for my next one?

Are any quality losses due to the fact the video came from video8 in the first place, or does WMM lose some quality or is it as good as any other program ( maybe I should have done the whole lot in Nero or Ulead but WMM is very friendly to use and I think effects are easier in it).

Or are there any settings I should have set to improve quality of visual and sound i.e. I keep seeing settings for 5.1 but I don’t actually have 5.1 at the moment so should I select it for better audio or not? There are some setting which I don’t know what they would do or maybe you have some tips or tricks to improve things?

On the net I read to make the movie with DV-AVI the way I did if using WMM but I also read something about using Huffyuv (no idea what that is)?

If I had done the whole thing in Nero or Ulead from the start would it have somehow started with a better quality or not?

In Ulead and Nero I found altering the added tracks much harder to fiddle with than WMM which I find amazing as they surely are the more powerful programs. And I had lots of trouble trying to add mp3’s to my Nero slideshow I was playing with. It does not seem to like mp3’s unless I am doing something wrong.

Basically I want to just add jpegs and mp3’s and alter them all to bits and get really high quality, but maybe what I want is not quite right for best quality and you can educate me a little…. ……please.

Any help appreciated.

 

[breezer]

i use pinacle studio (8) does it all comes out very good

i think its the format change that did it

 

[happyhero]

Did you start with video8 or something better?

My new camcorder is miniDV so I hope that anything I do from those tapes will be better but at the moment I have many video8 tapes to do first.

Also what do you mean by the format change, ie where exactly do you think was the worst point for quality, was it using WMM in the first place (some say this doesn't help, I read) as I used DV-AVI the highest it could do and then wrote it to DVD with Nero, or do you mean when I wrote the DVD? Did it chenge the DV-AVI to something as it wrote the DVD is that the format change you mean?

Forgive all the questions but I am a beginner and hungry for knowledge on this subject at the moment, and always accused of wanting to know the ins and outs of a .....

 

[jj4091]

what was the quality like from the camcorder to the tv, I would not have thought that played at that size it would have been much cop anyway, but by the time you take into account the degradation at each stage you cannot expect very good quality from video 8. I use Hi 8 & by the time I have done the same as you then the results are a little disappointing. I'm afraid you are going to have to lay out some serious money on a good digi-cam if you are serious about the the quality of the results you get.