Very Basic DVD recording Q's

RL

Hello,
I was wondering if anyone could answer 3 basic Q's for me regarding me recording my home mini videos onto DVD. I have recently bought the Panasonic DMR E55 and lots of DVD-R discs (as I don't need to edit/re-record these home videos and want to keep them as they are forever).

1) How do I get around the fact that all my mini tapes are 1hr and i want to get 4 onto a dvd (Long Play) but as I have learned, once I have recorded the first 1hr tape it wont then let me record onto the unused disc space. Is there a way around this and if not has anyone got any ideas for getting 4 1hr tapes onto a 4hr dvd.

2) Is it possible with home videos to have the mini screens on at the beginning showing different sceens to skip to as at the moment all I get is 1 mini screen with the beginning of the DVD on and all the others are blank.

3) Could anyone please explain finalising and if I need to do it or not.

Many thanks in advance
RL

Hanoijane

Hello RL.
You might want to have a look at some of the the guides here;
http://www.doom9.org/

If you are still not sure then you might get some helpful replies in the forum at that site.
Good luck.

shrek101

Well you could use Ulead video Studio. I use that for editing dvd content either from freeview to dvd+rw or from old video8 camcorder to dvd+rw. I normally pick the highest quality sometimes its a bit over the top and the bitrate could be lowered whilst maintaing decent quality.

Anyhow the problem can be with the amount you can get on dvd say 1hr, 2hr, 3hr ect. the more content the obvioulsy loose in quality.

However, although I havent done this part yet (well not with video over an hour that is) you can edit and or join video together with ulead video studio. Thsi program can directly read dvd content inc chapters and save them as smallish file sizes that can easily join them togther.

The only problem really is that video is so demanding ie decent processor 2gb+ and min 512mb ram. You also got to overcome the file size problem as windowsXp can use to different file formats that being fat32 and or NTFS. As video takes large file sizes usually greater than 4gb NTFS is the only way to go so make sure you hard drive is set up for that. If it isnt xp wont reconize files greater than 4gb.

The other problem you have unless you use dual layer and even then quality may suffer, is that 4hour is a lot of video quality for dvd-r+r without using a lot of compression then the quality will suffer so 2 hours on a 4.3gb dvd-r+r is about the max without considerable quality lose and I assume dual layer disks with be 8.4gb or there abouts.


The only other ways is to compress mpeg2 data which is dvd to mpeg4 but that uses compression but quality can be very good if done right, but problem with that is that most dvd players dont yet read these files and you need seperate programs like dr divx, tmpeng, or auto guardian and divx 5 codecs, XViD codecs if you want to go down this route.

Sorry I know it sounds complicated at times.

Woby_Tide

RL wrote:

Hello,
I was wondering if anyone could answer 3 basic Q's for me regarding me recording my home mini videos onto DVD. I have recently bought the Panasonic DMR E55 and lots of DVD-R discs (as I don't need to edit/re-record these home videos and want to keep them as they are forever).

1) How do I get around the fact that all my mini tapes are 1hr and i want to get 4 onto a dvd (Long Play) but as I have learned, once I have recorded the first 1hr tape it wont then let me record onto the unused disc space. Is there a way around this and if not has anyone got any ideas for getting 4 1hr tapes onto a 4hr dvd.

2) Is it possible with home videos to have the mini screens on at the beginning showing different sceens to skip to as at the moment all I get is 1 mini screen with the beginning of the DVD on and all the others are blank.

3) Could anyone please explain finalising and if I need to do it or not.

Many thanks in advance
RL

might be wrong or might not work but some suggestions

1) Set up a timer recording for 4 hours on FR seting(flexible recording), set it to record of the channel your camera will connect to(haven't done it myself but I'm guessing AV3 or AV4) as the timer recording starts, press play on your camera, when the tape ends cancel the timer record. Now set up a second timer recording, this time for 3 hours on flexible record. Same as before, after your tape ends, again cancel the timer record, now set up another timer recording for 2 hours, repeat as before, then finally your 4th tape needs a 1 hour timer recording slot, so you'll have 4 seperate programs on the DVD now

2) Following 1) you should have 4 seperate screens populated and you can choose your own thumbnail using the edit sub menu if you want

3) If you don't finalise, you'll be able to watch the DVD on the E55 only (probably, though some other recorders/PC's will probably be able to read too). Finalising will mean you can no longer edit anything on the DVD but it should play in 'most' normal DVD players as it is a standard DVD-Video now.

RL

Thank you all for your help - took me a while to get my head around some of it but it's all good stuff and I'm learning lots !