Please Help - Sup-8 & Dig-8 converstion to DVD Best Method/SW?

[tim_m2]

Greetings,

 

To start, I am very depressed for the last few days. I do not have the energy

to search various forums and threads on this topic and some of my setup may be

specific anyway.

 

I lost my 7 year old daughter in June. She was killed by a car. Hence, the

depression, no energy, and just don't give a darn attitude.

 

I have Super-8 tapes and Digital-8 tapes I want to get onto DVD.

I have a fine PC with 2 gigs Ram and a Audigy 2 Platinum Pro sound card to do

this with. It has a front panel with firewire and other inputs.

 

I have the Sony (Pixela) Image Mixer software. It will burn to DVD via an

upgrade. But I don't know if it is even any good, etc.

 

I can download/import to my PC and I have via IM. It ends up as .MPG format.

Is this MPEG-2? Thinking it is. Do I need to do something more to get it to

MPEG-2 if not?

 

I know I can edit in MPEG-2 and that is where I should do it. But again, I am

not sure if there is some better software or something that I should be using to

do this. I don't have a ton of money so I am not looking at $75+ software.

 

Any help, assistance, etc. is much appreciated. Thank you.

 

Peace and Blessings

[ted_chambers]

MPEG-2 is the final DVD format. It's designed to take up little space and is not a working format.

 

The basic steps in converting tape to DVD are:

 

1) Capture and convert if necessary (Digital-8 tapes will already be in Digital Video (DV) format while the analog ones will need conversion as well as capture)

 

2) Edit

 

3) Transcode from DV to MPEG-2 format

 

4) Author the DVD (basically involves setting up the DVD menu structure; the authoring program then packages the files for burning)

 

5) Burn the DVD

 

I'm not familiar with Image Mixer. Others may have an opinion on it, but if not I'd start with it and if you aren't happy with it you can always come back and ask for more suggestions. I don't know if IM handles all of the above functions, you'll need to check.

 

It sounds as if IM is capturing the tape okay. The editable format is Digital Video. It might have a .avi extension. The transcoding - a time-consuming step - turns the .avi file into a .mpg file which is much more compact, but not editable.

 

Hope this is comprehensible. If not just ask.