switchedcraigmageephotogra

problem is that really you need a hardware MPEG encoder to do it well. I've never come across any software that will capture MPEG without the need for a hardware compression board. Your right AVI tkaes up a lot of space but it's much easier and faster to encode with just plain software. It takes me about 20mins to encode 3 mins of footage into an MPEG2 DVD quality stream with LSX software encoder, so i dont think really thats its possible to capture with software alone properley if at all.<p>

I think the MAtrox RT2000 with capture MPEG, and at £800 is quite cheap for that function but obviously still quite expensive.<p>

A bigger hard drive is a much cheaper alternative. 40GB for 40£ at the last computer fair i went to.

Tape deffinetley, you'll only fit just under an hour of uncompressed DV footage on a DVD. Big films run for 3 hours or so on DVD's as they are compressed with a highband Mpeg 2 compression. so essentiall they are lower quality than the original DV footage or DVcam footage. Tape is a mch more productive format, it holds a lot more and can be used easily and quicky time after time. If the footage is really important i'd have removable hard drives and save the footage to those. DVD is a great format for giving people the final product, but it is compressed (realisticly you have to compress the footage down to get decent run time), its good compression but not as good as raw DV.

that would be a very expensive peice of equipment. i'd imagine youd still need a telecine machine (film to tape) and a computer, and a mpeg 2 compression board to compress more than 5 mins of footage.

there are a few places in the UK that will do cine to dvd but i cant remember any names. But why stratght to dvd?? shurley you'd want to edit your footage if your talking buying equipment. it's probably cheaper to have a company do the film to tape then final edit to dvd for you. unless this is going to be a huge commercial venture. MPEG 2 cards for instance are about £4000. and DVD writer is £3500.

You could buy a new mac 733 as these have dvd writers but apparently they take a long time to compress the footage as they use software compression. It does seem strange as to why you want film straight to DVD?

Give us a clue...!