Digital 8 to DVD Conversion

[Azurik]

I have a few tapes recorded from my Sony Digital 8 camcorder that I would like to convert to DVD. If possible, my ideal would be a lossless transfer if that wouldn't pose a big problem.

I guess I need help on what kind of conversion would I use... things along that line. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

 

[rudder]

What is the model of your camcorder? I have an older sony camcorder that I just connected to the PC via firewire and dumped the tapes. There are plenty of cheap or freeware programs out there to save it to whatever format. I am trying to remember the model number. Videohelp.com has a lot of good links.

 

[Severian]

I have always captured my Sony digital camcorder tapes (via Firewire) with WinDV to uncompressed AVI format, around 13gb per hour. Then I feed the AVI into Pinnacle Studio Pro, add transitions and chapters, and convert the whole thing to DVD. I do use some freeware like VirtualDub for editing out segments. There are a lot of other choices out there, like Adobe and Sony's proprietary software; Pinnacle crashes all the frickin time, every version I've used, but nothing else has its functionality. I've also used TMPGenc Plus to convert OpenDML AVI to MPEG2, then feed that stream to TMPGenc DVD Author, if all I need is chapters and not transitions.

There is no lossless transfer, because the DVD format uses MPEG2 compression as its standard. However, your video is likely 720x480 @29.97 or 23.97 FPS, which is identical to the MPEG2 specification.

Good luck

 

[gsellis]

Adding... Your best quality will come with video at 1 hr in length at data rates of 8000kbps. Using TMPGenc or the GUI from Pegasys, you can run dual-pass VBR with AC3 for the best fit above 1 hr. I use VBR all the time, so I forget if TMPGenc does dual pass CBR.