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.

hAVE you tried to split the job in question onto more than 1 cd so you get a better quality picture?----------------SILVERSURFER------------------------

I am interested in what you are saying but cannot see how that would improve it. Can you explain?

I have written it onto DVD which holds loads of MB, why would putting it onto CD make it better when it will have less MB even with 2 together?

Also if you actually meant 2 DVD's, I cannot see how I could increase anything that would make it take any more room. If there was a way to increase the quality and it meant it would take up more room I would be happy to do that as the quality is very important to me as I said above.

Do you think it will NEVER be great because I am starting with video8 and then showing it on a large screen or does that not really cause a quality problem normally?

Transferring to the Video Edit forum...

I think part of your problems came from using Nero. The length of time you say it took to burn means that Nero reencoded the video to dvd format. And your original source may not be the greatest quality once blown up to 720 x 480 resolution, assuming you are in the US and made it to NTSC standard.

I'd stick with the Ulead program throughout the process the next time you try to do this. Or just cut Nero out of the loop and import the DV-AVI files from WMM to Ulead.
Nero's encoding engine isn't the best available.

The only reason to cut the video in two is to reduce the amount of compression necessary to fit onto a blank dvdr. Without seeing the results, its hard to say if this is a reasonable step to take. And you could always set Ulead to output to a dvd-9 dual layer disk, assuming you have a fairly new burner that can burn to dual layer. If you take this route, only use Verbatim +R dual layer disks. They are still expensive per disk, so do not use any other type.