First time user, here, and aptly named at that. New to a Sony handycam
(DCR-DVD308 DVD Handycam® Camcorder DCR-DVD308) and have four 8" 1.4GB dvdr disks with 1/2 hour (approx.) of footage on each. The camera comes with Nero 6 bundled. I thought it would be easier to burn all four disks onto one or two 4.7GB 12" DVD's. Is there a way to copy all the video_ts and audio_ts folders and burn them onto one CD (assuming proper space allows)?

Thanks,

I'll transfer this to the Video Edit forum, after a few words for starters.

For a DVD disc to be recognised properly as a DVD-Video by a standalone player, there can only be one VIDEO_TS folder on it (and strictly speaking, an AUDIO_TS folder too). Hence you will have to extract the footage from all four camera DVDs, combine them under one VIDEO_TS folder and index the different parts as chapters before burning to disc.

This is not a straightforward process, but can be made easier for someone new to camera editing and DVD authoring by using a good all-in-one application such as Ulead DVD Movie Factory. There's a month's free trial at their website here:

http://www.ulead.com/runme.htm

There are a few different ways of doing this. One was as IMKIDD suggested. The other is to use an mpeg or vob editor.

I see that you are new to this video stuff. You can save yourself a lot of headaches, by spending some time reading/learning about video capture, editing, authoring, at www.videohelp.com, and if you have a question about terminology, you can go to wikopedia. Spending a few hours reading and learning now, will save you far more hours down the road.

Since you have Nero, you can merge all those together using Nero Recode.

Tutorial here...
http://www.dvd-guides.com/guides.php...name=recodemix

Recode, NeroVision, and many other similar tools, will re-encode the video with a loss of quality. Better to use an authoring tool that does not re-encode.

You're not the first one to mention DVD authoring over Re-encoding, but to be honest, authoring with both DVDLabPro and TMPGEnc left quite a bit to be desired. Demuxing and then remuxing led to audio sync issues and didn't improve the video quality over Recode, DVDShrink, and definitely not better than DVD Rebuilder.

The conversion program that I use to convert certain files to DVD compliant format (1ClickDVDMovie) uses the MainConcept Encoder and also encoded videos that was atleast as good as the authoring programs you refer to, AND no audio sync issues.

So while you feel thats perhaps best for you, it was nowhere near worth it to me. Certainly not DVDLabPro for $200 bucks.

You can use DvdReMake Pro to join multiple mini DVDs together while maintaining original menus. The quality output is the same as the original. And it is cheaper than most authoring software. But then again, its functionalities are different than others depending on what you want to do.

If you don't care about menus, use DvdShrink to join.