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Horse-Racing-Tips
Forum Admin
764 Posts |
 Posted - 21 February 2006 : 11:17:45 PM
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Just got a Digital video camera and thought I would list a few things I learnt.
I found that the standard Movie Maker under Windows XP as and excellent source for free video editing. I tried a few other packages but they seemed to be clumbersome, and sticking with Microsoft is not a bad thing these days.
I just connected the camera via the firewire card and it sprung to life thanks to plug and play...
The problem is, there are no tools to get the AVI (preferred) or WMV files to DVD format. To my knowledge, Microsoft has left this obvious hole in functionality (who wants videos that just run on PCs!). I found a few free downloads that convert AVI and WMV to DVD and the burn was poorly created on some... sound and/or picture jumped and did not handle Microsoft special effects such as watermarks.
I ended up buying a software product called DVDSanta (terrible name!) but it worked very well. It almost handled watermarks (I ended up taking it out of the production) but it had no hassles with the audio. It cost $30 US but not a bad price considering I can now burn AVI to DVD directly. The card did come with ULead software, but I had to covert the files to MPEG, then DVD then burn. Apart from taking longer (double convert) it also seemed to lose some quality along the way (scan lines, compression in pixels etc). The quality may have had something to do with the software rather than the format specs but end result was that is was inferior. DVDSanta is free to try.
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Secrets in Home DVD
