MiniDV cam to H.264

[JeffReckart]

Forgive me if this has bee answered here before.

I have some MiniDV tapes i need to encode to DVD.
I have a miniDV cam that will play them, via a firewire to PC. Don't have a lot of room on the hard drive, so i was thinking straight to h.264 for quality and space.
I also want to be able to send the across the internet to someone else to burn to a DVD, so i don't have to buy DVDs or pay for shipping.

Any software or workflow options.

on a PC with WinXP

thanks
JR

[mjl5007]

When you say "encode to DVD", I assume you mean you want to burn DVDs that will play in any run-of-the-mill DVD player? If so, H.264 will not work -- the DVD-Video standard requires MPEG-2.

If you're using the camcorder for playback and capturing over FireWire on the PC, you're going to need to capture the DV stream directly to disk and then re-encode to MPEG-2 afterwards -- encoding straight to MPEG-2 (or any other codec) in real-time isn't an option. Note that DV will take about 12GB per hour of video (w/audio).

As for software/workflow, it can be done totally free if you're willing to take a little bit of time to learn the tools (and don't care about having menus on your DVDs).

• For capture from the camcorder, WinDV. Creates an AVI file.
• For conversion to DVD there are many options, but AVS2DVD is one that I use that does a good job.

VideoHelp.com is a good resource for other tools/tutorials as well.

[JeffReckart]

i have to capture about 20 miniDV tapes, with home movies, with the end goal being DVD's. however the person wanting the DVDs is in another physical location than me.

The plan is for me to get the data from tape onto disk in some format. Then send the data via internet to the other person, who will create the dvd's from what ever I send them. I am only the capture and upload/transmit guy. this plan was to save me buying dvd's and then paying shipping.

I understand that h.264 isn't a "proper" DVD format. I wanted to capture from MiniDV tape straight to h.264, to conserve space on my local HDD and keep files sizes down for uploading, while trying to preserve quality at the same time. This isn't a commercial/professional video content that will be green screened/edit/etc, just home video of kids birthdays, piano recitals, etc being saved for sentimental reasons, so compression isn't a deal breaker.

I can capture in WinDV, to dv-avi and then re-encode to h.264, but was hoping to bypass DV-AVI and capture straight to h.264 to save space and time. The person on the other end will drop these files into iMovie/iDVD/Toast and then make DVDs on her end.

Hope that made my situatuion clearer! thanks
JR

[mjl5007]

Ahh yes, much clearer!

Unfortunately, I don't know of any way to bypass the DV capture and go straight to h.264 without some additional hardware, like a hardware H.264 encoder (consumer USB-stick version or something pro-oriented like the BlackMagic h.264 Pro Recorder or ATEM TV Studio). h.264 encoding in software is processor-intensive, and I'm guessing that a PC with XP is old enough that it wouldn't have the power to encode h.264 in real-time anyway -- although I could be wrong.

Perhaps someone else will have some other ideas for you... sorry I can't be of more help!

[JeffReckart]

ok! was worth the shot!

[collinong]

You may also lose quality or introduce artifacts if you reencode twice using your scenario (dv to h.264 and then h.264 to MPEG2).

it might be worth it to just capture the dv to hard drive then physically mail the drive to the person producing the dvds.