I am new to all this. I have a Sony Digital8 Camcorder. I plan on purchasing a Firewire (IEEE-1394) Card and CD-RW. I am also getting a DVD player for my entertainment system (not on computer). I assume I can take my Camcorder movies and turn them into VCD's to play on my DVD player. Am I correct? Do I need special software outside of VideoWaveIII or Uleads product (forgot the name)to do this. What do you recommend?

How is the quality on the TV with VCD? Is there a way to encode it as a true DVD quality disc? Please help me understand what I need to do?

-- Jazzman (ford@netquest.com), December 14, 1999

Answers

First of all read everything on this forum because bits and parts of your questions will have been addressed at one point or another; you can now draw your conclusions from them. You are getting a DVD player; you have to be sure it will play VCDs and CD-Rs. Pioneer 525 is the cheapest in the heap which will do the job. There are several incarnations of Firewire cards out there that touch on several modes of operation. Some are complete vidcap cards with 1394 ports, with or without analogue capture options, and may or may not have the DV codec bundled/installed (of prime importance for your DV camcorder if it indeed uses DV codec), which do motion capture. There are also cards that DO NOT capture motion, but only still frames, even though they have a 1394 port. Of course the latter will not do what you want. There will be two ways to capture video: through a vidcap card's analogue inputs (which is probably how most readers of this forum do it), and digitally, as in transferring the contents of your DV tape straight to a DV-coded .avi file on your hard drive. Digital8 can transfer by 1394 but I do not know what codec it uses (may or may not be DV-codec or some flavor of MPEG-1/2), which must be present in your PC system for you to even start doing anything with those files. Of course capturing digitally simplifies things a lot and since the signal from the tape to hard drive was always in the digital domain quality can be tops. If whatever codec you need is there in your system it is at this point you can use your Video Wave and Ulead to give your videos a make-over, so to say. After this you convert it to White Book comliant mpeg-1 files (which the VCD format requires) with an app called a s/w .avi-to-.mpg encoder, like Panasonic MPEG-1 encoder ver 2.21 from Panasonic Wondertainment, Xing encoder ver 2.2, etc. The resulting *.mpg files you use to author/create your VCD using apps like kvetchy Adaptec Easy CD Creator Deluxe, Ahead Nero. etc. If everything went well you now test your VCD with your DVD set-top player. VCDs created this way can exceed best VHS quality slightly.

-- EMartinez (epmartinez@hotmail.com), December 15, 1999.

Digital 8 is really no different to any other digital format, a friend is using the same firewire capture system with his mini dv TRV 900 camera as I am with my TRV 110 D8.

I am using the ADS Pyro firewire card which is bundled with Ulead Video Studio 3 (DV) and for the price its a great cutting edge system. It is taking other software suppliers a while to catch up and supply support for type 1 avi's.

One only has to plug in the 4/6 dv lead to the camera and to the computer card and captures at 3.5M/s on average look excellent when finally put to VCD. Suffient quality for me to go entirely VCD, no tape finals anymore unless requested. The menu options available from Video Pack 4 make an excellent vcd end product.

The codec used by the Pyro is a Dvcodec which produces type 1 avi's and camera control is by a Texas Instuments controller. The Ulead program also has the MS Dv capture codec option but I have not tried that yet even though the ADS web site gives instructions on how to set it up as an alternative.

Most dv sources are 48/16 or 12 bit sound and the spec for a VCD is 44/16 "stereo" sound so that means for the stand alone avi encoders the source material must be changed during the process. The Panasonic encoder will do the 48 to 44 or 12 to 16 bit change on the fly provided the source is type 2 related. It will not handle any type 1 sources at all. For programs like LSX the rendered avi file must be adjusted to suit and the source must be type 2 as well. I suspect none of the Timeline plugin programs will handle type 1 either but thats no reason not to get involved as that will come.

The other advantage of the ADS Pyro firewire system is that you do not need a high flying computer to be successful. I am still using a 233mmx pentium over 2 years old and have no intention of up dating.

-- Ross McL (rmclennan@esc.net.au), December 16, 1999.