CAA: Christian Anime Alliance

I recorded some stuff on my MiniDV camcorder that I want to put on DVD. As a intermediate measure, I saved the footage as an AVI (that takes up 14 GB!!!).

Is there any easy or free way to put AVI to DVD? If not, how about MiniDV to DVD?

Ingemar (post: 1300267) wrote:I recorded some stuff on my MiniDV camcorder that I want to put on DVD. As a intermediate measure, I saved the footage as an AVI (that takes up 14 GB!!!).

Is there any easy or free way to put AVI to DVD? If not, how about MiniDV to DVD?

You need DVD authoring software of some kind... I use the Adobe Suite. You do your editing in Premiere, save the files out, then build the DVD in Encore. You set your own chapters, and can even do some interesting things if you know what you're doing... Hide things on the disc that need to be found, say, by pressing the enter button only when a certain subtitle pops up... That sort of thing.

I don't know of any real DVD authoring software other than Encore... Media Center can make DVDs, but there is no play-all feature on them, and you have ZERO control over anything... Chapters, menu, even compression. You can only do FULL SIZE (mpeg 2... it's always MPEG-2 for DVDs) files on there, meaning about an hour per single layer DVD. Encore lets you scale it, so you can compress the files to fit 2 or 3 hours on one single layer DVD.

So... really, free would be media center... It just sucks, that's all. It's like the MS paint of DVD authoring, only worse.

Is there some sort of media lab or something similar near you?

My service dog and I recently had our recertification exam (basically, to make sure we are still doing things right) and we recorded the exam on miniDV. I took the miniDV tape to the Mass Communications department on campus to see if someone could help me convert it to DVD.

I walk in and a prof asks if I need help. I explained what I needed to do and he said he could help. In his office, he had a machine that took miniDVs in one slot and converted them to DVD! So he converted it over for me --and just in time to mail it off to the service dog school!

Perhaps there is a department like Mass Comm. near you? Do you attend a university or live near one?

I didn't actually realise that Media Centre made video DVDs...
Since you want something free, you might have some DVD authoring software that came with the DVD drive (eg. Nero - some OEM versions we have do have DVD authoring; others don't), or if you have Vista Home Premium or better, the DVD Maker program thing. I don't know of a widely available free/open source solution though (probably because the MPEG encoder peoples want their royalties).

i think you can use nero to burn it or toast for mac....should be straightfoward