Video Camera to DVD Production

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allan

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#15285 14-Aug-2007 07:51

Almost posted this in the Home Theatre forum, but figured it's a little too off-topic.

I am involved in an organisation that will be holding a series of on-stage competitions where they wish to record the performance (video & audio) and provide the contestants with a DVD copy of their performance at the end of the contest, when the contestants will also receive judges' evaluations.

They have considered using a professional company to handle the recordings, but don't really have the budget for it as the contest runs for quite some hours, with gaps between each performance.

Any suggestions as to the best hardware/software combination to achieve getting the recorded detail from camera to DVD in a timely manner?

lurker

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#82285 14-Aug-2007 08:15

I am not an expert, but if you can rent a camcorder that records direct to DVD you will save yourself a lot of time.

Otherwise, to transfer video to a PC and then transcode to DVD can be a time consuming effort because of the amount of processing involved. Capture time is equivalent to recording time (ie 60 minutes tape takes 60 minutes to capture). Then you need to save the output, which takes time depending on compression level (DVI-AVI is around 13GB per hour of footage), and then the DVD authoring software will take a long time to transcode the video file into DVD format, a process that in itself could take hours.

It sounds to me like renting a DVD camcorder is the better option for you.

allan

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#82328 14-Aug-2007 13:36

Thanks lurker, your suggestion has appeal, as a separate DVD could be used for each act, however I had someone suggest to me that the time taken to "finalise" each DVD ejected from a DVD based camera could well exceed the benefits and the time available between each on-stage performance. Is it necessary to finalise each DVD as it is ejected, or could that be done later?

AllNightNerding

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#82355 14-Aug-2007 16:25

what you can do in some programs is record it onto the camera and have the camera plugged into the laptop at the same time. so that can heavily lower the time it takes.

ampapakol

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#83123 21-Aug-2007 12:45

I agree with Allnightnerding, one possiblet solution is to have a Video Cam connected to PC and recording it to the PC while the performance is occuring. Some program can record it as MPEG [high res] so that when the performance finishes, it's just a matter of burning it to a DVD.