DVD recorder that writes mpeg2??

revriff wrote on 8/7/2005, 6:36 PM
Is there a dvd recorder that will burn as mpeg2...?? In my church I use a Sony camera that takes the big 8mm tapes, but rather than go to tape I just record straight to dvd to be able to offer a finished dvd within minutes of the end of our service...I ask about the mpeg2 because it will import to vegas in the media pool whereas a rendered dvd will not. I'm trying to get passed the ripping stage & converting to avi before I can open my video into Vegas. I posted this earlier but I don't think I really stated it clearly.

Comments

Steve Mann wrote on 8/7/2005, 7:05 PM
Uh, don't all stand-alone DVD recorders record in MPEG2?

Rendered DVD? All DVD material is rendered. And no problem importing into Vegas. But, introducing MPEG into your editing stream will be counterproductive for two reasons. First, Vegas is not an efficient MPEG editor because every frame has to be re-created on the timeline, and that could take a lot longer than you want. Second, MPEG is highly compressed and when you render it again, you lose a lot of quality.

Sounds to me like you are trying to do it the hard way. Starting with an 8mm analog camera. Buy a DV camera with Firewire output and something like the Firestore disk. You can take the AVI files right from the Firestore disk into Vegas.

Or, I could have completely misread your requirements.

Steve Mann

Liam_Vegas wrote on 8/7/2005, 7:11 PM
If you are bringing it into Vegas... I would assume that means you want to do some editing with it. MPEG as a source format is very bad when it comes to editing. Vegas in particvular is the worst software to use for this as it will re-encode every frame even if you have done nothing to it. There are some other utilties that allow you to do cuts/only editing without re-compressing (Womble).

That's why you've likely been told in the past to get your DVD into Vegas as an AVI file.

The easiest way for you to do this is to capture your church videos LIVE TO DISK. You can either use Vegas's Vidcap utiltiy - or something else (DVRACK, Scenalyzer). The point is you will then have an AVI file that is immediately editable and at very high quality.

The disadvantage - is that you'll need a computer plus sufficient hard drive space to do the capture - and an analog video to digital (firewire) converter box. All in all... that should not be a big problem.

Many cameras can be used to convert the analog video inputs direct to a firewire video source - or you could use one of the many dedicated "boxes" such as the Canopus ADVC-100 or the device from ADS.