It depends on what the customer wants. If it is a straight copy without any authoring, I run the DV tape direct to a set top burner and charge just about the same as C&R posted above.

If it involves authoring, then the price goes up significantly. My experience has been that very very few people want to pay for sophisticated menus on family videos.

As a Christmas treat for myself, I put a movie from VHS onto DVD, and because I wanted to do it "properly" - with 63 scene selection chapters, it took ages - deciding and naming the Chapter points, laying out the menus and making sure navigation worked the way I wanted, designing and printing disc and sleeve etc.

With software encoding and careful authoring, I agree - there's no way it could be a worthwhile exercise as an "earner" - I would have had to charge at least A$500!!

I agree, to do a GOOD job is time consuming and when you tell people they can get it done on STB for next to nix or pay you to spend time on most go the cheap way.
If they sound like they're serious about good work then I also explain to them I'll give them a copy of the raw files on DVD-ROM as well but it is an uphill battle. I think the consummers are being badly misled about DVD in general and STB boxes as well. A lot of the home movie stuff out there was pretty horrid VHS to start with and when you put it through a STB it gets much worse.
Bob.

Agree with Bob and others. I use the ADVC-300 to clean up the video as it's captured. No editing included. I usually put a marker at the 30 minute point or at a natural break (tape change). I render with markers in and let DVDA2 build chapters using a template I've selected for the disk. I make sure the thumbnail shows a picture of something, then build and burn the disk. As for the label, I use a stomper with Avery high gloss labels (they are very thin and sticky) with the thumbnail pictures printed along with a title and my header. It's quite a bit of effort for little pay but I'm not doing this for profit, rather just to pay for materiels and equipment and to do friends and relatives a favor. Now, if they want me to turn their footage into a home video worth watching, I charge a minimum of $50 for up to a 15 show (still pretty cheap) and it depends upon the situation. I'm a hobbiest who has a day job so I'm not trying to make a living with this. My objective is to learn and practice until I can get good enough to take on the big projects. Maybe I can get there by the time I retire in 5-6 years. ;-)
Aloha,
Randy

I've never approached doing a straight xfer. If I have on Scene Detection, it creates a different clip per scene, right. Will those clips act like songs do? In other words, will they each be a different track they can fast forward to? Am I making sense?