SONY DCR-DVD201E Handycam

turbine wrote on 12/29/2004, 12:52 AM

Bought SONY DCR-DVD201E Handycam earlier and later purchased VMS+DVD Version 4.0 Build 48 and downloaded the 4.0a upgrade from this site. The 'no audio' problem during editing as well after burning is still there.

I have posted some questions here in the forum before and some say I have to get rid of my expensive camera and keep this excellent software. Is it true that video clips in MPEG2 format are not meant for editing? This DVD camera is only suitable for straight viewing on DVD players.

Should I get rid of this expensive DVD camera? Please help.

Comments

ScottW wrote on 12/29/2004, 5:51 AM

MPEG-2 is generally considered to be a delivery format and is not usually suitable for editing. It's very highly compressed, and because the compression is "lossy" (that is, information is lost when the image data is compressed) you can never get bck to the original. DV is also compressed, but not as highly. The other issue with MPEG-2 is that it is temporaly compressed (compressed across time) and this also adds to the difficulty in editing.

Since MPEG-2 has more compression than DV it also puts a heavier load on your computer during the editing process - so things may not be as responsive.

Your lack of audio is because the audio on the DVD is encoded as AC3 (dolby digital), and VMS doesn't contain an AC3 decoder, so it doesn't know how to deal with it. If you search this forum and the Vegas Video forum using the keyword VOB you'll find lots of solutions for getting your MPEG-2 into a format suitable for editing; just about every good solution involves taking the MPEG-2 and converting it back into DV AVI.

Whether you trade in your camera for something else is entirely up to you. It is certainly possible to use the video you shoot with the camera and edit it, but your workflow is going to be different (as outlined above) from those folks using a MiniDV based camera. The quality of your final product will also be slightly lower, but whether you can notice this is going to be somewhat subjective and will depend a lot on what it is that you shot. Generally with most video that I've been seeing come thru our store being transfered to DVD, there are so many other issues (lighting, stability, focus, etc.) that a slight difference in quality is unlikely to be noticed at this level.

--Scott

Steve Grisetti wrote on 12/29/2004, 7:00 AM

I really wish sales people and camcorder producers didn't push cool new formats like DVD cams and MicroDV so hard. MiniDV (and even Digital8) are much better formats if you plan to do anything with the resulting footage (in addition to being much, much cheaper camcorders!).

If you can possibly trade off that DVD cam for a MiniDV, I can promise your life as a video editor will be much easier (not to mention the fact that you could get a heck of a nice DV cam for the price of a low-end DVD cam). With DV, you just plug-and-play and the results are terrific!

I know knowing that NOW doesn't help much and, as Scott said, there are workarounds if you decide to stay the course. But, if you can at all figure out a way to trade horses at this point in the game, believe me you'll be a much happier videographer in the long run.

Whatever you do, we're here to help. Good luck!