I have recently purchased a Mini-DVD Camcorder and I would like to take
multiple Mini-DVD's and convert them to a single DVD so I can
distribute them to other families from our soccer team. I'm not opposed
to buying software, but it must preserve the original resolution, and
be able to consolidate. Nice features such as titles and such are
preferable, but not neccessary.
Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Phil

pminor@neo.rr.com wrote:

My guess.. You can't. Not unless you do some serious hacking of the
DVD. Once you dump that onto your computer, and then re-encode it back
to mpeg-2 and back to another DVD, you can kiss all quality good bye!

When I say hacking, I mean.. possibly taking the VOB files, combining
them onto another larger DVD and editing it together, but that would
take some serious work to look into.

-dave

<pminor@neo.rr.com> wrote in message
news:1149265286.362195.192400@y43g2000cwc.googlegr oups.com...
You could try TMPGEnc DVD Author 1.6 (TDA) using
its "Add DVD video..." button. You can then use an MPEG
Editor like the www.womble.com Wizard on the extracted
..mpg files then continue making your new DVD with TDA.
www.pegasys-inc.com

Both programs will not re-encode your video, so your
original video will be unaffected. They have trial downloads.


Luck;
Ken

<pminor@neo.rr.com> wrote in message
news:1149265286.362195.192400@y43g2000cwc.googlegr oups.com...
You can make full-size DVDs from the mini-DVDs. Copy the files to a folder
on your computer. Using a program like Nero 6 or 7, create a new video DVD.
Drag the files you copied to the folder into the VIDEO_TS folder for the new
DVD. Burn it, and you should have an exact copy, with no loss, of the
miniDVD.

Consolidating files will be harder, as it will require re-authoring (which
is not the same thing as re-transcoding, i.e. there will be no quality
loss). One route might be to use VideoReDo, or something similar, to create
a single mpeg for each miniDVD. Then use an authoring program (I use Adobe
Encore, but that would be overkill for you), to author the various mpegs
into a single DVD.

Your first mistake was purchasing one of these miniDVD camcorders in the
first place. Each disc has to be finalized. Once this finalization takes
place the disc is assigned a menu having thumbs of the videos on the disc.
Those files on the disc each have a VOB number according to the speed you
used in recording. Each disc you make has exactly the same numbering system
as the other. When creating a larger compilation disc from these file names
cannot be repeated with the VIDEO_TS folder. In addition the IFO files
cannot be changed either because they point to certain VOB's.

Your only recourse is to capture the video over analog inputs, since your
camcorder does not have 1392 or full resolution DV quality, and then
transcode each captured file to make the larger DVD.

However, the camcorder should have come with a little software package which
will allow you to copy the files to your hard drive over USB, but the
problem is that these are then labeled .MPG and I suspect they are QSIF
MPEG-1 files and not true MPEG-2 files as they are on the disc proper. This
copied MPG file is not for serious editing, but rather for those who wish to
use the included editing software to create shareable video over the
internet and e-mail.

If you have not had this camcorder for very long I highly suggest you take
it back to the store where you purchased it and get a refund, or credit
toward a serious miniDV camcorder instead. Unfortunately you fell for the
notion that DVD is somehow better, when the manufacturer had the notion that
recording straight to DVD would be more convenient for playback at home in
your DVD player since VHS is on the way out, and there are few miniDV decks
for this purpose.

DVD video is not for editing, and DVD does not mean "better quality video".
DVD, which means Digital Versatile Disc is for playback and storage period.
Buy a miniDV camcorder and a 1394 card. Shoot your video, use any NLE - even
Windows Movie Maker for editing and then make your compilation DVD's from
the final output files. Even Nero will make passable DVD's for that purpose.

--
Larry Johnson
Digital Video Solutions
webmaster@digitalvideosolutions.com
http://www.digitalvideosolutions.com
877-227-6281 Toll Free Sales Assistance
386-672-1941 Customer Service
386-672-1907 Technical Support
386-676-1515 Fax



<pminor@neo.rr.com> wrote in message
news:1149265286.362195.192400@y43g2000cwc.googlegr oups.com...

Is it not possible to edit and author with TMPGEnc, using its command
to import DVD video? As long as the VOBs from the miniDVDs are copied
into separate directories, there will be no file-name conflicts.

I believe I have done just this.

Also, PTravel has another method - see his post; I haven't done this,
but now I think I'll try it myself. Well, not right now, I have a huge
project (52 half-hour shows) to put on DVD :-)

Oh - I plan to use more than one DVD for that project, in case you're
wondering.

Gino

On 6/02/2006, Larry Johnson posted this:
--
Gene E. Bloch (Gino)
letters617blochg3251
(replace the numbers by "at" and "dotcom")

Gene, that's fine if it works for you. From where I sit quality in the final
output is everything. Being absolutely frame specific is paramount to
accurate editing. My opinions are based on editing and output at a
pro-consumer and professional or near-profiessional level. My opinion from
what I have seen of these DVD camcorder and the final output to yet another
DVD from that video - and yes, I have used the VOB method, is that the video
is sub-sstandard. To me it is like comparing the original King Kong to the
latest version - they are both engaging only the latest is more realistic
looking.

Sure, I spout some pretty harsh indignations about the equipment available
for the consumer, and many times rightly so. A customer of ours who once
brought miniDV tapes of the band she promotes suddenly turned up with an
Everio. Now she has to bring the entire camera and drop it off, which keeps
her from doing any further work for a day or so. The video on the hard disc
is not even close to being a good as a single CCD miniDV camcorder (noting a
Samsung with low color saturation). The compression is very noticable even
at the highest recording level the camera offers. Plus, there is an
additional loss in once the video is finally on a DVD.

I enjoy and understand your position that it is possible to do the editing.
As someone who deals in the equipment for quality DV editing and now the
emerging HDV/HD equipment I feel it is necessary to point out the pitfalls
of certain decisions which could save people headaches overall. Sorry I
sometimes do it like some crazed evangelist on a street corner screaming
'the end is near!". But hell, some may have made what I see as a mistake and
others may read and not even go there because of it. Sure, it sounds bad
when you read it, but I am here to reach as many readers as possible,
regardless of whether they purchase from me or not. Sometimes to accomplish
the goal I just have to beat someone over the head with a dead rabbit!!

Quality is key. What works in VOB for an HDV signal is not necessarily what
works for standard def. But, standard def had to be the proving ground
regardless of the end quality. You settle for what you like, and I will
continue to argue the point of quality over seeming convenience. You can
keep yanking my chain, and I will keep respecting you for that.

Larry

"Gene E. Bloch" <spamfree@nobody.invalid> wrote in message
news:mn.143d7d66c6dca354.1980@nobody.invalid...

And also Gene, I did not say it was not possible to edit from these
miniDVD's. I said it was not a good video source. What the eye misses in the
first compression will come to the forefront in the second one.


"Gene E. Bloch" <spamfree@nobody.invalid> wrote in message
news:mn.143d7d66c6dca354.1980@nobody.invalid...

"PTravel" <ptravel@ruyitang.com> wrote in message
news:4ebiiaF1dti54U1@individual.net...
This will work, if you take PT's statement literally. With that procedure
you could make one new DVD from the contents of one mini-DVD.
Though why would you want to? Why trade a CD disk for a DVD
disk with exactly the same data on it?



Yes you need to Author a DVD to make one with different content,
otherwise you could just copy to make one with the same content.
(Basically what PT described at first.)
You said you wanted to use the disks that your camcorder makes
to make a new "regular DVD", so you will need to author the new
DVD. (No "re-" is involved.) As you seem to be working with
material that will need some editing, you will want to use an editor
like the Womble Wizard or Ulead's Video Studio 9 or 10 to combine
..mpg clips into a consistent coherent story or stories that you will
author as a new DVD.

"Larry Johnson" <webmaster@digitalvideosolutions.nospam> wrote in message
news:ZR4gg.11617$eQ4.9458@tornado.tampabay.rr.com. ..

You are still displaying your MPEG phobia there, Larry. For many home
users, the ease and speed of working with DVD compliant MPEG, is a
far better approach than working in DV-AVI then encoding to MPEG
later (over night, perhaps) to have what you need to author a DVD.

/Ken

Ken Maltby wrote:
instances will serve me as I intended, record it, finalize it, and pop
it in the trusty ole DVD player and watch it, What's a good set of
tools to work with to get me the best quality in a format that I can
distribute to the other team families, without buying a stack of
DVD-R's four feet tall.

Thanks!

Phil

<pminor@neo.rr.com> wrote in message
news:1149307780.191229.175020@c74g2000cwc.googlegr oups.com...
Well, I would assume that a normal authored DVD will be
your means of distribution. You want something that they
will be able to play in their livingrooms, right? How tall the
stack of distribution DVD-Rs will be depends on how many
"other families" are involved.

It would be more economical if there were 80mm DVD-RW
for your camcorder.

The good set of tools will depend, to some extent, on what
best works for you and what you are trying to accomplish.
Editor programs that can work well with MPEG are more and
more common. Some programs lend themselves to repeated
production and a smooth workflow, better than others. The
Womble MPEG Wizard was one of the first and still provides
solid performance for most "Home" use. For authoring DVDs
I feel TDA can be setup to make routine production of quality
DVDs fast and easy. There are more feature filled authoring
programs like DVD Lab Pro, if you need extra audio and/or
subtitles. Ulead VideoStudio 9 or 10 can provide more to
the editing process, than the Womble product, but at a little
greater complexity and learning curve. ( One note: I feel it is
not a good idea to author a DVD with an editor, their authoring
function is not normally anywhere near as good as a dedicated
authoring program.)

Why not download the free trials of TDA and Womble wizard
and see if they meet your needs?


Luck;
Ken

Sorry, I simply disagree. There is already missing picture data because of
the IBP frame structure of MPEG-2. Upon further compression this becomes
more noticable. If you can't detect it then fine. Personally this loss of
quality is something I cannot live with, and most people I deal with see the
difference too. It's not a phobia, it's having a more discerning eye -
simple as that.


<pminor@neo.rr.com> wrote in message
news:1149307780.191229.175020@c74g2000cwc.googlegr oups.com...

"Larry Johnson" <webmaster@digitalvideosolutions.nospam> wrote in message
news:1Plgg.11119$h01.7100@tornado.tampabay.rr.com. ..

Again there is no loss of quality involved for the OP. What
he has is DVD compliant MPEG in the .vob files from the
mini-DVD (80mm) disks his camcorder made. What he, like
you (with your "more discerning eye") or anyone else, needs
for a Video DVD is - DVD compliant MPEG.

There is also no further compression needed, unless the OP
wishes to put more video than is currently on 4.7Gb worth of
his 1.46GB 80mm mini-DVD disks.

The native MPEG editing currently available would be more
than enough for the task described by the OP.

Luck;
Ken

P.S. Why do you and PT even mention DVDs? Surely you two
can't be watching DVD video, with your discerning eyes. After all
it is suffering from the loss of picture quality you can't stand, it's
made with "IBP" frames, it's compressed. How do you find your
26GB DV-AVI Hollywood productions, anyway? Is there a special
outlet the rest of us just don't know about? How many disks do
they come in bye the way? Is there a special AVI authoring program?
How about the standalone "AVI-DVD" players, just where do you
find those?

"Ken Maltby" <kmaltby@sbcglobal.net> wrote in message
news:u9-dnet-UswDahzZnZ2dnUVZ_oOdnZ2d@giganews.com...
Still at Ken? The OP mentioned DVDs.

And, of course, you totally miss the point (again).

You are correct about one thing -- for the OP's purposes, there is no
quality lost between the DVDs that he makes with his camcorder and the
consolidated DVDs that he wants to produce.

However, for those of us who care about the video that we produce, DV-25
requires far less compression and has a far higher data rate than
DVD-compliant mpeg. Moreover, commercially-released DVDs are produced using
multipass hardware transcoders that are further tweaked by experts to
produce the best-quality DVD-compliant mpegs. DVD camcorders, cheapie
computer capture cards and consumer-grade software transcoders do not come
close.

That's why professional news organizations do not use DVD camcorders, but do
use miniDV machines. It's why commercially-released films have been shot on
miniDV camcorders, but never with DVD machines.

The video that comes of a DVD camcorder like the OP's will never approximate
the quality of video that results from a good miniDV camcorder that has been
transcoded using good consumer software and authored to DVD. If you can't
see the difference, you need a better television than the Sears cheapie that
you're evidently watching, or else you need glasses.

See above. You and your strawman arguments are truly tiresome.

Are you truly ignorant of how commercial DVDs are produced, or are your just
looking for attention?

"PTravel" <ptravel@travelersvideo.com> wrote in message
news:C4ngg.45711$Lm5.3972@newssvr12.news.prodigy.c om...
you used a whole sentence.

Which has what to do with anything? The OP like most people view
and exchange video in some format other than DV-25. You claim
DV-25 is much better than DVD compliant MPEG, but the question is,
Better for what? It can't be authored as a DVD, without encoding to
DVD compliant MPEG. Do you just sit around your PC telling yourself
how much better your DV-25 .avi looks than a DVD would? If you so
need a better quality video why aren't you working with HDV? What's
the point of DV-25's "better quality" if you can only use it on your PC?
And then only if you can put up with the enormous storage requirements.
To put it to any practical use you will be encoding it to a more
compressed format. I suppose at that point your "more discerning eyes"
tear up, at the loss of quality.

Moreover, commercially-released DVDs are produced using
DV-25, with the professional resources you describe? I doubt it. But even
if you are using professional hardware costing tens of thousands of dollars;
isn't it a little irresponsible to be suggesting that is what everyone else
needs
to be doing? Or are you suggesting that if your source is DV-25,
transcoding
won't be necessary? Won't you need to use a "consumer-grade software
transcoder"? Won't whatever you use also fail to "come close" to the movie
studio processing you described?

phone video on occasion. And spare me any more "Blair Witch"
projects.

just average consumer software?


with the characteristics your side claims make video unusable.

Using an Analog capture device, no matter how much it cost,
to create DV-25 from the analog output of a DVD player
will provide less "Quality" than extracting the digital MPEG
data directly from the DVD.

Ken

Ken Maltby wrote:
I quoted you completely and in context.

What had your snide remark about me to do with anything? I said
exactly the same thing you did, i.e. that there would be no quality
lost in consolidating miniDVDs to full-size DVDs, and that it was very
easy to make a full-sized DVD that contained what was on a miniDVD. I
didn't chide the OP for having a DVD camera. I didn't say anything
about miniDV. None the less, you felt that your gratuitous smarmy
comment was appropriate.

Better for anything beyond casual video for which quality isn't an
issue. I exchange my video on DVDs, too. However, the technical
quality of the video on my DVDs is far superior to anything produced by
a DVD camcorder, because I use a multi-pass software transcoder instead
of a single-pass consumer-cheapie built-in hardware transcoder.

Exactly right. And tmpgenc (or even the built-in transcoders in
programs like Encore) do a better job than the consumer DVD-camcorder
transcoders and the cheapie capture boards.

I don't have to tell myself anything. I can see the difference, and
anyone with even a medicore television will see the difference as well.
You've been told this, repeatedly. but are incapable of responding to
simple facts. Mutli-pass transcoding is better than single pass. Deep
motion analysis is better than on-the-fly, which is backward-looking
only.

Because I don't have either an HD television or the money to buy new
equipment. Even if I did, I would probably wait another generation or
two, since there are signficant artifact problems with the current
prosumer HDV machines.

I don't only use it on my PC. I edit on my PC and transcode and author
to DVD. And my DVDs have demonstrably better video quality than the
in-camera DVDs produced by consumer camcorders.

You can't be serious. Storage is cheap. I've got 1.25 terabytes on my
PC, and it represents the least costly components in my video system.

And I suppose on your black-and-white 9" Sears television, you don't
see a difference. As I said, it's absolutely clear on any decent
television set, and particularly so on my 52" RPTV. Some people are
happy with photographs taken by a disposable camera and developed by
the local Walmart. Others prefer better quality for their images
though, if you're consistent, I suppose you don't.

My point was in response to this that you wrote: "Surely you two can't
be watching DVD video, with your discerning eyes."

Commercial videos are distributed primarily on DVD, so there's a not a
lot of choice. I will, however, be getting an HD television, HD
DirecTV, an HD Tivo and an HD DVD player as soon as I can afford them,
because I do prefer better quality. Notwithstanding, a commercial DVD
is of far higher video quality than that produced by a DVD camcorder,
for all the reasons that I've explained.

Nope. I transcode with tmpgenc, which allows considerable flexibility
in settings, which does multipass encoding, 10-bit precision, deep
motion detection, and a whole bunch of other things that DVD camcorders
don't do, and which make an enormous difference in the quality of the
resulting video.

I never suggested that everyone else needs to do it. I suggested that
the OP use a program like VideoReDo for consolidation. YOU are the one
who insists that everyone use DVD-compliant mpeg for everything,
including capture and editing.

And that's simply stupid. You know perfectly well that's not what I
was suggesting.


I will, indeed. However, I'll use the highest quality consumer
software transcoder that I can afford, and the results are demonstrably
better than that produced by DVD camcorders, and the $100 all-in-one
entry-level video packages.

What I produce is far closer to studio quality (technically, not
necessarily artistically) than it is to the low-grade consumer quality
that comes out of DVD camcorders.

The BBC buys and uses PD-170s for ENG. The BBC does not buy cellphones
for this purpose. And I'm not talking about Blair Witch Project, but
full-production films like Open Water and 28 Days Later. The former
was shot with Canon XL2s and the latter with a Canon XL2 and a Sony
VX2000 -- the same camera that I own and use for my own video.


Crappy cameras produce crappy video. Though there are crappy miniDV
camcorders, there is no such thing as a prosumer-grade DVD camcorder.
Care to guess why that is?

I don't have a side. And if your contention is that the transcoding
process is irrelevant to the ultimate quality of a DVD, then you've
established, once and for all, that you haven't the slightest clue
about video. However, I know you know better than that, which is why I
think you're simply an unpleasant person with a penchant for smarmy
remarks.

Obviously. No one suggested otherwise.

In article <1K%fg.196648$bL2.56296@fe02.news.easynews.com>, Dave <blachley@aol.com> wrote:

In article <mn.143d7d66c6dca354.1980@nobody.invalid>, hamburger@NOT_SPAM.invalid wrote:
Yes, it also assigns a filename for its own internal use while you use TMPG.

I do this all the time, my son asks me to record all of the godzilla movies off
of scifi channel and i usually take a couple of DVD-RW's and record each show in
the highest quality from my DirecTV Tivo box to a DVD-RW, then i take the 3
disks over to the pc and use TMPG to merge the 3 together and make custom menues
etc for the shows and then i end up having a single folder as a result with all
3 movies combined. Of course i end up with a huge VIDEO_TS folder that i then
send thru DVD Shrink and the resultant folder is 4.3 GB.

pminor@neo.rr.com wrote:
Yes, you can collate a number of mini-dvd discs onto a regular dvd-5
disc without losing any quality. If you look at the contents of your
mini-dvd disc in your computer, you will notice a number of .vob files.
These contain your video and audio streams. You will need to
demultiplex these files into separate video (m2v) and audio (mp2, ac3
or wav - it depends on what audio format your videocamera used) files.
You can use a program like DVD-Lab to demultiplex (also known as demux)
your files, but if you Google "demux vob" you'll find a number of
programs.

Once you have your two files (audio and video) you can import them into
DVD-Lab (a great dvd authoring tool) and create a menu, chapter points
etc. You can import as many files as you want into DVD-Lab.