
Now we presume you've got the VCR plugged into the Canopus ADVC 110, and 110 plugged into either your computer's native Firewire/IEEE 1394 port, or you've found a PCI card equivalent. You've got Roxio, ArcSoft or Windows Movie Maker open and capturing your video.
"How do I edit my video and create menus?" Consult your software's user's manual, or any number of forums. That's a little "deep cuts" to get into here. Movie Maker and ArcSoft Showbiz are pretty similar and darned intuitive, if you ask me.
So you've got your finished product. Now how do you get that onto a plastic disc to put in the DVD player so everyone can see it in the living room? Well, there are a few different ways, and they're software-dependent.
The Roxio version I have, which comes bundled with a lot of retail PC's these days, is Easy CD and DVD Creator Basic v. 9. In this version, the DVD creator program wants to burn your project directly to a disc out of the program.
I haven't investigated Roxio's options too much, I have to admit, because of the three programs mentioned here, I like the ArcSoft Showbiz's bitrate and burning options the best. It captures in the high-quality MPEG2 format, and when it's time to make the DVD, it doesn't make you burn it to a disc directly out of the program. The Showbiz instead will burn a few folders to your hard drive, one of them labeled VIDEO_TS and maybe another one labeled AUDIO_TS. This gives you more options about what you can do with your project: you can either burn these folders to a disc and have a playable DVD, or you can use these as sources to create a ISO file, a.k.a. a compressed disc image, that you can upload on the Internet to share on torrenting sites, or keep on your hard drive as a compact file to burn future copies of your DVD project from.
The actual burning can get tricky. Most programs out there aren't going to give you the option to burn the VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS folders themselves they'll only burn ISO images. I tried burning VIDEO_TS with
Deep Burner and wound up with a data disc instead of a video disc. I
did manage to burn a VIDEO_TS file with Roxio Basic Creator once, but...I don't remember how I did it.
Let's err on the side of caution, and use one of the greatest freeware programs I've ever encountered:
ImgBurn. This excellent, easy-to-use program gives you every option there is for what to do with your video project. You can burn the VIDEO_TS folder directly to a disc, or you can burn a ISO image to your hard drive first to create future discs from and
then burn your DVD from the ISO, or you can copy existing discs...it's great.
That's it. That's all I know. As I say, I'm just getting started with this stuff myself, but I couldn't get over how incredibly difficult it was getting the right software and hardware together, and that no one had written any easy everyman guide, that I could find. So hopefully you're on the road now.
* TIP: I just discovered today that the Canopus ADVC 110 will sometimes come on and both the analog and digital input lights will be on, and pushing the input switch won't change the inputs. The only way to get around this is to unplug it and replug it. It will also, as I wrote earlier, sometimes flip out when out of sync with your video, but ejecting and reinserting your tape usually works, maybe fast forwarding and rewinding the tape a little to take up slack. No, even for $240 it's not perfect, but what the heck...
If you plan on archiving any Zen footage on DVD, I would love a copy!!
Geoff