Film to mini-dv - to dvd

[TB582]

Hopefully you guys can help me out, or perhaps point me in the right direction ( maybe another forum) .... heres my question/problem ....

My grandmother has these old film reels, yes, film reals, and I wanted to compile them onto DVD for her .... so this is what I did. Rather than paying big bucks to get it converted "the right way" I decided that I would just use a projector and set up my mini-dv camera to recored the projected image, the image was projected onto a white piece of foam board, rather than a wall. I'm fairly happy with the way it turned out, obvisouly it is a little grany due to the film being old and not stored properly. So now I have about 10gigs of digital video, stored on my computer. I would like to "clear" up the picture a bit, does anyone know of any sort of filters that might do this without a loss in quality? If not thats ok. Secondly since I want it to be a dvd, I was wondering if you guys knew of any companys that manifacture dvd's and the protective cases ( I would like it to be a cardboard protective case where the dvd just slides in and out)

I will be happy to respond to any questions... i will be checking the board throught the day

Thanks

Tony

[reboot]

Virtualdubmod has lots of filters, and will frameserve your video to your encoder. Then author it and burn.

[TB582]

could you explain it a bit more ....exactly what it does

[TB582]

well ??

[reboot]

It allows you to edit, crop, change colors, filter out noise, and a ton of other things.
You then tell it to send the edited video directly to your encoder, don't save an avi inbetween and lose quality.

[TB582]

would it be best to use Virtualdubmod before I start editing the video in Avid or after it is edited?

[reboot]

I would use virtualdubmod to edit it as well.

[TB582]

I could, but it doesnt possibily give the amount of editing features that avid or adobe after effects gives ? I need to import photos ect..

[reboot]

Ah, you mean EDIT!, not just edit out a section or add a filter.
Use vdubmod after you edit, unless Avid or Adobe can frameserve.
The whole idea is to maintain as much quality as possible. The less encoding, decoding, transcoding you do, the better.
Capture in mpeg-2 format if possible. Edit directly, then author and burn.
If that's not possible, you need to save an avi in the best format possible. That would be uncompressed, however, a 2 hour avi will take up ~15 gig. If you have the room, this is the best.
If you don't have the room, try to save the avi in as lossless format as possible, with a codec such as Huffyuv.
Do all your editing as needed. Try to avoid saving the file yet again (requiring compression/quality loss), and frameserve it to your encoder.
If you MUST save another avi, do it uncompressed if possible.

[TB582]

I'm 90% sure that the video files were captured and are saved in MPEG2. I'll will check later on tonight and post tonight

[reboot]

If they ARE mpeg-2, all you need to do is edit them as you like, then save, author, and burn.
Just make sure you save your edited files in the same format, and that your editor does NOT re-encode the files before saving.
Womble mpeg-vcr would work, or VideoReDo. Cuttermaran will do simple cut/crop type editing.
I have no idea how Avid or Adobe deal with mpegs, sorry.