Total NewBee to video anything

[jackd52]

Hello All: I hope I have the right spot for this. I have some older home movies on VHS. I have Toshiba VCR/DVD combo unit that allowed me to "DUB" straight from a VHS tape to a DVD. If I want to edit and clean up this DVD what do I do next ? It plays on my computer but that is all I can do. I know very little about video stuff so any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance

[rumblehouse]

Hi Jack,

You may be out of luck with the combo unit you have. These units are meant to be fully turnkey; - capture and burn to DVD in one pop-, with no real ability to edit within the hardware environment. You can take the DVD disks that are created from the combo deck and reverse the DVD vob files back to native MPEG's and edit the MPEG files with tools like Videoredo for example the way you want. You would want an editor that allows for edits at the frame level and to re-render the final file with no re-compression. Then take the resulting edited MPEG files and recompile back to DVD using your favourite DVD authoring tool. It's a bit of a cycle, but it works.

There are ripping tools as well, but in the end you will need a file format that is editable without causing re-compression artifacts.

[milesrhart]

Rumblehouse is right

While I don't know that much about these things you could probably find free video editors to make it easy. Do a search on "free video editors" or "free video converters" Places like Brothersoft or Cnet might have freeware you could use. I do a lot of audio editing and have several free programs that work great.

[MilesAhead]

For a free program that does some editing check out AviDemux. You might also take a look on the Womble subforum here. There's an mpg editor that only reencodes near the cut points. I'm not explaining it well but see the Womble subforum for the author's explanation.