Help a newbie out. DV to DivX

[Freeflyfreak]

Seems like most of the advice I can find is for ripping DVDs and converting them to divX, but that is not what I need to do.

I have a Sony Digital video camera and would like to take some raw video from the camera, edit it and then save it as DivX.

I have a firewire card and have been doing some editing with Windows movie maker it is easy to use and I dont need to be a rocket scientist to figure it out, but the output quality leaves a lot to be desired.
I have downloaded the free DivX codec and have tried some of the programs suggested here but cant get anything to work.

What exactly do I need to be able to do this?

[techno]

ok, follow this and u will be a ok:

capture using these settings:

NO RECOMPRESSION
CD QUALITY UNCOMPRESSED audio

320*240/352*288
YU12/YUY2
30fps

capture! now, make sure u have a BIG HDD as this will take up alot of HDD space (4 mins = about 650MB) also, make sure u have an NTFS partition or avi_IO to split the files over a few files while recording to avoid the FAT32 4GB file size limit

then, convert the captured video to MPEG2, 224VBV buffer, high quality, brighten up the vid, and res of 352*288 and AUTO_CQ in TMPGENC

then use something like vidomi to convert this MPEG2 file to DIVX fast motion (assuming u have the best codec installed, DIVX v3.11alpha) with 75 crisp and 6000 bitrate.

This will give u NEAR DVD quality. I have done it ALOT and it works perfect, + the file size will be real low, believe me.

any probs, let me know

o, and NO, u will NOT lose quality when doing alot of conversions....

Techno

[Freeflyfreak]

Thanks techno,

I am running windows XP and have NTFS, what are the best programs to use for each of these steps.
Preferably something free and easy to use.

[techno]

ok, use the software that the firewire card has (if any) OR!! Use AVI_IO which IS free....

remember to set the MAX size per file, in MB in the input settings (I think)

AVI_IO:

https://www.nct.ch/multimedia/avi_io

Techno