Transferring Videos to CD to View Forever

By Kenny Williams

I have a ton of home video footage from filming Karl and Molly over the last few years. When I got the camcorder I had an idea to save money by reusing the tapes over and over by transferring the video onto a CD for backup and viewing. Unfortunately it did not work out that way and I now have 78 beautiful little camcorder tapes, with no titles or descriptions, stacked up waiting for transfer to CD or DVD. It is time for me to pay the piper and start this wonderful task that I have made for myself. Let the project build up until it has reached critical mass and then try and complete it in one stretch without any rest, this seems to be a recurring theme in my life.

With the right software and equipment hooked up to your computer, you can arrange audio and video to make a contribution to the future generations in your family by leaving some cool home movies that tell your story. Creating CDs and DVDs containing audio and video isn't difficult and is very inexpensive.

You only need a few things to make a great multimedia disk CD or DVD. First is a computer that is powerful enough to handle all the mixing and editing you'll be doing. As a barebones minimum, you should have a Pentium 166MHz (megahertz) or better processor, at least 64MB (megabytes) of RAM (random-access memory), and 700MB of hard drive space. I would recommend something with more power and speed like a 700+ MHz CPU, 256MB RAM and at least 15 Gig of hard drive space to work with. It's not technically a requirement for burning CDs, but it's necessary if you will be recording files to your computer before copying them onto the blank CD. You'll need more space if you're working with DVD. One hour of digital video can take up to a whopping 13GB (gigabytes) of storage.

Next you need a CD recorder. Most new computers come equipped with a CD recorder built in. If you don't have an extra grand or more sitting around to buy a new system, you can eek by, by purchasing a CD recorder for as little as $60. CD-ROMs are fine for making short multimedia presentations, but they can't support much imagery and won't be adequate for a true multimedia presentation of any length.

A DVD burner is really the best choice for recording video and audio. The pricing is a little higher than a CD-RW and you should expect to pay between $100 and $400 for a drive. These DVDs aren't the same as the ones you check out from the video rental store. Those are actually called DVD-Video. The ones for data storage are officially called DVD-Read-Only-Memory. The DVD movie player you bought can't read DVD-ROMs, but the DVD-ROM drive that came with your computer can read the movies.

You will also need a video capture card installed into your computer. These read analog video, such as from the old cassette of your 1990 family reunion, and digitize it so your PC can read it. These cards range in price from $65 for an average card and up to $3,000 for a top-of-the-range professional model. You might want to go middle of the road and invest between $200 and $300 in a decent model. Many video editing suites come with a card, so you might not have to buy one separately.

When it actually comes time for you to put video on your disc you will need to import the video to your computer from the camcorder. By doing some pre-editing you can save some time and space by picking the best parts to transfer. If you want to put only video on a DVD or CDwith no extra menus or textthen start your recording software and you're ready to go.

I use Easy CD Creator and I recommend it because of its easy to use step-by-step process for making CDs. Easy CD Creator is a pretty simplified version of a multimedia editor, and if you want to merge the video with text or interactivity, you'll need to use an editing suite to help you along.

Easy CD Creator is like most editing programs, using the drag-and-drop method. You'll select thumbnail images representing your video clips and drag and drop them in the order in which you want them to appear. Think of it as a timeline, each track playing out before the next one begins.

If you want to use the capacity of a DVD, but you don't have a DVD burner, you can use a software program called DVDit! LE (http://www.dvdit.com) that lets you create multimedia DVD's and CDs using only a CD-ROM drive. It sells for around $500 but is well worth it. DVD's require MPEG format for video files and one feature of this software is that it automatically converts AVI or QuickTime video and audio files to the proper format for you.

The crème de la crème of editing suites is Macromedia Director 8 (http://www.macromedia.com). This multimedia-authoring tool is rather expensive at $999, but it lets you produce winning presentations. A word of warning, however: Director isn't the easiest tool you can find for creating multimedia discs. But that's the price you pay for using such a powerful program. Macromedia Director 8 runs on both Windows and Macintosh and lets you put your content directly on the Web or onto discs.

Another good program is Studio MP10 from Pinnacle Systems (http://www.pinnaclesys.com). It lets you produce videos for CDs, the Internet, or DVDs. Studio works on the same timeline system described above, and it has easy access to titles, scene transitions, music, narration, and more. It also has simple tools to let you insert menus.

Sound is already bundled with video clips, so you don't really need to worry about adding extra if all you want is a straight video CD or DVD. However, if the sound is fuzzy, if you want to add a musical soundtrack, or if you want to insert a voice over, the process isn't difficult. Most editing suites have a simple menu command that lets you drop in sound where you like. If you already have a sound file, that's fine, but you can also grab music directly from your CD-ROM drive.

With these standard tools and some time, you will have no limitations to what you can do to dress up your final project. You may want to include captions with frames that appear on-screen. You can also incorporate HTML to make the CD work like a Web page.

Feel free to contact me via email at WebServerColumn@yahoo.com if you have any questions pertaining to video transfer and editing.