From DV to DVD using only free tools

• Published 2007-06-01 (11 months, 3 weeks ago)

Mission:

1. Transfer footage from my DV-camera to my computer.
2. Do a little bit of editing and add a simple introduction with music and text.
3. Make a DVD from the edited video, playable in a standalone DVD player. A nice menu is also a plus.

Entering the world of free video converters, codecs and editors can be scary and very frustrating. There is always a risk of doing something illegal, installing malicious software, crash your computer or simply being driven to madness because nothing works.

After countless hours of trial and error I finally managed to fulfill my mission. I have written down the necessary steps so that I do not forget them. Hopefully I also can save others from doing the same mistakes.

Before you start

The following software will be used.

• WinDV for capturing
• Blender 2.44 for editing
• DVD Styler for DVD authoring
• CDBurnerXP Pro for burning the final DVD

Blender and DVD Styler are cross-platform. WinDV and CDBurnerXP pro are only available on Windows. However, Linux users should have no problems finding alternatives. I also used some other software to create content for the DVD:

• DVD Slideshow GUI for creating nice slide shows with transitions and music
• Inkscape for menu graphics

Make sure that you have plenty of free space on your hard drive. A typical DVD can store more than 4 gigabytes of data. In addition you will need space for the captured footage and plenty of space for temporary files. An external hard drive is a good investment.

Capturing from camcorder

For capturing footage from my Panasonic MiniDV camcorder, I used a handy, little program called WinDV:

WinDV is a small and easy to use Windows application for capturing videos from DV device (camcorder) into AVI-files and for recording AVI-files into DV device via FireWire (IEEE 1394) interface. Capturing is very reliable thanks to use of large buffer queue.

It does exactly what it promises.

Before you start capturing you have to decide how to split the footage. You can set WinDV to create a new file for every clip by setting Discontinuity threshold > 0. You can also limit the maximum frames in each file. In my case I ended up limiting the number of frames to 6000. The reason for this was that my editing program Blender, could not handle larger files. Here are the settings I used:

Warning: If you plan to edit your video with Blender, make sure that your video clips are smaller than 1 GB. Larger files may trigger strange bugs when rendering the final video. To be on the safe side, limit the clips to 6000 frames.

Editing the video

For editing I used Blender. It is primarily a 3D modeling and rendering tools, but it also has a very capable built in non-linear video sequence editor. It does not have all the bells and whistles of other video editors, but for combining and cutting video clips, adding sound and music, and doing simple transition effects, it has all that you need.

The latest versions of Blender is also built with FFMPEG support, so you can read and write media in many formats, including MPEG2. Version 2.44 of Blender can now also load multiple clips at once, which is really a time saver.

I will not go into details how to use Blender for video editing. I will just show the video and audio settings I used. For video format I chose the PAL and DVD presets as shown in the following figure. Presets are also available for NTSC users.

For audio I chose multiplexing and MP2 format. NTSC users should probably choose the AC3 format instead. When multiplexing is selected, video and audio is combined into a single file.

Important: Set the audio mixer frequency to 48.0 kHz to avoid synchronization problems in the DVD authoring process.

Rendering the final video is time consuming. In my case rendering a 60 min video took nearly three hours. The result is a MPEG2 file which is suitable for DVD authoring. Blender's default file extension is *.dvd. You should rename the rendered videos to *.mpg. DVD Styler does not accept files with other extensions.

DVD authoring

For DVD authoring I used DVD Styler. The program is a relatively user-friendly GUI-frontend to tools like FFMPEG and DVDAuthor. With DVD Styler you can author DVDs with nice looking menus. Again I will not go into details. I recommend taking a look at the documentation before you start. That may save you from some frustration.

Before you create the final ISO image I highly recommend that you first debug the DVD on your computer. It is very frustrating to discover errors after you have burned a physical DVD. For debugging VLC is an excellent media player. It has no problems with playing DVDs from you hard drive.

The final output from DVD Styler is an ISO image. DVD Styler ships with software for buring the ISO image to disc. I used CDBurnerXP Pro without any problems. I was very satisfied with the end result. DVD Styler can be used to create very professional looking DVDs.

Final words

I could probably have save myself a lot of frustration if I had bought a commercial video editing package. Some of the packages are quite cheap, but I wanted to avoid filling my hard drive with slow and bloated software just for making a single DVD. It was also very satisfying and fun to do this using only free and mostly open source software. Next time the process will be much easier since I know the pitfalls.