Congrats on the purchases and welcome to the world of Digital Video.

For your first forays, I’d suggest that you steer clear of MSP8. It’s quite high end and will probably frustrate more than please!

For very basic editing tasks (capture, edit clips, maybe some very simple titles, then transfer to DVD), you could use Nero Burning ROM (versions 6 and 7 include workable video editing with DVD burning engines). Or try Ulead’s DVD MovieFactory (version 4). For what you describe, you don’t need the ‘Disc Creator’ version (which has lots of modules for making CDs, etc. etc.).

For a tad more creativity in the video edits, why not use Windows Movie Maker? It’s a very workable product, if somewhat limited. But it’s free and not a bad place to start. Save the videos you make as standard PAL AVIs, and import them into Nero or MovieFactory — these programs will then encode them into the MPEG format required to play on a standard DVD player.

One step up the ladder is Ulead’s VideoStudio 9. This has quite a powerful editing engine, and includes a DVD authoring component. One of the BEST things about VS9 is the inclusion of AutoMusic — it uses some very cool technology to create music for your videos that is just exactly the right length. I think there are about 22 ‘free’ tunes provided with the program, but you can download hundreds more (or buy add-on discs) if you need extras.

As to backups: your 300GB HDD will fill surprisingly quickly! Each hour of DV footage (raw or edited) will consume 13GB of space! Mind you, hard drives are about the lowest price for storage these days ($/GB) — especially if you visit the Computer Nazi (see link over there ==>> ). My latest drives were $115 for 200GB. Many video editors use removable ‘caddies’ to allow off-line archiving of physical HDDs. Your other proposal (storing AVIs on DVD media) is also workable. I do it all the time for archival as most of what I produce is less than 15 minutes.

I transferred my Video8 tapes to PC some years ago for the same reasons that you nominate. (In fact, my V8 player died but my brother has a Sony D8 player which will play analogue V8 with real-time encoding to Firewire (digital) for capture into PC. I have that lot stored on a large USB-connected HDD waiting for an edit job. If I need to, I can save out to miniDV tape.)

Personally, I wouldn’t play into and record on a DVD recorder. You’ll end up with a lower quality product, and MPEG (as used on DVDs) is not a good format for editing — very hard to be ‘frame-accurate’.

Sonic probably can do what you want. Never used it. Sorry.

If you decide to buy Ulead software, shop around and then consider buying on-line. It’s a HUGE download (I know you are on broadband), but almost always cheaper. See earlier posts on this site. And don’t forget to click the Ulead button on this site to buy — help keep the Nerd Flying.

FN