DVD burning

[Greg Dunn]

I have a PowerMac G4 with an internal DVD-R/RW.  Is it possible, maybe through a PCI card, or something,  to hook up my Videocassette Recorder to my computer and copy tapes to a DVD?  Specifically, I'd like to make a DVD of old home movies that my father took long ago.

[kelly]

Yes you can Greg.  

Is that an Apple Internal SuperDrive?

Your main options are to get a Digital to Analog Convertor.

Or better but more expensive, a Digital Camcorder with "pass through" capabilities.

Lots of info here.

http://www3.macintouch.com/digitizingvideo.html

http://www3.macintouch.com/digitizingvideo.html#links

http://www.apple.com/imovie/compatibility/.../camcorder.html

http://www.apple.com/imovie/

http://www.apple.com/dvd/

[kps]

Not directly. The analog tapes have to be digitized first and then the DV stream compressed so they can be burned to DVD-R.

A dvd-r is only 4.7 gig, an hour of raw video is 12gig, so compression is important.

There's probably a lot of hardware and software out there which will do this...at a price.

You may try this if you own a firewire miniDV camcorder...connect the DVcam to the VCR and copy the old tapes onto miniDV. Then, import this into iMovie, edit further if you wish or just export to iDVD and burn to DVD-R.

EDIT: yeah what kelly said...I got to learn to type faster...  
 
 [ 04-22-2003, 10:00 PM: Message edited by: kps ]

[Greg Dunn]

Thanks for the advice.  To answer the question, yes, it's an internal SuperDrive.  I don't have a digital camcorder, and probably wouldn't use one after transfering the video, so the other option looks good to me, maybe the Formac.  Big help.  Thanks again.