Transferring Mini DV to computer with HQ results?

Question

I have a lot of footage on Mini DV's that I want to transfer to my computer at the highest quality, edit them, and then put them on DVD's so that I can view them on my television and give them to people. I used "Exsate DV Capture Live" at the highest settings, and the video looked like trash- it was all choppy and fragmented. Not sure what to do. Is it the program? If so, are there any freeware programs that can provide high quality, DVD results?

Answer 1

Windows MovieMaker  will import (capture) without converting to a compressed AVI.

Your quality problem happens when you convert from that AVI to the DVD... you can bypass that step.

Capture using MovieMaker (or WinDV), edit, save the file, then use WinDVD to burn the DVD (and make menus for clip selection).

Answer 2

I'm not surprised the quality was poor - any app that says it's going to convert the format in realtime using a 1 Ghz PIII has to be sacrificing quality for speed.  If you want to use freeware, capture and edit with Windows Movie Maker and author and burn the DVD with DVD Flick.  The menu options are quite (OK, very) limited in DVD Flick, but you could use it to convert your edited video to MPEG-2 and then use DVDAuthorGUI to author a more sophisticated DVD.