DVD authoring software

edbert

Here's the background. My father-in-law has tons of video over the course of my wife's and brother-in-laws lives that is on various non-digital format video tapes. I helped him find a good USB device to allow him to basically hook his VCR up to his computer and at least get the video onto the computer. The problem is, the software that came with the unit sucks. It's Ulead DVD Moviefactory 4.0 SE. It's glitchy and locks up the system a lot. This is after the updates to make it work with Vista.

Here's the question, what is a good simple DVD authoring and video editing program that he can use in conjunction with this? The editing part basically needs to be able to cut out the dead space at the beginning and end and possibly some of the stuff in between if there is more than one event on a tape. Any ideas? I have Sony Vegas, but just looking at the screen after opening up the program would make him want to quit the process. He understands the basics, so a clean and simple interface is much needed.

Please let me know if I have left out anything that would help you to help me make a decision.

Sami

Adobe Premier for the cutting, or TMPEnc. Vista comes with a MovieMaker that makes a basic DVD. I can't remember if you can do menus with it though as I only used it once. Worth a try before buying something cheap.

Refefer

Sami wrote: »

Adobe Premier for the cutting, or TMPEnc. Vista comes with a MovieMaker that makes a basic DVD. I can't remember if you can do menus with it though as I only used it once. Worth a try before buying something cheap.

I use a mac for all my editing, but the little bit that I've fooled around with Premier 2 has shown it to be a very capable editing system. I'd check out something by Roxio for the actual menu making/bunring onto DVD.

edbert

I actually tried MovieMaker. For some reason it saw the file as only audio. WMP will play the video just fine, but MovieMaker won't. I'll do some more research on it, but if I can't get it to work easily then I know he won't be able to.

Any links you can point me to on TMPEnc? I have seen a lot of info, but no actual website.

Demiurge

I have been using Adobe Premier 2 for about a week now and it's great.

Sami

edbert wrote: »

Any links you can point me to on TMPEnc? I have seen a lot of info, but no actual website.

http://www.google.com/search?q=TMPEnc&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

http://www.tmpg-inc.com/en/index.html

edbert

Ah, I was missing the G. Thank you sir. I will check Premiere as well.