Ok the problem is I have a client who is interested in getting an old cine film merged with an old soundtrack thats on a seperate tape, then put this to viewable format on a dvd.

My usual job is nothing to do with digital video editting but this client found out I use pc's all the time and obviously thought I knew how to do ANYTHING on a pc... sheesh.

I have no idea how to convert anything to a viewable dvd format.. how to make it/edit it etc. let alone get the physical film converted to digital form with accompanying soundtrack.

Any info on this problem would be grateful as I have hit a wall in my knowledge base in this subject.

You might want to take the project to a video shop and have a pro do it. You have a month or two learning curve and a significant cash outlay ahead of you to go from no digital video experience to doing film transfers, audio mixing, video editing and dvd authoring.

For the film transfer to digital video, the pro shop will have a film projector with a very short focal distance lens, a film transfer box (this is a ground glass rear projection 'screen' and a first surface reversing mirror) and a mini-DV digital video camera to capture the screen contents. You can sometimes find transfer boxes on ebay.com. Some even have the projector built in. Won't be cheap and you'll need time to learn how to best use it.

Once the film is in digital form it will need to be transfered to the PC though a firewire interface. This also needs a large capacity hard drive and preferably NTFS format, since FAT32 format has a 4G byte file size limit. Windows XP has NTFS format. 4G bytes is about 16 minutes of mini-DV.

Then the digital editing, audio mixing and final compression to MPEG2 DVD standards can begin. A good video editing program can handle this. They range in price from fifty to several thousand dollars. The cheap ones will let you do the basics and a few special effects. The costly ones have more special effects. All of them will take a lot of time for proficient use.

When that is done, the next step is to create all the DVD menu's, chapter marks and action links. Some video editing software can do this too.

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Hi there,
Could you give me some Idea what format the film is , how long, what format audio tape is it.

May be able to help.

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yeah im also better that the time sync is off when you even try to combine the video with audio, so i would also suggest let a pro handle it, the learning curve will take more time then you probily have

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