I bought a Canon dvd video camera, I have a pc and tried to convert the files which were recorded on the 3" dvd discs of the camera. The files are saved as a 'VRO' format. I found that my Nero 7 software couldn't do anything with them - so I read somewhere on the net that they can be just renamed as .mpg files and then I could do something with them... I did this and Nero did then convert them to actual 'dvd format' ready for burning onto standard dvd discs... I burned the files and then found that the picture when played on my dvd player through to the tv was sketchy and jittery... no good to watch at all.
So I posted the problem and folk suggested my pc wasn't really up to the spec required... I was advised to upgrade the pc. (it was a 1.66ghz, old and very tired pc to be honest).
I now have built a new pc; with a 2.3Ghz Quad core processor, 2Gb Ram, 500Gb hard drive... I am confident it is up to the spec required.
I have again taken the camera mini dvd disc and have copied the file(s) to a hard drive folder and then tried to use Nero 7 again - it did encode the file ok and then I tried to burn it at 4x speed (believing as I have been told the slower the better for dvds..?) but twice it has failed and ejected the dvd rw disc after just 10 minutes. I suspect these 4.7Gb discs may be suspect.
The current issue of 'Computer Active' magazine has a write up on a free, shareware program called DVD Flick which both encodes and burns dvds. I downloaded it and used it and sure enough - it encoded the mpg file(s) to dvd format and also burned it all to a dvd rw disc. But... when I played the finished dvd in my player... again I have the jittery result. The still scenes are ok but when the camera has panned - the footage is jerky and unwatchable.
If I connect my dvd camera direct via a lead to my tv - the resulting footage is perfect - excatly as it should be.

What am I doing wrong?

What alternative course of action / procedures would you take and if you wouldn't use these software types - what would you use?

Many thanks for your advice!

Element.

I would suspect it is converting your video from lower field to upper field or turning them in to progressive, you need to check them with something like "Tecoltd Bitrate Viewer" if you can find an older version it is free ware, but not the new version. and then make sure the fields stay in the same order they were capture in.

I have been using MPEG StreamClip 1.2 (Squared 5 - MPEG Streamclip video converter for Mac and Windows) recently and got good results from it after wanting to take vob files off dvd's (see if it will open your .vro files). It has very basic editing, you can just do trimming but it seems to be very good when it comes to converting files from one format to another. I also downloaded QuicktimeAlt181 (freeware) which you need to install first as it has codecs that MPEG StreamClip 1.2 needs to run properly. You then run MPEG StreamClip 1.2 and then click on either File->Open Files or Open DVD.

After you have the file in the program you can then go to File and select either Export to Quicktime, DV, AVI, MPEG4 or other Formats. I tend to stick to avi and mpeg4, the avi uses Apple DV encoder and works well with Adobe Prem Pro and once you get it in there you can work away with it as much as you like. If I want to put something on Youtube straight away then I select MPEG4.

Now that sounds like sound advice... I have had adobe premier elements 7 recommended to me and there's even a 'dummies' book for it too - so I may get that - but as your suggested software is free - I think I'll go for that for now and just do the one video so I know the system actually all works ok - then maybe invest in something like elements to do more editing stuff.
We have successfully ruined two dvd rw discs with nero 7 now and we no longer trust it to do any dvd work; it's fine for data and even music but it just can't seem to encode the footage properly for what we want to do, I guess its a bit dated now.

Another point you may want to look at is that you have been burning your projects to RW discs. Your DVD player may actually be having trouble dealing with these hence the jumping or jitteryness on playback.
Try a -R disc and see if that helps.

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Success!!! - Well partial success at least... I used the MPEG StreamClip 1.2 in conjunction with the Quicktime alt' 181... and burned a dvd rw with 'deepburner' free ware and the images were crisp and perfect - exactly what I have been trying to get, no jittery frames and the panning was fine... but there was no sound .
I figure this is probably just a missing 'tick in a box' somewhere - so we'll take more time with the same footage and see what we can do about the audio... It was late last night when we'd configured everything - so we probably missed something - we'll try to play the now converted MPEG4 footage in the PC and see if it has any sound or not... It shouldn't be difficult to figure this bit out

We thought about that - but because my wife had downloaded divx films and had managed to burn them to the same dvd rw discs and these played without any problem we knew the discs were ok and the player was fine with them...

FILE->Export to AVI

Compression - Apple DV PAL

Quality - 100% drag the slider to the right.

Limit data rate to - 3600kbps - Tick the box to activate this.

Sound - MPEG Layer 2, see if this works, if it does then use this all the time, or try MPEG Layer 3 next time.
Stereo, Auto, 256kbps.

Frame Rate - 25fps.

Frame Size - Choose one of the settings or use the Custom Setting at the bottom.

De-Interlace Video - Ticked.

Field Dominance - Lower.

Click on MAKE AVI button.

The avi will take a while to render, and when done you should be able to open it up in a 'real' editor, work on it and then Export to DVD.

Have to say that this little MPEG StreamClip 1.2 is brilliant! It does exactly what I needed it to do and I can't believe it was a free program - fantastic results. I have finally now put several hours worth of accumulating mini dvd rw discs footage into the hard drive with full confidence in the conversion and rendering by this little app. I'll still keep the original files in case there's a problem until I have burned a final version though. Now just got to get an editing program to cut the footage into a better viewing film series...

Glad to hear everything worked out for you using that piece of software. As far as choosing an editor is concerned, download some of the 30 day trials of the editors you see listed on this forum. Whether it's Adobe Premiere, Sony Vegas or from some other company. Now that you have the files in avi format it opens up a lot more possibilities.

I also made the mistake of using a DVD camcorder which used the .vro file format. I followed these steps and it also worked for me, although I had to use my PC to do the conversion (I couldn't find Mac software that carried the codecs for mpeg2) so I could then copy the file to my Mac.

My 1.3GB .vro file turned into a 8.5GB MPEG4 file in 4 hours. To copy the file to the Mac another one hour and then to import this new file into iMovie 8.0 took another 20mins.

I have another 7 files to convert, so that's about 50hrs of just preparation work before I get to edit and make one movie out of all 7 disks. I hope iMovie can handle these large files...

Thanks for your help!