I have recently been burning DVD home movies with DVD-X-Maker which is an ok program but could be muchly improved (any suggestions on a better program for holywood style DVDs?) and i have now hit a problem.

My problem is as follows. I have copied two seperate tapes (from the one occassion) from my dv camcorder but want to have these two files as one in the movie without having to have two templates to play them.

Because dvd-x-maker doesnt accomidate for this i borrowed a version of Ulead videostudio 8 of a friend and though this would solve my problem. So i put these two video files together but the prgram decreases the quality from around 3.9gb to 2.7gb. The sound is all mucked up in this process aswell.

What i am trying to say if you cant understand me is, that i am trying to make these two files one without losing any quality. Just like you can do in wavestudio with audio.

Does anyone have any suggestions?, i have also tried using blazemedio pro but also experience the same problems?

What setting did you use for burning from Ulead Studio 8?

The quality should not have reduced. Check that you are using a variable bitrate of 8000fps.

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IBM A51p with 160Gb Boot Disk, 160Gb external Firewire Disk, 2Gb Memory and a super duper sound card, 17\" TFT Monitor etc etc etc
Sony TRV33e : Sony TRV310e : Canon XM2
ULead products mostly including Mediastudio Pro (V8.0), Video Studio 8, Movie Factory 2.0, Premiere Elements

Remember, there is always more to learn than there is to teach.

I didnt burn from Ulead.

I captured the two videos from my camcorder with the sony program it came with. Then i went into ulead and opened one of the files and then the other which appeared in the timeline next to it. I then just saved the files as mpeg2 which appeared to decrease the quality.

I went into dvd-x-maker and put the file (which was the two clips in the mpeg2 format) into a new project but when i previewed it the sound was all distorted?

Just a couple of points.

1. If Sony are still bundling that rather poor (IMHO) Pixela Image Mixer software, then I would use something else to capture. Why not use your Ulead software to capture in full resolution DV AVI format via firewire?

2. If your project settings are the default MPEG 2 settings then you are using a mid range quality setting. Regardless of your burning method, and if your DVD burning project is under one hour in total, set your Ulead project settings to 8000kbps as folllows

3. From the File menu select Project Poperties

4. Make sure that the Edit file format: drop down box is set to MPEG files

5. Click the Edit button

6. Click the Compression tab

7. Change the Media type: dropdown value to PAL DVD

8. Change the Video data rate: to Variable

9. Change the kbps value to 8000

10. Click OK button twice

11. Continue your project to completion

12. Enjoy

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IBM A51p with 160Gb Boot Disk, 160Gb external Firewire Disk, 2Gb Memory and a super duper sound card, 17\" TFT Monitor etc etc etc
Sony TRV33e : Sony TRV310e : Canon XM2
ULead products mostly including Mediastudio Pro (V8.0), Video Studio 8, Movie Factory 2.0, Premiere Elements

Remember, there is always more to learn than there is to teach.

Thanks purejammy,

I ended up just capturing from ulead with no problems. It was my first time using the sony program to capture and the sound was out of sync from the capturing, before i even tried to edit it with ulead. Thanks heaps for your help. One last thing, do you have any ideas on what the best Holloywood style dvd maker is?
Cheers mate

Adobe Encore will do anything you want it to. It's not "Hollywood" standard as you put it but probably as good as is out there for us mere mortals.

Even better if you know (or have) Photoshop as the menus are PSD files

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I'm not young enough to know everything!