finalizing

Working with miniDVD's

Work with these little DVD's comes as:

  1. Finalizing the DVD.
  2. Copying the DVD.
  3. Consolidating miniDVD's onto one standard DVD.
  4. Unreadable miniDVD....see posting on "ripping an unreadable miniDVD".

Finalizing

Many miniDVD's I find are not finalized.  Make sure the customer leaves the camcorder so that you can finalize the DVD's.

Time: 4-5 minutes each.

Cost:  $5-6

Copying miniDVD's to standard DVD's

It is a very good idea to backup the miniDVD's as this is usually the customer's only copy of valuable footage.  I find that when these miniDVD's are being read (for backup by Nero) I usually encounter at least one "Unrecoverable read error" and sometimes as many as 6 or 7.  It seems that these errors do not have a great impact to the playback of the discs, but it still concerns me.

Time: 4 minutes to read, read & write is 10 minutes

Cost: $7.50

Consolidating MiniDVD's onto a Standard DVD

Essentially consolidating the DVD's into a standard DVD involves identifying the contents and making note of the dates, then copying the contents into Vegas Pro, labeling the timeline and rendering out the footage.  Then importing the timeline into DVD Architect and preparing and burning the contents.  Typically 3-4 miniDVD's will fit onto a standard DVD.

  1. Load miniDVD into drive (0.5 min)
  2. Use VLC to read the menu and record the dates in a spread sheet (0.5 min)
  3. In Vegas Pro import the footage from the miniDVD (2-3 min)
    1. File / Import / import from DVD?
    2. load onto timeline
    3. create a region for each date that you want in the final menu.
    4. render using UltimateS
    5. this should produce each clip named by date
  4. In DVD Architect (5 min?):
    1. drag clips into project....each clip should create a menu name by date
    2. prepare
    3. burn

Time: 9-10 min?

Cost: $7.50?