Windows 7: Creating Playable Music, Picture, Video Disks of Family Reunion.

I think I am beginning to see a problem, if my cousin's video recorder doesn't have a way to convert her video to DV, that part of the project will have to be put on hold for a while.



I'll know more when I talk to her Saturday.

How was your cousin's video recorded and what is the file format.

That will be the question I will ask her when I talk to her on Saturday.
I should know by 5pm est.

Hi whs good evening,

I talked with my cousin, and the video I was worried about is a moot point. She has a Cannon ES8100V 8mm and will be taking the tape to Costco's Photo Center to have the analog video (AV) converted to Digital Video (DV) and burned to disk, then upload them to an account she has with Snapfish(SF).

I was concerned about the cost, but she has done this before and doesn't think it will be that bad, maybe around $20US. All I know is I have heard it is expensive and thought it would be much more than that.
It says this at the Photo Center link under product details, I underlined two areas:
It's nice she will get a copy, but we'll see.


There is 25" of video and I told her to expect two disks. I was reading where 14GB equals about an hour of running time, so, turning that around and rounding the 25" to 30 I figured 7GB and two DVD disks.

I have already downloaded her pictures. The only thing I dislike is SF only allows a 10MB zipped download, I don't mind the .zip part, but do on the size limit.

I'll be online for a while yet, but it's getting late here so I think I'll call it a night and start on them tomorrow.

Well, that seems to solve that problem. I convert my VHDs myself. Quality usually suffers, but maybe Costco can do a better job. I have a great variety in output size per minute - from 20MB/min to 50MB/min. No idea why because all those videos were taken with the same camera.

Do you use something like this? Dazzle Video Creator Platinum HD I've seen it on amazon from $219.00 new to $80/85 used, but a lot of people are dissatisfied with it; poor quality, skips/drops, sound suffers, and non-existent support.

Not sure about your varying DV output, maybe it is your converter. If I come across anything I'll let you know.

I used the gear and a program from this company. I think I paid appr. $60 for it. The quality is OK and I have no skips or sound problems. But when played on TV, it is not the same as the original VCR. But fortunately there are ways to improve it a bit with the PC.

You probably already know about this, it's about 8mm, but if you scroll down a bit in the first answer you'll see it below the Some points to keep in mind for better quality DVD's: section:

Thanks for the info.

Your welcome, well its past midnight for me, and I'm heading for bed. I'll catch up tomorrow, good night.