Category: DV Hacks

Ask Jake / DV Hacks / DVD Hacks / HDDVD / HDTV / Premium / Windows Vista / Xbox

HD-DVD Authoring for Home Movies

How to make an HD-DVD using standard 4.7GB DVD media or 8.5GB dual layer disks.
After shooting numerous hours of high definition video footage, I’ve been itching for a way to create some HD-DVDs. There are no HD-DVD burners on the market at the moment. And media seems to be in scarce supply. Sure, I could shell out $700 for a Blu-ray burner, but then I’d need to spend another $600 for a player that conveniently connects to my television (like a PS3, for instance). At least I can use the Xbox 360 HD-DVD player with Windows Vista or my 360, and there’s now an HP HD-DVD player in the wild as well. When I found out Pinnacle added support for HD-DVD burning to Pinnacle Studio Plus, I was thrilled. Better yet, they do it by burning to standard 4.7GB DVDs or to 8.5GB dual layer disks.

Ask Jake / DV Hacks / Movie Maker / Premium / Windows Media

Make an Audio CD from DV Tape

David writes, “Is there a way to take my DV tape and put only the audio onto a cd? So that people can listen to the audio from the program in their car? I do the multimedia for my church and we are just begining to get into this.”
It’s definitely possible to take the audio from your digital video tape and put it on a CD. The process will vary slightly depending on what video editing software you use, but the basics of getting the job done are the same in every application. I’ll walk through the process of using Windows Movie Maker to capture and edit the video here.

Ask Jake / DV Hacks / Premium

Video Editing Application to Convert MOV and AVI to Flash

Is there a simple video editing application to convert MOV or AVI files to Flash? Ideally, I’d like to have play control buttons for the Flash player and the HTML code to put the video on a Web page as well.
There are a couple of ways to get your video files from any of the common desktop formats like MOV, AVI and WMV to a more Web friendly playback format like Flash. One easy way to convert a video to Flash is to upload the file to one of the many free online hosting services. This gets the video in format you want, but you lose control over the file and possibly some of your rights in the process. Using a desktop application provides more control over the appearance of your final video and makes it easy to only convert the portion of a video file you need. I haven’t found a free Flash conversion app I’m willing to recommend for Windows users, but Mac OS X users, have the option of using ffmpegX to convert video files to Flash with ease. Read on for Windows Flash conversion options.