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Video Camera to DVD

From Video Camera to DVD using Free and Open Source Software

In this article I have documented the step by step process that I use to transfer video from the family video camcorder onto DVD with pretty menu system for use by the DVD player.

Equipment:

  • JVC Everio Hard Disk Camcorder (Model GZ-MG361HEK)
  • Mini USB to USB cable.
  • Old(ish) HP Pavilion 64 AMD 3200+
  • Running the OpenSUSE 11.2, GNU/Linux distribution and my preferred Desktop environment (KDE 4.5)

Process

The high level outline view of the process is:

Record -> Upload -> Edit -> Render -> Master -> Burn -> Enjoy

  • Recording – Point the camera and shoot!
  • Uploading – Getting the Video files off of the video camera and into he computer.
  • Editing – The process of removing the cruft, joining the video scenes, making seamless transitions, correcting audio anomalies etc. to enhance the watch-ability and story line of the movie.
  • Rendering – The process of taking the bits, transitions and edits and making a single contigious movie file.
  • Mastering – The process of taking one or more mastered movies and crafting a DVD menu that allows the viewer to select which movie (or chapter) they wish to view and converting menu and movies to an ISO image suitable for burning on DVD discs.
  • Burning – The process of taking an ISO image and writing it to a DVD disc that is watchable / usable in a standard DVD player.
  • Enjoy – Put the DVD into your DVD player, watch and enjoy your handiwork.

Recording

Use the Camcorder to record your movie (go figure!). Either record as one continuous block of video or stop and start recording and record only the events that you want. I have done both ways before.

  • One continuous movie means less work editing, joining and creating transitions but can end up to being more tedious to watch. Also the overall movie will be longer and take longer to render.
  • If you choose the “stop and start the recording” process be sure to start recording 2-3 seconds earlier than you need and continue for 2-3 seconds after. This will allow time for fading in/out or transitional effects between scenes and allow more flexibility when trimming etc.

So choose wisely.

Uploading

Connect the camera, using the USB cable, to the computer . On the video cameras screen select “Back Up” (Save data to PC) mode. The camera will present itself to the PC as a removable hard drive and Linux will detect and automatically mount the drive at /media/EVERIO_HDD

Navigate the “removable HDD” and find your video files in /media/EVERIO_HDD/sd_video/prgXXX where XXX is a three digit number.

The movie files on the Everio have an unusual file name extension of .MOD and there are corresponding .MOI files (for which I have yet to find a use for!).

Open a second file manager window, and navigate to the folder where you want to move the movie files to or create a folder to hold the working copies of your movie files. I use a shared folder /home/all_users/Movies/MovieName. Copy the .MOD files of interest (date time stamp will help you select the correct files, as long as the date set in the camera is right of course) from the camera to your working directory.

user@machine> cd /home/all_users/Movies/folder/
            user@machine> cp /media/EVERIO_HDD/sd_video/prg123/*.MOD ./

Un-mount the EVERIO_HDD drive using the device manager plasma app (or equivalent).

Editing

My JVC Everio saves all the video files with a weird file extention. Mplayer and VLC recognise the file format (even if not the file extention) as being MPG video files. So, rename the .MOD files in the working directory with the .MPG file extention.

user@machine> for f in `ls | grep MOD | cut -d ‘.’ -f 1`; do mv $f.MOD $f.MPG; done

Next I have found that I get audio errors rendering the intermediate edited MPG movie files and/or the final DVD files. The audio portion never makes it to the rendered movie or DVD, or is corrupted in some way so that when the movie plays on either of my computers the sound system crashes! However I have found that if I split the audio track from the video and convert it to mp2 format (DVD friendly format) that the corruption during rendering does not happen. So there is something screwy with the audio in the .MOD file.

To split the audio from the video file(s) I use the following command:

user@machine> ffmpeg -i MOV05E.MPG -vn -acodec mp2 -ar 44100 -ac 2 mov05e.mp2

Before I start the editing application I also assemble into the working directory any other file or media objects that I might need. For example, A background image to place behind any title sequence or end credits, images such as Logo’s or clipart, sound tracks for background music (converted to mp2 format, see above).

Now I’m ready to fire up the video editing application. I use KDEnlive to edit my movies. Start by creating a new project and save it in the working directory. Add all your movie clips, sound clips and background to the project by selecting Project → Add Clip from the menu.

Add the background to the time-line editor by dragging from the and dropping the
Edit your movie by dragging the movie and audio clips onto the timeline. Add color clips to fade to and back from for transitions. Add Title clips to add titles and/or graphics (use transparent background if you want to overlay these directly on top of the video).

  1. When ready to render to a single movie file
  2. Push the Render button
  3. Destination → File Rendering
  4. Output file → Destination folder and name the destination file
  5. Format → PAL
  6. Select MPEG-2 in the left hand column
  7. And MPEG-2 1000k in the right hand column
  8. Leave everything else as defaults
  9. Push “Render to File” button

Result! We have a single MPEG movie file.

Mastering the DVD

For this part of the process I will use the application DVD Styler.

  1. Start the application and “Save As” to create a new project xml file. I usually save this to the same directory as the original movie file(s), audio file(s), image(s), edited movie etc.
  2. Select the “File Browser” tab on the left.
  3. Browse to your working folder then drag the Movies that you want on the DVD to the bottom of the window. They will be automatically called Title1, Title2 etc. Select the “Backgrounds” tab on the left.
  4. Drag and drop a suitable background onto the right window pane, resize to fill the mock screen.
  5. Drag and drop images as appropriate (e.g. logo)
  6. Right click and “Add Text” to create labels for the play buttons.
  7. Select the “Buttons” tab.
  8. Drag a button from the left onto the background.
  9. Double click the button to open its properties. Select the Title the this button will play when clicked. Also set where the cursor/focus goes when the up/down/left/right arrows on the DVD remote are pushed
  10. When happy, push the “Burn DVD” button to create the .iso image.

Burning the ISO Image to DVD.

For this step I use the application “K3B”. I will write about this step in a later article.

Making the DVD look Pretty

Equipment:

  • DVD Labels (Sticky)
  • DVD Cases
  • DVD Label application thingy-bob.

Software

  • GIMP to create imagary,
  • Libre Office or Scribus to layout on page and print.

I will write about this step in a later article.