My goal is to take my old home movies on Hi8 cassette tape (about 20 of them) and copy them onto my computer so I can preserve them longer and also make DVDs of them. For some, I want to take scenes from several different tapes to make a 'best of' type DVD. In working with the software for the last few days, it appears to me that this is the process I have to follow to do that:
1. Use 'Capture Video' component to copy the cassettes in their entirety to the computer. I'm using my camcorder and saving them in the AVI format. I'm copying the whole tape at once so that I can leave it running while it captures since this runs in real time and takes about an hour.
2. Then I go to 'Manage Media' and select the AVI file just created. I right-click on it to use 'scene selection' to break the large AVI file into smaller scenes that go together (i.e. soccer game, birthday party, etc).
3. Then I right-click on one of the individual scenes and choose 'edit' which loads up the 'VideoWave' component.
4. In VideoWave, I might trim the scene a little and add a 'color panel' and text at the beginning to introduce it. Then I save the file (defaults to DMSM) and then output the file back to an AVI format. Then I close the VideoWave component so it can load the next scene later in step 5.
5. Then I repeat steps 3 & 4 for each scene of the big AVI file.
6. Then I have the large AVI file separated into several smaller AVI files. I can get rid of the large AVI file now. I can use these smaller AVI files to call up 'MyDVD' to create a DVD which will allow me to view the files and jump to different scenes, based on the smaller AVI files.
Is that right? or am I making this process harder than it needs to be? This seems to take an awful lot of time and seems like I'm constantly jumping around between Media Manager/Video Wave, etc. If there are shortcuts or an easier way, please let me know... THANKS!