Many people buy consumer technology products like camcorders and then need help moving the video files to the DVD format. There are some Windows software tools for the task, but better tools exist for the Mac platform. The issue here is that consumer cameras often use odd MP4 formats or MPEG2 for storing the video on miniCDs or SD cards.
Today, we received a video DVD job where the original files from a Canon FS-100 camcorder were brought to us on a CD-ROM disc. The files were labeled 1.MOD, 2.MOD, etc… as that was the camcorder’s setting for saving the video files. Most of the video tools on the Mac do not open MPEG2 formatted video files — even the venerable VLC.
There is a free tool made by Squared 5 called MPEG Streamclip that can read about any format of video and transcode it to a modern usable format like DV or MP4. You can use MPEG Streamclip to open most movie formats including MPEG files or transport streams, convert them into muxed or demuxed files, or export them to QuickTime, AVI, DV and MPEG-4 files with more than professional quality.
Once this is done, any standard video editing software package that uses QuickTime like FinalCut or iMovie on the Mac can piece the segments of video together and burn a DVD that is playable in standard DVD players.
There are some small issues with some consumer camcorders. In the case of the Canon FS-100, its audio is very noisy due to its poor microphone, which picks up ambient sound and also the camera’s motor noise. In this situtation, I was happy iMovie HD had a noise filter and low-pass and high-pass filter.
The one other issue was that some of the time code in a couple segments was not synchronized correctly when the video was recorded. MPEG Streamclip actually detects and can automatically correct time code problems.
Lastly, I needed to install my copy of the $20 QuickTime MPEG2 plug-in to work with MPEG2 video. The video encoder is licensed and QuickTime does not include it unless you pay for that license.
Working with the latest consumer camcorders can offer some challenges, but with the right tools, you can master the art of video to DVD conversions.
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