[jabulon]

Acceptable? Well yes if there is no other possibility. Is it ideal? No! Like you said in your own comment the best way to go is to transfer the mini-dv to your PC via firewire. Nearly all DV camcorders have IEEE 1394 (FireWire, i.LINK) ports for digital video transfer. When video is captured onto a computer it is stored in a container file, which can be either raw DV stream, AVI, WMV or Quicktime (depending on the software used). Whichever container, the video itself is not re-encoded and represents a complete digital copy of what has been recorded onto tape. [There are some camcorders that feature a USB 2.0 port for computer connection. This port is usually used for transferring still images, but not for video transfer. Camcorders that offer video transfer over USB usually do not deliver full DV quality.]


So all the steps would be:

1. Capture: getting the DV information from the tape to a file on the computer (firewire, btw make sure the DV camera is set to VCR mode. When possible choose DV Type 2 because this appears to be more commonly/readily accepted by encoding tools. The different types (1 & 2) have nothing to do with the video, just the way the audio is stored).

2. Editing the DV file: lots of software possibilities ranging from free to expensive (VirtualDub, Avisynth, Windows Movie Maker, Adobe Premiere, Sony vegas Movie Studio, TMPGEnc etc).

3. Converting the edited file from DV format to MPEG-2: this requires an encoder (most editors include one, some are better than others. TMPGEnc Plus, Canopus Procoder, Mainconcept MPEG Encoder, Cinemacraft Encoder or a free encoder like HC Encoder.

4. Authoring: creating titles, menus, adding special effects (again lots of software possibilities from free to expensive).

5. Burning: writing the edited video and authored information to the DVD (most use ImgBurn or Nero, I would recommend ONES).

6. Verifying DVD.

Some people would recommend an ‘all-in-one’ program while others use individual programs optimized for each step in the process to give more complete control and to allow lots of processing (noise removal, de-blocking, etc. – which is a whole study in itself). Determine which format you have (standard or hi-def) then decide on how much time and money you want to spend, and then make a choice. Also keep in mind that 'free' means things will come at a cost too.