DVD camcorder vs. Mini DV camcorder

DVD Movies (MPEG2) is certainly editable. Almost all standard editors, say, Adobe Premiere, Ulead Video Studio, etc. will accept an MPEG2 format naturally, i.e., not as a strange alien awkward option. Unlike other (say VCD, DV format), MPEG2 video frames are interdependent and work together as Group of Pictures (GOP) to effect maximum compression, in contrast to DV where each frame is independent and can be removed or changed independently. Therefore, in MPEG2, you cannot modify individual frames without affecting a group of frames(that roughly means you can only accesss at the begining of a second or so in a timeline, not at a fraction of a second location. That also means that you cannot delete only a few frames from whereever you wish, without badly affecting videos in other frames in the group. You should discard a whole group of frames.) Any software has to work in a convoluted way to incorporate any title, effect, transition or changes you make to your MPEG2 movie, therefore, they will take much longer time to render, with the more risk of lowered video quality depending on the capability of the software used. Moreover, DV, VCD use a unique standard algorithm but MPEG2 compression algorithm is not unique and varies widely from publisher to publisher - which can make the job tougher for a particular editing software resulting in confusion.

Read the reviews, DVD camera corders are not as good as miniDV ( too bad) probably next years models will get right. John

You can get a firewire cable and a firewire pci card so you can hook it up to your computer and use some kind of editing software. Then, you can burn the Dvds off your computer.