I want to burn DVDs with home video (mini DV and

[TennesseeHorn]

some Hi 8 that I have shot years ago) What is the best computer for this application (including HD, graphics card etc) I am looking at Power Director 4 software for the editing/burning..

Thanks

 

[HornHawk]

Tenn--I know that with the computer that I was using with my computer, there were issues on rendering and previewing (dropped frames were an issue). Now I was using Pinnacle software with a lot of transitions because the projects were for some big presentations. Because of all the problems, I switched to using my laptop and didn't have any of the problems afterwards. You may not need the fancy stuff and can be happy with just being able to transfer your videos to DVD with some simple editing.

The key is to have at a very minimum:
(1) 512 MB of RAM, and
(2) A video card that it up to date--there will be people who tell you that one card is crap and another is the ****, so I'm not going to suggest any brand cards, but if all you are using it for is home movies, then a card that has 128MB DDR memory and an 8-pixel pipeline should be sufficient.

One other note: sometimes what you are seeing on the computer screen is what you will see when you view it on the DVD. The rendering may be a little choppy, but it will likely still turn out smooth on the final product.

One other thing to do is check with the manufacturer of the software and see what their preferred specs are. They should have a web site where you can either ask questions or see an information database for issues like this.

 

[TennesseeHorn]

Thanks for the info!