You can transfer from the camera with freeware WinDV: http://windv.mourek.cz/

WinDV is a small and easy to use Windows application for capturing videos from DV device (camcorder) into AVI-files and for recording AVI-files into DV device via FireWire (IEEE 1394) interface.

Edit with VirtualDub (freeware), or if you want better quality and more professional advanced features then use Adobe Premiere or Vegas.

Where you'll run into problems going all free is in an MPEG encoder. TMPGEnc is free for MPEG-1 encoding and has 30 days of free MPEG-2 encoding. It's also very reasonably priced if you want to buy it after you try it out. CCE Basic is a little more expensive but also a much better encoder. It's big brother (CCE SP) is the gold standard in MPEG encoders and they both use the same encoding engine.

For authoring DVDs use IFOEdit.

Last update: 07:24 PM Sunday, February 26, 2006