Sony DVD cam corder and Pixela software

[caiss4]

Can anyone help..

Three years ago now I took the family on the 'holiday of a lifetime' to Thailand and Australia. It was all recorded using a Sony DVD camcorder (state of the art at the time) and rewriteable DVD's. As the DVD on the camcorder filled I'd download on to my laptop PC and re-use the DVD.

I thought this was the best idea at the time. The camcorder came with this Pixela s/w to edit the video captures and put together a 'video' to burn to DVD....except I could never get the DVD to burn successfully.

I did a search at the time and there did seem to be a history of problems using this Pixela s/w but to be honest I got bored with the time expended trying to solve the problem.

I'm now getting nagged by my kids asking to see the video of their holiday. I have the (probably) proprietary IMV extension files on my PC but no means of getting these on to a DVD.

Does anyone out there have any suggetions as to how I could get these files burnt to a DVD so at least they could see each video capture?

If anymore info is required please let me know and I'll try and find out

[fastfreddy]

How big are the .IMV files you copied? Were there other files you copied off the disc at the same time?

[caiss4]

I have 3 0r 4 files ranging in size from 26Mb to 58Mb if I remember correctly. I also thought I had individual capture files but these don't appear to be on my home PC but would have been on the laptop that I no longer have! I do, however, have a backed up copy of the hard drive from the laptop so I'll need to take a look tonight to see if there are any other files.

As far as I can recall the IMV files are the 'edited' final versions before burning to DVD and that of course was where the problem was; the s/w refused to complete the burn.

[fastfreddy]

Unless you shot just a few minutes of footage, those filesizes aren't big enough to be the video files.
I think .imv is some sort of thumbnail or index file which accompanies the actual video files.
Sony DVD camcorders store the video in a non standard format until you finalise the disc, however I have successfully recovered video from corrupted discs before so it can be done.
At the end of the day, it's MPEG2 and you should be able to get the video back if you find the original files.

[caiss4]

Well if I double click on these files the Pixela s/w opens and I can then watch the video without a problem but this is not very convenient as I'd rather just burn a DVD a pop it in the DVD player and TV.
I might come back to you if I can find the original video files though.

[fastfreddy]

caiss4 said:

Well if I double click on these files the Pixela s/w opens and I can then watch the video without a problem but this is not very convenient as I'd rather just burn a DVD a pop it in the DVD player and TV.
I might come back to you if I can find the original video files though.

Do they open in a small window on your PC? As i said, they may just be small versions of the actual video you recorded.
50MB is is less than a minute of high quality MPEG2 video, which is what the Sony DVD camcorders are using.

[caiss4]

No the Pixela application starts up and operates in the Album mode ( see http://www.imagemixer.com/e/sony/handycam/index.ht... I can then click on any of the individual clips in a scene and watch the clip. As for the file size I'll have to check again when I get home tonight.

[caiss4]

fastfreddy said:

caiss4 said:

Well if I double click on these files the Pixela s/w opens and I can then watch the video without a problem but this is not very convenient as I'd rather just burn a DVD a pop it in the DVD player and TV.
I might come back to you if I can find the original video files though.

Do they open in a small window on your PC? As i said, they may just be small versions of the actual video you recorded.
50MB is is less than a minute of high quality MPEG2 video, which is what the Sony DVD camcorders are using.

OK, did a search of my PC and I've found the 300+ video clips, each ranging from 5 - 50MB which I can open in Windows Media Player. What I'd like to do is get all those clips on to a DVD. What are the options? Is there some editing s/w (other than Pixela) that will let me do this?

[fastfreddy]

caiss4 said:

fastfreddy said:

caiss4 said:

Well if I double click on these files the Pixela s/w opens and I can then watch the video without a problem but this is not very convenient as I'd rather just burn a DVD a pop it in the DVD player and TV.
I might come back to you if I can find the original video files though.

Do they open in a small window on your PC? As i said, they may just be small versions of the actual video you recorded.
50MB is is less than a minute of high quality MPEG2 video, which is what the Sony DVD camcorders are using.

OK, did a search of my PC and I've found the 300+ video clips, each ranging from 5 - 50MB which I can open in Windows Media Player. What I'd like to do is get all those clips on to a DVD. What are the options? Is there some editing s/w (other than Pixela) that will let me do this?

The first thing I would try is renaming the clips with a .mpg extension and see if they will open in a standard media player (VLC or Windows). If that works, you can download all sorts of free DVD burning tools and use one of those. If it doesn't then you'll need to do more googling or use Pixela to do something with them first to make them DVD friendly. Take a look at www.videohelp.com where there's loads of info about this sort of thing.

[caiss4]

fastfreddy said:

caiss4 said:

fastfreddy said:

caiss4 said:

Well if I double click on these files the Pixela s/w opens and I can then watch the video without a problem but this is not very convenient as I'd rather just burn a DVD a pop it in the DVD player and TV.
I might come back to you if I can find the original video files though.

Do they open in a small window on your PC? As i said, they may just be small versions of the actual video you recorded.
50MB is is less than a minute of high quality MPEG2 video, which is what the Sony DVD camcorders are using.

OK, did a search of my PC and I've found the 300+ video clips, each ranging from 5 - 50MB which I can open in Windows Media Player. What I'd like to do is get all those clips on to a DVD. What are the options? Is there some editing s/w (other than Pixela) that will let me do this?

The first thing I would try is renaming the clips with a .mpg extension and see if they will open in a standard media player (VLC or Windows). If that works, you can download all sorts of free DVD burning tools and use one of those. If it doesn't then you'll need to do more googling or use Pixela to do something with them first to make them DVD friendly. Take a look at www.videohelp.com where there's loads of info about this sort of thing.

Thanks for your help. I'll try doing as you suggest.