Professor Geek

My son recently bought a Sony Handycam DCR-DVD92. The main reason for his purchase was the ease of use of having a camcorder that recorded directly to DVD. The idea was to just record video, plop the DVD in the computer, and then edit, combine taping sessions, and write to an edited DVD for distribution to family and friends.

The camcorder is probably the only model Sony has that doesn’t come with any software and that doesn’t have a connection device (firewire, usb, etc.). The only way to get your video to your computer for editing is to use the DVD. Use of the camcorder was, as advertised, simple. It shot good video and had a relatively straightforward menu system. But the first time we tried to copy video data to the computer for editing, the computer didn’t recognize the data on the drive.

After some research (lots of Google searches), I found out that the camcorder creates its video in a format called VOB. That is a format that combines the audio and video track somewhat differently than most common formats. Roxio Easy Media Creator documentation claimed to be able to input VOB files, but we couldn’t read them. After quite a bit of time was spent messing with the disks, I finally determined that the reason that we couldn’t read the video was that my son was not finalizing the disks (he was using DVD+RW disks) before putting them into the computer. I suggested he finalize one, so he did that and, voila, problem solved. Easy Media Creator would recognize the files on the disk, import them (we had to use the “capture” mode) and then edit them with the usual editing features.

Bottom line: While vendors make every effort to make things user friendly, this stuff is still fairly complicated and it really does pay to read the manual (the solution to our problem was on page 44 of the manual, where it said that you had to finalize the disks before trying to use them in a computer drive). Take your time, read the documentation, and follow recommended steps in the proper order.

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.