Using Firewire Cable From Camcorder To Pc

I want to transfer all my videos from the minidvs onto my pc. So far i tried windows movie maker which isnt that bad but im wondering if there is a better software i can use.

There's Adobe Premiere ($700) or Ulead DVD Workshop ($500). Those are the only 2 I've used. They're excellent pieces of software, so you get what you're paying for. I can't think of anything cheaper though.

Yea because i have used windows movie maker and i dont like the settings that record the video. One setting makes it look bad and the best setting just takes up too much space.

That is because DV has a native data rate of about 3,6MB/s respectively 13GB/h. During editing a movie there is no way to reduce the size of the video without loosing a lot of quality.

When it is ready you can dub it back to tape (if your camcorder supports it) or encode and burn it on a DVD for example, if it takes up too much space on your hard disk.

It has nothing to do with the editing program you are using.

so for an hour of recording it will take up around 13 gigs. Wow thats a couple of dvds to copy then. i didnt think that. I thought maybe i could get an hour of recording onto a dvdr

Well, I do it this way:
For archiving I dub my movies back to tape, this means no quality loss and for watching them I encode them with mpeg2 and burn it on DVD so that I can play them in my standalone DVD player.

Compressed with mpeg2 you can get one hour on DVD with still excellent quality. But although the quality is quite good it is not lossless, so I have another copy on MiniDV tape.

Storing uncompressed DV material on DVDs is not a good
idea, as you mentioned already you would need a lot of DVDs and it is also more expensive than tape.

ok so explain to me what program you use to record the video from the camcorder and what program compresses it to mpeg2? Do all dvd players recognize that format?

MPEG2 is the native format for video DVDs (every pressed movie DVD uses MPEG2) so if your DVD player can read DVD±Rs it should play self-made video DVDs with MPEG2.

There is a lot of software available for editing, encoding and recording. If you are looking for an easy and fast solution, get a software suite which contains everything you need and which leads you through the process, like Ahead Nero 6 with Vision Express 2, Roxio Easy Media Creator7 or Magix Movies on CD & DVD 2004.

Another way which is more complicated and which needs some engagement, but gives you full control about everything and probably the best results is this here.

But there are >100 tools and programs on the market and range of prices is from $0-20000. I use Adobe Premier for capturing the data from my camcorder plus editing and the Ahead Nero suite for the rest so far.

HTH