Which quality to pick "Capture wizard" burn to DVD, quality lookspoor.

I have a canon zr800 minidv. I am using xp movie maker to capture
the video to computer an then would like to burn to dvd (on occasion
would like to edit first). My question is, when the Video capture
wizard pops up, I am not sure which quality to select (dv-avi, high
quality ntsc, video for Lan 1.0 Mpbps, etc). I tested several of
the different options and the only formats I end up with is avi or wmv
format. The video color and quality does not look that great.
Which format do I need, with the goal of eventually getting that video
burn on a dvd? Do I need a different software and is there a free
one that you can recommend? thanks.

 

Stick with DV-AVI. In simple terms, that's what's recorded on your
videotape. If you capture as anything else, you degrade the picture
quality.
You'll need another program for DVD authoring/burning as Movie Maker
doesn't have this feature.

Mike

 

I was told that 20min worth of video equals to about 4.7gb on dvd.
But the biggest file I get is about 330MB out of 20min of video wmv
format on my computer. Or do I then need to convert to a different
format once I burn to dvd? So do I need to first convert to wmv
format and then some other authorizing format in order to burn to
dvd?

 

First of all, MPEG-2 is the ONLY video format that can be burned to make
a "legal" DVD (DivX and other formats are excluded here).
I've read about some folks putting over 3 hr. of video on a DVD but this
depends on several factors such as the quality & type of the source
video and the bitrate of the finished product.
You'll need a program to take your source video, edit it and convert it
to MPEG-2 format.
After that, you need a DVD authoring program to convert the MPEG-2
file(s) and corresponding audio to a format (VIDEO_TS & AUDIO_TS
folders) that can be burned to a DVD.

Mike