I left the recorded video in an unfinalized state (later testing also worked with finalized disks) on the DVD+RW disk. Ultimately, I found a simple solution to the problem, which works with both Adobe Premiere Elements and Nero Vision Express (which is part of Nero 7 Ultra Edition), but may not work with all software packages. Picture Package Manager does a great job of making video slideshows out of still images, as Sony’s licensed co-brand of the muvee AutoProducer technology. Using the bundled Picture Package Manager, the software supposedly copies the video from the camera to my computer, but I can find no instance of a file of the matching size on my machine. However, Sony only makes the DVD content accessible via USB through the bundled software. My computer recognizes the Handycam as a mass storage device, which should mean I can read the contents of the drive.

The first thing I attempted was connecting the Handycam via USB. I stepped through several potential scenarios before arriving at a solution that seems to work with relative ease. None of the Handycam DVD models include FireWire (or as Sony calls it, iLINK). If you are more familiar with the process of realtime video capture over FireWire available via a more traditional DV cam, this is especially frustrating. You are expected to record to disk, edit on the camera, finalize your project on the camera and at best make copies of the DVD for sharing with other people. The dirty secret of DVD camcorders is they aren’t designed for editing on a PC. I have some experience with Sony’s Handycam DVD7, which is an entry level unit, but representative of the experience for all DVD camcorders.

The reality is a series of frustrations for anyone who wants to edit movies after shooting.

No hard drive, theoretically affordable media, considering full-sized DVDs cost less than fifty cents each in most cases. I’ve got Nero v6.6.01 and I purchased Adobe Premier Elements in an attempt to work on these, but they don’t seem to be the right tools to work on this. Even being able to just delete some of the original menu items generated by the camera would be great. Ideally, what I’d like to be able to do is to:ģ) Combine several mini-DVD’s worth of movies into one longer regular DVD, andĤ) Be able to put some sort of menus onto the front of the final DVD to get to different sections, preferably not every scene, but user chosen points. mpg files, but that often doesn’t work well, and it generates one file per “scene” instead of just converting the entire thing into one long MPG file. I’ve tried using the Nero 6 decode routines to convert to. I’m trying to figure out how to do something with these files other than duplicate the entire mini-DVD. Gary writes, My wife uses one of the Sony Handycams which writes the files to a mini-DVD.

Sony handycam camcorder software