From DV to DVD, datecode into chapter names?

[EricChadwick]

I'm looking into purchasing DW2, curious if it supports what I'd like to do.

I have about 20 home videos of our kids growing up, and I'd like to convert them from tape to DVD, partly becuse the camera is likely to die at some point, and partly because DVDs allow random access.

I'd like to transfer in a Digital8 DV tape, auto-chapter it by changes in shooting date (not by time changes, that would probably cause too many chapters, limit is 99 right?), auto-name the chapters using the date (day/month/year), create a simple menu to navigate the chapters, then burn to a DVD-R. Would also be cool to have toggle-able subtitles of the dates, but that's less critical.

I don't want to manually chapter every tape, would take to long. I have a Toshiba DVR (RD-SX34) that takes in firewire, can make menus and burn DVDs, but it doesn't make use of the datecodes at all. I'd have to manually input that, yuck.

I've read thru the "chapter" portions of the DW2 manual and searched the knowledge base and this forum. All I could find is the "Split By Scene" auto-chaptering, but no mention of auto-naming for the menu.

Also searched other sites like http://www.videohelp.com, where I found the DVDate utility, which renames DV AVIs based on their datecodes. But I couldn't find auto-chapter creation/naming.

Thanks for any ideas!

[sjj1805]

Split by scene will split your Video according to whenever you have started/stopped filming. There isn't an auto-naming function built in.

[EricChadwick]

Thanks for the reply.

If I use Split By Scene, is there a way for DW to split the single AVI into multiple AVIs, one AVI per scene? I wonder if DW has to recompress the DV streams.

I could send those AVIs through an external tool (DVDate) to rename them based on their timecode, then maybe find another tool to process those into chapter names. Or maybe some other kind of labelling strategy (subtitles maybe?)

Any suggestions? Thanks again for the help.