My son had his end of year picnic at his pre-school yesterday and I brought the camcorder out for the event.
It's a crusty Canon ZR-1, an old school DV camcorder that looks like a large boxy camera. Canon doesn't make anything like it anymore and perhaps for good reason. It has an open/close slider control for the lens cap that turns the camera on and off. The problem is that it has worn out and now it's very hard to turn the camera on without half a dozen open/closes of this slider. Also, the microphone points straight up, not forward, so the sound recording is not very good. Finally, I typically get poor playback on it, which looks like really bad tracking, which may be another mechanical breakdown.
Needless to say I don't use it very much and I really should buy a new one.
However, my son was singing in this program during this picnic so I thought it would be worth capturing.
I was able to get it working, knowing its peculiarities, but I thoiught it would be better to get him to perform the song alone, which he likes to do, and then use that new $99 DVD burner I bought to create a DVD for the grandparents.
Well I did a sample burn last night. I used the Roxio Easy CD/DVD Creator software that came with the drive. The drive didn't come with any instructions how to install but it came with this stuff.
I ran it and it seemed pretty straightforward. I had some video snippets that I captured a few years ago and dragged those onto the "storyboard." It warned me that the video image was not suitable for DVD and I should have listened. I did a burn and after 15 minutes or so I received a failure message. I think the problem was that I put a compressed MPG file on there and it should have been high resolution raw footage (like an AVI).
So the burn failed, but I think I know why. I'll try again tonight.
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