Converting Canon 60D Video to DVD

A new video adventure has begun.  Before cheerleading season began, I wanted to upgrade my video equipment.  Rather than get a separate camcorder and DSLR, I went with an integrated solution, a Canon EOS 60D.

My first attempt at video was this afternoon at a short recital at a local bookstore.  The video is only 9 minutes long and was shot in 1280×720 at 60fps.  Although this is a higher resolution than DVD, I thought it better to downconvert to DVD and have a higher resolution for the future than to shoot at lower resolution.

The first attempt to burn a DVD was with Brasero.  This was easy enough, but the quality wasn’t what I was expecting.  It was noticeably blotchy, like a JPEG with the quality set too low.  Then I tried FFMPEG:

ffmpeg -i MVI_1234.MOV -target ntsc-dvd MVI_1234.mpeg

This was much better.  From there I took the output MPEG and fed it into Brasero to burn a DVD.  And it looked crappy again.

Finally, running the FFMPEG file through DVD Styler worked fine.

I thought some people might like to watch the original 720p video, so after burning the DVD, I set out to upload it to YouTube.  The video is almost 3 GB, and YouTube’s file limit is 2 GB unless you use the advanced uploader.  But the advanced uploader didn’t work because I didn’t have Java.  At least that’s what YouTube said.  I do have Java, just not the Java browser plugin.  That’s available in the Ubuntu Software Center as “Sun Java 6.0 Plugin”.  What’s cool is Firefox found the plugin after installation without restarting.  All I had to do is refresh the YouTube page and the advanced uploader started itself.

The video will be up in, uh, 45 minutes.

While I’m waiting, I’ll create the DVD case sleeve.  Wow, more trouble.  I use cdlabelgen, which requires an EPS file for the graphic.  It won’t take any other format.  In the past, I’ve just used convert picture.jpg cover.eps.  This isn’t working any more.  Trying to look at the output EPS with ghostscript causes a syntax error.  My first thought was the JPEG was too large, so I shrunk it.  But that didn’t fix it.  Maybe convert is broken?  I looked for another converter and found sam2p in Synaptic.  The syntax is the same as convert’s.  Hey, it worked!  But I’m kinda shocked that convert is broken.