Grandfathers home movies

[Bob-Stith]

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My father has just discovered 2 8" canisters of 16mm home movies my grandfather shot just prior to his death in 1960. Dad is planning to have the film transfered to DVD and editing the resulting file(s) to produce video DVDs that include naration, backgroung music and special effects. Dad has created other family history documents on CD, but this is his first try at video.

My primary questions are:

For the best quality, in what file format should the orignal 16mm film be recorded? What file format would be best for making the family history DVD/CDs for the children and grandchildren.

Dad knows that his 8 year old (PC) system is not up to the task at hand so my next question is how large a hard drive will he need in the new system he is going to buy? It is a given that we will cram as much memory into the system that it will take. And, since the only video imput will be from a DVD, will he need a video capture card? Are there any other hardware considerations?

Do you have any software recomendations?

Thanks
Bob Stith



Also:

Since the data imput is from a DVD only, does he need a video capture card?

[jack]

I am a Grandfather who has had 8mm film transferred to digital tape (miniDV) because maximum quality is preserved that way.

I know very little about editing but don't plan to do much. Pinnacle AV/DV is the software I bought; it includes a capture card to get the tapes into the computer. From there I wil burn DVDs hopefully.

DVDs are formatted as MPEG I believe. Some quality will be lost in going from my tapes (I think that is AVI format) to MPEG. But if all DVDs are made from the original tapes they will all have the best quality possible.

From what I read the best choice for storage is a external hard drive, as big as possible.

At this point that is about everything I know!