Newbie to DVD editing -- please help!

Question

I finally braved transferring a video to DVD on my (non-computer-related) VCR/DVD burner and was successful. That I feel victorious over such a simple procedure indicates my level of newbieness. Some time ago, I posted some queries here about editing/copying non-copyrighted DVD footage, and was given to understand that it's tricky no matter how you approach it.
What I want to do is take footage like home movies &c., transfer them from VHS to DVD on my (non-computer-related) VCR/DVD burner, then edit them on my iMac using Final Cut Express, iDVD or whatever it is that's used to snip out undesirable parts, make cool menus, and that sort of thing.
When I try to open the DVD I just burned through iDVD or Final Cut Express, I get various errors, or the video files are greyed out (i.e. are not available to be opened).
I can watch the DVD on the computer just fine.
So my questions are:
* How do you edit DVDs you've transferred from videos?
* Do you have to buy a third-party data converter?
* Is there a brainlessly easy way to do all this?
Also, as I was playing the DVD I burned, I tried to take a screen shot, but it wouldn't let me. Any way around this?
Thanks --
Christine

Answer 1

What I want to do is take footage like home movies &c., transfer them from VHS to DVD on my (non-computer-related) VCR/DVD burner, then edit them on my iMac using Final Cut Express, iDVD or whatever it is that's used to snip out undesirable parts, make cool menus, and that sort of thing.
This is NOT the approach you should take. Conversion of your content to MPG-2 on a DVD disc should be the LAST step in the process.
iMovie and iDVD are designed to work with DV stream video content and not MPG-2 compressed content. To use iMovie, you would need to deencode the MPG-2 content to DV; edit the content; and then use iDVD to recompress the content to MPG-2 on output.
Your best (and easiest) approach is to buy or borrow a DV Camcorder that has play-through capabilities so that you can playback your VHS tapes, passing the signal through the DV Camcorder to the Firewire input of you Mac computer using iMovie. Then send the edited movie to iDVD for the addition of menus and burning to a DVD.
As an alternative, you could use something like DVDxDV at http://www.dvdxdv.com/DVDxDV.overview.htm to convert your MPG-2 content on your DVD to DV stream content for use in FCP or iMovie, but all the additional steps will reduce image quality.
BTW, no matter how you convert to DV video, you should remember it requires about 13 GB per hour of running time, so be sure you have lots of free hard disk space.
Also, as I was playing the DVD I burned, I tried to take a screen shot, but it wouldn't let me. Any way around this?
Try playing the DVD with the VLCmedia player at http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-macosx.html . You should be able to make a screen capture with it.