You may have some video on a DV camera or some old stuff on VHS tape. If you have the latter you might be better off having the analog data digitized before you go on with the rest of these steps. Otherwise, you will have to buy a video capture card and digitize the material yourself. That wouldn't be too expensive, but some quality is lost in the process and it may be less if it's done professionally.

 

With digital video I use Kino to pull the data off tape and convert it to a DVD mpeg format. Using Kino you can edit out the bad parts and create a very clean DVD ready mpeg. You can even add some special effects such as fade ins and audio dubbing in the process which could eliminate a lot of the next steps, but Kino works with .dv files only, so if you already have an mpeg or avi I don't think you will be able to use it.

 

Let's say your brother gave you an mpeg of video he took of your family reunion or he has made a dvd movie. You watch it, and there are parts where the camera gets carried around hanging from your brother's wife's arm recording 5 minutes of upside down crotch shots, or there is so much movement you get vertigo watching it. In another scenario the conversation is mundane family chatter of no interest even to the family, or maybe your brother-in-law shoots you the root. For these reasons the only thing that will clear a room faster than a home video is a loud fart.

 

So, if you already have a dvd VOB file or a mpeg you can't use Kino but you can use LVE to edit out the bad scenes. this will at least get you past the crotch shots and "the finger". LVE works like ULead or Microsoft Movie Maker or some of the other windows video editing software that may have come with your DVD player when you bought it, but it often gives you a lot more versatility than even some software you would pay for.

 

Quiet video is also boring. If you are going to have a lot of people standing around talking then dub in some music for your audience to listen to. I'll show you how to do this using Tovid's video conversion script and Audacity, an audio editing program.

 

After you do all this, don't put it all together into one giant mpeg. Keep it separated into several small video clips. When create your final DVD movie you can make chapters on an introductory menu screen so you can go right to that movie clip of your cousin's butt crack with CCR's Bad Moon Rising playing in the back ground. You do all this with a great piece of software called Qdvdauthor. It uses dvdauthor to do the grunt work. I have run into an occasional compatibility problem with some DVD players, but I'll shoe you how I get by that too.

 

I am writing this as I do these things to video of my own and some I got from my brother, too,  so you can see the exact steps I took and trust they have been tested.