Hitachi, Canon, Panasonic, Samsung, and Sony all marketed mini DVD camcorders to consumers back in the day. They all offered modern features and were the "hot new technology" as consumer video tape was on it's way out and before smartphones allowed everyone to carry a digital video camera with them everywhere they went. Remember those days...?
But there was a catch with mini DVD camcorders that some people didn't realize until they took the disc out of the camcorder and tried to watch it on their set-top DVD players.
It wasn't finalized.
Finalization is an operation performed by the camcorder that allows the recorded disc to be played in other DVD players or read by a computer. However, finalization also made it so you cold no longer record to the disc. The re-writable version of the mini DVD could be un-finalized and or erased and recorded over again.
This reality of mini DVD camcorders can make conversion of their discs to .mp4 digital video files a challenge unless the client took the time all those years ago to finalize each disc
...OR... they kept the camcorder that was used to record the discs!
We recently had a very nice client bring us twenty mini DVDs that were recorded with her Sony Handycam in the early 2000s so we could convert them into .mp4 files. She also requested we make full-sized compilation DVDs with menus. Luckily she had saved her camcorder and we were able to use it to finalize all of her discs in preparation for the conversion to .mp4 and the DVD authoring process.
THE GOOD NEWS FOR YOU is that even though you may not have finalized your mini DVDs after recording them or kept your camcorder, it is still possible to recover what is on those discs and we will tell you all about it when you call us to discuss your mini DVD conversion project.
Dial 480-420-7518 and ask for Tony...
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