DVD-R, DVD-RW, and DVD-RAM.
What I was thinking is that with a PC DVD recorder, I could take the DVD that I recorded with the standalone unit, and then
a) edit out stuff like commercials from the DVD-RW, add chapters, etc.
Simple stuff. And then burn that to a DVD-R using the PC DVD recorder
b) reauthor content (recorded in the -VR format on the DVD-RAM) to the -Video format for recording onto DVD-R's. I've been reading through the posts at videhelp.com and avsforum.com regarding this, and it sounds straight-forward.
So, for right now, the stuff I would be planning to use a PC DVD recorder for would be pretty basic.
What I don't know is how much hard drive space something like this will require. I was assuming that it wouldn't be much larger than the capacity of a DVD (i.e. doing the type of stuff I outlined for, say, a full DVD that I created on my standalone DVD recorder wouldn't require more than 5 or 6 GB of hard drive space, would it ?).
The computer that I would be doing this on would be a laptop that I will be ordering soon with an 80GB hard drive, 1.8Ghz Pentium M Dothan, 512 MB RAM.
And the PC DVD burner that I have my eye on is the external version of the Pioneer DVR-A07XLA -- the DVR-S706.
The thing that had made me uncertain about whether what I will have will be sufficient is that there is an article (page 139) in the September 2004 issue of "Computer Shopper" magazine that says
Know your Hardware
Ulead VideoStudio says you can get by with an 800MHz Pentium III, 256MB of memory, and about 4GB of hard drive space. Forget it. Although video capture can be fairly benign, especially when using resolutions of 320x280 or lower, video editing and rendering hog processing capacity, memory, and space. Anything less than a 2.8GHz Pentium 4 or a 2.17GHz Athlon XP 3000+ will make you wish you never started this project. Although Windows XP's comfort zone is 512MB of memory, 1GB is far more viable for video editing. As for hard drive capacity, 43 minutes of video at standard resolution (720x480) in AVI format can easily occupy 60GB of space.
Thank you in advance for your help