Many mini DV camcorders have a “pass thru” capacity. Plug the cam into PC via firewire and then plug your DVD player into the camera.
Failing that, there are several analog/digital converters that will do the job, like ADS Tech Pyro A/V link or Canopus ADVC 100 or 300. The Pyro is less than $200.
The trim window works in 2 modes;
Click and drag in the center of one window produces ripple edits.
Click and drag at the divide of the windows produces rolling edits.
I can see a shift in brightness to the darker while playing the timeline, but corrects itself as soon as playback stops. Exports dont show any shift. Colors dont shift.
I have an older P4 HT system with a Nvidia dual head card.
All of the tools have a keyboard shortcut;
Select tool = v
Track Select tool= a
Rate stretch tool = x
razor tool = c
I use the Trim window instead of rolling and ripple edit tools.
You will need to encode your sequence as “Mpeg 2 DVD” format using the Adobe Media Encoder. This will create a 2 elementary streams, one video and one audio. Import these into Encore.
Many of the older DV camcorders have a “pass-thru” feature that will facilitate the conversion.
ADS Tech Pyro A/V link is less than $200, Canopus ADVC 100 is more.
With Encore you can do most anything possible with menus, but Premiere 2 gives you a main menu and a scene menu.
The basic workflow is to put DVD scene markers in the timeline and then open the DVD layout window, choose a template and tweek things and burn.