Try as I might, I can’t create chapters on DVD recordings made on my DMR-EZ49VEB, whichever setting I choose (there's a choice of "every 5 minutes" or automatic). Every time I make a recording, or copy from a VHS, the result is the whole thing as one long title, even if it's a 3-hour-long one.

I have experimented several times with various settings, but the result is the same on each occasion.

Also, I'm unable to edit material in any way.

This is the routine I’ve been following to try and do that:

Drive select = DVD.

Direct Navigator>

Option>

Edit>

The only options that are shown on pressing ‘Edit’ are ‘Enter title name’ and ‘Change thumbnail’ – I do not get offered ‘Partial Delete’ or ‘Divide Title’. These options, shown in the manual, aren’t just greyed out: they don’t show at all.

If I then go to Chapter View, the only choice after pressing ‘Option’ is ‘Title View’ (I don’t get offered ‘Delete Chapter’, ‘Create Chapter’ or ‘Combine Chapters’, all of which are shown in the manual).

What I am able to do, however, is delete 'titles' (the term they use for recorded items) by selecting them with the pause button and pressing ‘delete’; I can also create a name for a title. But that’s all the system will allow me to do.

Am I likely to have a defective unit, or is there something I’m not doing correctly?

I’d be very grateful for any specific advice.

Have you Finalised the disk after making the recording? If you have then you cannot perform any editing on it. The options you have suggest the disk is Finalised and it's left with those options that apply to the Title View in the Direct Navigator.

Good point, and thanks for the reminder. I should have mentioned that all the attempts I was making were on an un-finalized disc. Also, recalling a previous machine which wouldn't allow editing on a disc that was already full, I tried my experiments also on a disc with only minimal recorded material on its (say, a minute each for two titles), but still no joy.

What type of disks are you using. I've been reading the manual downloadable from the Panasonic website

http://www.panasonic.co.uk/html/en_G...447/index.html

That suggests only DVD-RAM disks can be used for things like Divide Title and Create Chapters etc.

If you go to the link above, select the second manual link (the 13MB one) and eventually get to the PDF go to page 47. If you notice in the table there the left hand column shows the disk types that the operation can be performed on.

Divide Title and the Chapter operations only show RAM in that column.

I concur, only RAM discs are editable. In the old days, I would edit on a RAM disk on one recorder, then copy to another using a DVD-R

if you want to copy VHS to DVD AND edit, get the Pana VHS HDD DVD combo machine - it recognises index points on VHSs when copy to HDD or DVD and sets titles for you.

Thanks both for the replies - sorry to be so long in responding, but for some reason I stopped receiving email alerts, so I only found your answers upon logging in to this site.

I'm now kicking myself for several reasons - among which are that I didn't read the small print. It appears from a closer reading of the 'usable disks' section of the manual (I hadn't read it before, assuming that you record video on a DVD disk) that I can only play back DVD-RAM disks on certain machines, so if I want to make copies for other people I'd need to find a way of doing that. Actually I probably won't need to make copies that often, but it would have been nice to cut off the first minute or so of a recording I made the other day. Further reading required - and thanks again for the information.

I've had another look at the manual, and I now see how I could have misunderstood it.

The page headed "Titles - Editing" lists RAM, -R, -R DL, -RW(V), +R, +R DL, +RW and -RWV(VR)as usable disk types, and goes on to say: "you can edit titles on the DIRECT NAVIGATOR screen: deleting unwanted parts of titles such as commercials, changing Thumbnail, dividing and deleting titles, etc.".

However, most of the subsections, as you correctly pointed out, are headed 'RAM', and the only operations you can actually make with a DVD-R disk are to delete the title and give it a name.

That introductory paragraph might possibly have been phrased in a way that made that clear at the outset, but from now on I'll make a point of reading the instructions very carefully.