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DVD Ripper/Converter


J. Lamar King IMPOSTOR

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I need to rip some DVD's of some of my projects from producers who haven't fulfilled their contracts by not providing me footage on tape for editing. I do have some DVD's they gave me authored from various computer programs. I need to be able to convert them for editing then compress them for the web. Any good program recommendations?

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Hi,

 

If you need to make another DVD out of it, it's worth going the extra mile by maintaining them as the orginally-compressed MPEG-2 files. The VOB files on a DVD are just MPEG-2, optionally CSS encrypted. If you've been given desktop-authored DVD-R discs, there's every chance they never turned on the encryption and you can just copy the files off the disc, rename them to whatever.m2v, and try playing them in something like Elecard or your DVD player software.

 

If they are encrypted, you'll want something like Smart Ripper to untangle the CSS encryption and give you the same results.

 

From here, you can import those MPEG-2 files into your DVD authoring app and, assuming it's smart enough not to recompress them, end up with identical results to those you saw on the original disc.

 

If you must have them as AVI movies, use something like DVD2AVI or the MPEG-2 modification of VirtualDub (or anything else that'll read MPEG-2). From there you can use standard tools to create Quicktime or AVI movies for the web.

 

Phil

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Hi,

 

> Phil, will any of these programs allow me to edit the files I take from the DVD?

 

No - some of them will let you clip a bit out of the video, which may be all you need to do.

 

Something like Premiere will edit MPEG-2, I believe. Tsunami MPEG Encoder will clip and assemble MPEG clips together, which might also be enough.

 

If you are editing MPEG-2 off a DVD and you want to maintain it without recompression, you will be limited to cuts on 15-frame boundaries as that's the length of an MPEG compression group on a DVD (it's 6 frames on HDV, for comparison). It's worth it to maintain the quality, though.

 

Phil

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I need to rip some DVD's of some of my projects from producers who haven't fulfilled their contracts by not providing me footage on tape for editing. I do have some DVD's they gave me authored from various computer programs. I need to be able to convert them for editing then compress them for the web. Any good program recommendations?

 

You can do what I do. I only get dvd's of dailies or the finished film from my production company. I feed the component signal from a standard dvd player into an ADS Pyro A/V Link. Then I take the converted output of the ADS box and send it to my computer via firewire. I use Premiere Pro to capture, edit and burn finished dvd's of my reel. I have had no capture problems, no visible loss of quality. The ADS box is the key. Hope this helps. Good luck.

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