Re: [Hampshire] Editing DVD content?

On Mon, Jan 15, 2007 at 08:47:59PM +0000, Chris Aitken wrote:
> >The next job is to take those videos, tidy them up by removing some
> >clutter and out-of-date information, extract specific pertinent clips
> >and put the end results back onto DVDs.
> >
> >So the question is, what tools should I look at for doing this and just
> >how do I go about it?
> >
> >I've been looking at and trying what feels like dozens of packages, but
> >I have still to actually find a combination that works, so I'd
> >appreciate some pointers.
> >
> >Kino looks like a reasonable choice for the editting as I need do very
> >little with it, though Cinelerra-CV sounds like it should be kept in
> >reserve. So far though, I haven't found anything that will let me take a
> >DVD and edit it's content.
>
> You need to convert the video on the DVDs to something that can be
> edited. In this case, your tool needs to convert the many VOB files on
> the DVD to something editable (like an AVI). Some of the newer (mainly
> windows) apps can import from DVD, because of the popularity of DVD
> camcorders.
>
> Then you can use your editing too to edit these. I've tried Kino &
> Cinelerra. I find Cinelerra and Kino easy to use, but Kino is very
> buggy, crashing all the time. I made the decision to buy Sony Vegas
> Studio (Win) to edit all the videos I have taken, as I think is much
> better than anything availbel from FOSS. It also includes a tool to
> author DVD menus and export to DVD.

There are two things here that I wouldn't recommend. The first is
converting to AVI before editing, and the second is using Cinelerra.

My recommendations would be to use a tool that simply rips the VOBs
as the MPEG2s that they are, then edit as MPEGs, and *then* convert to
another format if you want. For doing the editing, I would recommend a
recent avidemux -- it will do editing, rescaling (if that's your
thing), and format conversion to pretty much anything sane. If you are
outputting to the same format (e.g. MPEG2 video) and simply cutting
bits out, it won't touch the video stream, so you get perfect
reproduction.

Hugo.

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