Newbie..video

[jota73]

Hey guys,

I was wondering if somebody can give me some help here...

I have a DVD with the ecography of my wife I am planning to do a video with all of these DVDs but as soon as I try copying the DVD into my hard disk an album named VIDEO_TS that contains several files of various type of files such as .BUP, .IFO and .VOB, none are recognized by any application!

How can edit them, I guess I should be using iDVD... huh?

I would really appreciate any help

 

[freiheit]

DVD format

Hey guys,

I was wondering if somebody can give me some help here...

I have a DVD with the ecography of my wife I am planning to do a video with all of these DVDs but as soon as I try copying the DVD into my hard disk an album named VIDEO_TS that contains several files of various type of files such as .BUP, .IFO and .VOB, none are recognized by any application!

How can edit them, I guess I should be using iDVD... huh?

I would really appreciate any help

iDVD is not much of an editor. What you have there is the actual contents of the DVD -- it's not a directly editable format; it contains chapter and title information, the support for multiple audio tracks, etc.

What you need to do, if you want to edit the video, is to convert it into MPEG or AVI or MOV (or DV which is best if you use iMovie for instance but it does take a lot of hard disk space). There are quite a few programs that will do this for you as long the DVD is not encrypted (ie. not a retail DVD movie). Roxio's Popcorn can help, so can HandBrake which is free (you can find it on versiontracker.com or macupdate.com or just Google for "handbrake"). You'll then have an ordinary video file which you can open in iMovie, edit, and export or share into iDVD to create your own DVD.

 

[jota73]

great, thanks for your help. I guess I will go with handbrake... but just have one final question..... is it easy to use... as you may be aware, I am not a professional user, will it be easy to use?

I mean once I "rip" the DVD should this same app allow me to do what I want?
Making a movie of all the pregnancy of my wife? Sorry for the dumb question, but I am totally lost here.

 

[Erendiox]

It shouldn't be all that difficult. Basically all you have to add the extra step of converting the DVD footage to a format that you can edit. DVDs are encoded in MPEG2, which is a final distribution format, designed for viewing and not for editing. Once you take the video files in the Video TS folder and run them through handbrake (which will probably take a while depending on your system) you can pop the resulting video files into iMovie and edit to your hearts content. Actually, come to think of it, handbrake will recognize the DVD in your drive upon launch, so there's no need to go searching through the Video TS folder. Also, if you're concerned with quality, you might want to go for the H.264 Codec. Takes a while to encode, but is absolutely the best codec for retaining quality. You can change the codec in the upper right hand corner where it says codecs.

As far as making a movie of all the footage, iMovie is just about the easiest editing program i've ever seen. You should have no trouble using it, and if you do, feel free to inquire some more on the forums. We're all happy to help.

 

[jota73]

You guys rule!

Thanks a lot!