hi y'all

i rip DVD's to take short hi quality video samples from them rather than entire movies. at the moment i rip a a chapter of dvd using smart ripper then use dvd2avi to take a section (takes ages and makes a huge file as i'm trying to retain quality) of this b4 using premiere to recombine the video with the audio.
it's a painfully slow process ...
ideally after ripping i would want to trim bits directly out of the vob files to an avi (an audio video avi) or be able to rip directly to an editable format

any ideas on software that can edit vobs?
or an dvd2avi type program which doesn't require the extra round of processing in an edit program (premiere in this case)?

thanx
~j