Mac Newbie DVD issues

[the_reever]

Hi,

This will likely be a long post so read on if you dare.

Let me explain what I am attempting to do here. I purchased a DVD and would like to remove scenes from it as it is too long (~3 hours) and cut it down to about 2 hours.

Here are the steps I have followed to date, using the advice from posts on this site:

1. ripped DVD into elementary streams (.m2v & .ac3) using OSeX
2. converted .m2v to .avi using DiVA
3. converted .ac3 to .aiff using mAC3dec
4. boosted volume up of .aiff using BIAS Peak 4
5. muxed .avi & .aiff to .mov using QuickTime Pro 6
6. exported .mov to .dv using QuickTime Pro 6
7. opened .dv for editing using Final Cut Pro 3
8. here's where I get stuck!

First, I read in "Final Cut Pro 3 for Dummies" that I have to "render" the audio and video so they play back smoothly. I did the render but when I select the Canvas view in FCP3 and play the movie the video only displays green and pink "snow". The audio is fine. When I stop the playback, the Canvas view correctly displays a still of where I stopped in the movie. What is with the green/pink snow? Help!

Secondly, once the green/pink snow issue is resolved, how do I export/save/convert my edited movie to a format that can be burned to DVD? I assume it has to be .vob like the original DVD? I exported the edited movie using FCP3, not checking on the "Save as Self-Contained Movie", as was suggested by "FCP3 for Dummies" as this would save disk space and the resultant file was about 1.4 GB. When I tried to import it into iDVD it refused stating that "the movie was greater than 90 minutes". I cannot cut the film down any more or the storyline will suffer. Please help me with this!

And finally, and I may be opening myself up to criticism and flames here, but is what I am trying to do legal? All the software I am using has been purchased legally by my school (except for freewares OSeX, DiVA, and mAC3dec), I have purchased the origianl DVD, I am not selling or distributing the resultant edited DVD, and it is being used for educational purposes only within my school.

Thanks in advance for your sage words as I bow in deference to the venerated wisdom of the video gurus of this forum, particularly Galactica (nice personal site, BTW).

P.S. I am using a Titanium PowerBook G4 1GHz, 1GB RAM, and an additional external 40GB HDD to save video files, in case that's important.

[Baldrick]

I'm moving you to the MAC forum.

[AntnyMD]

If all the scenes you want to keep are correspondent to chapters on the disc, you can use 0Sex in a different way from what you described above.

I believe there is a drop down that shows your a list of all the chapters in a given title, with a checkmark beside each one. You can remove the checkmark beside the chapters you wish to discard.

Then rip to either program stream or elementary streams. Then import them into the appropriate DVD authoring tool to make a new VIDEO_TS folder.

[the_reever]

Hi AntnyMD,

I believe there is a drop down that shows your a list of all the chapters in a given title, with a checkmark beside each one. You can remove the checkmark beside the chapters you wish to discard.

Thanks for your suggestion but, unfortunately, the parts I need to snip out are part of a larger chapter and cannot so expediently be cropped. Any other ideas are welcome though.

Cheers!

[jazzman]

I usually drag the sound and video files separately into FCP first and then output them as a FCP Movie file which is completely editable in FCP (of course). But you can edit it in FCP before you output it anyway. I must be missing something here.

[jazzman]

.....the FCP movie file then needs to be encoded back to root files for DVD authoring. I use BitVice but there are others. Then I convert the .aiff audio file back to .ac3 with APack and drag it with the .m2v file into DVD Studio Pro. If the .m2v file doesn't take, a utility called MPEG append usually does the trick. I haven't been doing much of this at all since I got a concumer DVD recorder console so I'm getting a bit rusty.