Advice needed on how to edit vob or mpeg2

[dalecooper]

You would think this would be covered enough, but I still find that after reading a dozen or more posts on the subject, I am having almost no luck editing mpeg2 files.

Briefly, what I am trying to do is make a personal DVD of a movie that includes deleted scenes reintegrated into the film. There is some tricky stuff involving the soundtrack that I will leave aside for now. The main thing I need to be able to do is accurately cut mpeg files, or vob files ripped from the DVD; join them together; and author a new DVD. I foolishly thought, going into the project, that this would be the easiest thing in the world.

Here's what I've tried so far: Womble's mpeg2vcr is a decent program with a good user interface, but on a lot of the files I tried to cut (basically just cutting up a larger vob into scenes) it destroyed the audio. I don't mean the audio was out of sync - I mean it was garbled and didn't even resemble the actual audio track. It sounded sort of like it had stretched a small piece of the soundtrack out to cover a much larger clip. I am trying to work with it again right now due to problems I've had more consistently with other programs. When it works, this is a handy app, but it also ruined hours of careful cutting when I finally got around to playing back my mpegs. Very frustrating. Their support recommended that I try the free trial version of their other program, another video editor, which I will attempt tomorrow.

A guy named Dark Angel offers a tool called either mpegcut or cutmpeg (I forget what it is exactly). At first blush it seemed perfect, without the sound problems of mpeg2vcr, but then I noticed two problems: 1. it's not very accurate, often cutting a little bit of the beginning or end of the scene off; 2. often it introduces a little of that ugly digital "blockiness" right after a cut.

Ulead Movie Factory has a video editor which I thought was perfect, with its highly sensitive scroll bar. Unfortunately it does the same thing as the above program, inserting digital blocks right after cuts.

I tried another program called, I think, Video Redo. Could barely get it to work for some reason so I gave up on that. It didn't seem to want to scroll through the clip correctly.

For those out there doing things like this, how are you doing it? I'm almost going to be forced to just keep editing and editing clips with various programs until I get lucky enough times to end up with a batch of coherent scenes. This strikes me as a really stupid way to work. But since I don't want to reencode anything, lose any video quality, or separate video and audio streams (for the most part), I don't see what my options are.

[dalecooper]

Update: I *may* have a solution in the form of Womble's new program. It will let you assemble parts of vob and mpeg files without even having to edit the native file. The interface is slick, and it's deep with lots of functionality as far as joining the video and editing the audio. The only potential stumbling block I have noticed is a very slight hesitation when changing from one clip to the next, but that might only be a problem in playback, not in the final burn (I haven't tested that yet).