DVD to AVI w/good quality

[frankmaster100]

Hey everyone, I've asked this before, and I've searched, and have yet to find anything to help me. (I know, surprising with the endless amount of info on this site.)

I have a couple DVD's I would like to edit for content (language, sex, violence, that type of thing) I woud like to rip them from the DVD at the highest quality possible, then edit them in either Pinnacle Studio 9 or Adobe Premiere Pro. 1.5.

I can't just change the VOB's to mpg's, and edit them. It won't let me hear the audio while editing, and the final cut comes out looking crappy.

Both Pinnacle and Adobe seem to handle AVI's the best. So I need a method to convert my VOB's or DVD's directly to AVI, without much compression, so that I can edit them. All the converters I have found so far, convert them to fit on a CD or something. I don't want them compressed, just workable! I'm not worried about hard drive space.

Any ideas?

I guess I'm open to other ways of editing VOB's, but virtualdubmod doesn't seem to work very well.
Thanks.

[Baldrick]

there are no simple all-in-one method for dvd directly to avi with lossless compression.

you have to keep use virtualdubmpeg2 or virtualdubmod or dgindex. and something to convert ac3 audio to wav like belight.

or try mpeg video wizard.

or convert to mpg using vob2mpg and convert the audio to wav and you will hear it in premiere.

[frankmaster100]

Thanks. Yeah, I didn't really expect all all-inclusive solution. I'm more than happy to use a few different tools to do the job. I'll give some of the things you mentioned a try.
Thanks again.

[lafjax]

You could also try Fairuse Wizard. Easy and works for me to convert dvd vobs to avi file.

[woolbright]

Couldn't you do this?

https://forum.videohelp.com/viewtopic.php?t=261416.

Adobe recognizes the avi and wav files. Edit what you want then export the movie as an avi.

I've been using this method to edit our church dvd's. You may have to render the files to get the audio to play without stuttering.

I just realized Baldrick wrote this guide so he should know best.

It works really well for me.

[celtic_druid]

FairUse would work since it lets you use ffdshow for encoding. So you can have lossless in the form of huffyuv, ffv1, MJPEG, etc. or encode to say DV.

[FulciLives]

I would use VideoRedo or MPEG-VCR or maybe even the "more robust" MPEG VIDEO WIZARD

All three of these programs are designed to edit MPEG files with no re-encoding ... well actually there will be some very minor re-encoding at the edit points but that's all.

The benefit here is that you can keep the audio of your choice for instance if there is a 5.1 AC-3 track it will edit that. Also you don't have to do any conversion or re-encoding thus you get to keep original quality.

The bad thing is you are kinda screwed this way if the movie has subtitles. The way to deal with that is to convert to AVI and burn the subtitles into the video during that so when you edit the AVI you keep the subtitles in sync. After editing the AVI you then have to convert it back to MPEG-2 DVD spec. Also you should decode the audio to PCM WAV for the editing then back to AC-3 for the final DVD so you end up with Stereo audio.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[frankmaster100]

Thanks folks. These are all great suggestions. I will look into some of them, and get back to you with what works best for me!

[Rudyard]

I know you have tried Virtualdub but this advice was offered to me and maybe there is something different you could use:

Using Virtualdubmod open the vob and save as AVI using the panasonic DV codec. You can save the audio as a WAV file in the stream list if you need to.

Also if Premier is not opening a file with AC3 audio (it just hangs on importing the media) there is an AC3 decompressor that you download and Premier then will open files with AC3 audio in them.

I dont know if you have done all this but I hope it may help in some way.