Necessary to capture from a dvd camcorder?

[bobogs]

A buddy of mine has some footage of my daughter's first ever basketball basket on his (mini?) dvd camcorder, and we have no idea what the steps are to get it off there into a format I can have/use. (my camcorder experience is solely with minidv).

I'm guessing the video is in mpeg4 or mpeg2 format, but how does one get the video off the disc? Is some form of capturing necessary, or do you just pop the finalized disc into the pc's drive and read it like any other disc with files? Do dvd camcorders split their files into 1gb chunks, possibly spanning a scene across multiple chunks?

Last question...do you think that most people who buy a dvd camcorder realize that the video they're shooting won't be easily editable in iMovie, Vegas, Premiere, Windows Movie Maker, etc. (assuming the video IS in mpeg format)?

Thanks!
Gary

[guns1inger]

It is in mpeg-2 format, and you should be able to work with it as you would any DVD. VOB2MPG can extract the mpeg2 video and (probably) AC3 audio into a programme stream, joining any clips that span VOB files.

[thecoalman]

If for whatevr reason you can't rip it directly on your computer the cam should have come with software for doing this.

Last question...do you think that most people who buy a dvd camcorder realize that the video they're shooting won't be easily editable in iMovie, Vegas, Premiere, Windows Movie Maker, etc. (assuming the video IS in mpeg format)?

There's software specifically for editing MPEG, Ulead products, Cuttermaran, Womble, TDA ...just to name few. However you are correct, they see DVD then see mini-DV tape and think to themselves since the DVD is new tech it must be better than tape when it fact its worse, much worse. DVD cams are for people who want to shoot and be done with it. The appeal and only real benefit of course is they can play the DVD in DVD player instead of having to hook the cam up to view the video. Not worth it IMO when you consider all that you are losing.

[bobogs]

I agree wholeheartedly (and I use VideoRedo for my mpeg editing ). I guess the folks who don't care about editing, and I'm sure there are more of them than of us, would be happy with the thought of popping their freshly recorded video into a dvd player to watch their footage. However, I would also expect that many of those folks also have a sense of "this could be so much better if we didn't have to sit through the parts where nothing interesting was happening...." once they watch their dvd.

Gary

[Bjs]

Yes , someone here had one , and the moron sales person gave them a dvdram disc , so the recordings ended up in vro .
The only thing that could pull the footage from both sides was my lg burner and sony vegas , every other program failed .

I managed to recover every clip , generated a nice dvd-r with menu for her , and only charge $15.00 for it , it was her 21st birthday on the disc .

I showed her how to set the camera up properly , warned about battery issues when it runs low , and what discs she actually should be using , as her pc can not read dvdram , unless she wants me to get her a new dvd burner for it .

----

Then it was the laptop , slow as hell , one look , well F me , 340mbs free space left , damn thing was full of music and she dosent want them moved off the laptop .

Fine , atleast get an external hd for all that stuff ... before it finally dose blow up and loose it all .