Capture clips from home movie DVD's and AVI's, save as AVI

[shrimants]

I have to make a compilation video out of a bunch of home videos for a graduation party. I have a bunch of photos and DVD's that have home movies on them, and also AVI files that were converted from 8mm tape. There are actually quite a few things I need in the ways of help.

I'll detail the most confusing part first. Initially we took the video using 8mm tape which was converted to VHS. We used a sony VHS to DVD box in order to dub the VHS tapes over to DVD. This has caused inconsistencies with a bunch of the DVD's and using the guide on these forums (get avi clips from a dvd, using dvdshrink) I get errors about my DVD navigation being inconsistent. Windows movie maker was supposed to be able to import the clips directly but it refuses to read the DVD's. Regular dvd players and MPC-HC can play the DVD's just fine.

I thought a simple solution would be to convert ALL the dvd's to AVI using handbrake but I think I used the wrong guide or something because all the videos are AVI but MPEG2 (FFDSHOW) encoded. It was supposed to be .mp4 "container" but I think AVI was the container because I forced it to be by specifying the file extension as .avi.

Anyways, because of the screwed up dvd titles, I had 1 DVD outputting 3-5 AVI files in certain cases. Because of the timestamps, I wanted to merge/join the AVI files. I tried doing this in avidemux but that didnt work. It just showed me a green preview and the file itself saved in the wrong aspect ratio. The height was OK but the width was half of what it should have been.

Anyways, then I figured maybe I can read the files in windows movie maker. i installed Klite Codec pack and Klite x64 for good measure. The very first 2 minute clip was read just fine and played, audio and all. Every single other clip was just a 7 second blank. I dont know if WMM crashed or what, I had to manually kill the process later as it was using 100% CPU and 700mb memory even though I thought I had killed the program. I'm assuming it had simply crashed from attempting to load that many videos at once.

I'm at a loss guys. All I want to do is get these clips off of these jankily encoded DVD's and a handful of AVI files. And then after that I can even do the rest of the project on a buddy's macbook. but this part is just too long and tedious to borrow his computer for that long.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I've got this thread subscribed and i'll monitor it like a hawk and respond to the best of my abilities. Thanks!

[aedipuss]

lol. being a video editor isn't as fun or easy as it sounded, is it? the 8mm tapes should have been captured directly to digital not to vhs and then to digital. those i'd do over. they must look like crap at this point. maybe find someone with a digital 8 cam or other cam with analog to digital passthrough and capture the tapes as DVavi with winDV. then start cutting parts and assembling a video. DVavi is much easier to work with then dvds.

[shrimants]

Well I did this same project a few years ago for myself. This is for my sister's graduation video but when i did it for my own video it was entirely using pictures and only a few AVI files. This year there are full on DVD's.

Just to clarify on the 8mm tapes, there were some that we had long since converted to VHS but others that we still had in original 8mm format that my mom never got around to transferring to VHS before getting her proper digital camcorder. Whatever we had in VHS format we converted to DVD. whatever was left in 8mm format we have as AVI files, but that is only a couple DVD's worth of AVI files and hardly any of the clips are from those.

All in all we have 2 data DVD's filled with AVI files and 11 or so DVD's that are actual DVD's from VHS tapes.

Most of my problem is with the actual DVD's and trying to get the clips off of the DVD's. The 8mm tapes cost us close to 120 to convert for the few tapes we had and if we tried to dig up all of the rest of the tapes (since 1995) we'd be in quite the pickle. I think the AVI files off those 2 DVD's work just fine in windows movie maker, though.

Can you help with just the getting clips off of DVD part? Thats the part I know i've screwed up, and dvdshrink wont read the dvd's because the menu system used by our vhs->dvd device did things incorrectly or something.