Newbie with questions. Reorder/Reedit DVDs.

[bannister]

Hi all:

My situation:
I recently discovered a box of 8mm home movies of the family taken back in the early 60s. Problem is, the reels weren't labelled either by subject or by date. I had them all transferred to a single DVD by a professional service.


Now, I would like to reorder the disk chronologically and make a couple of new DVDs from different segments.


What would be the best program to:
1. Copy the DVD to my hard drive
2. Edit the results by segment and subject
3. Burn the desired segments to new DVDs


Thanks in advance!

[DB83]

'Professional' is a very wide word and this could just be a firm who took money from you for the service.

So, some more questions:

1. Approx how many home movies or better still the approx running length.
2. Does the dvd have a menu so that you can select a 'segment'
3. Is this 'segment' the equivilent of one reel of film ?

[bannister]

DB83, the transfer was done by a camera store that does film transfer in addition to other services. I was concerned that the film would be fragile, and wanted to be sure that it was handled with the proper care. A photographer friend recommended the store, but he isn't a video expert.

They didn't segment the different reels by menu, it's like one movie with many disparate scenes. Each scene or segment ends and a new one begins. Total running time for the DVD is a little over one hour. Yes, each segment would be one reel of film, but it isn't divided on the DVD. There were probably 14 reels of film. Seems like film and developing was expensive back then, so the segments weren't very long.


For example, I want to be able to have minutes 5:15 to 9:18 cut out, and added to minutes 19:03 to 28:32 to make a coherent video narrative. If that makes sense.

[classfour]

You would need to author the files.

[classfour]

If this is "precious" home movies: I would offer my service for free - only to spare the trouble.

I do have the software, etc. to make the necessary dvd's.

pm me

[sanlyn]

If your source is DVD, you can transfer the content to your PC with the free VOB2MPG. Note: This is a transfer (a copy), not a re-encode or a recompression, with VOB renamed to MPG (VOB is encoded MPEG). If simple cut and join is all you're doing (not complicated stuff like recoloring or noise filtering), use a smart-rendering space-specific MPEG editor that won't re-encode your entire video or force you to cut only on GOP segments. Freebies can do this, but reasonably priced paid editors like TMPGEnc Smart Render have more features and accept more formats. You can re-author the results for DVD with TMPGenc's product line or use free authoring apps with less fetures. Avoid non-smart rendering apps and products that make colorspace changes you don't want.

If all the stuff in the preceding paragraph looks like Vedic sanskrit to you, you should ask more questions and do some research.

[DB83]

My initial reaction is that if this firm did not even do a menu for the dvd they can hardly be called professional.

To expand a little on the above replies, first copy all the files on your dvd into a folder called 'Video_ts' on your HDD. You should not have to do a standard rip on this sort of disk but if you get issues then use a ripper such a dvddecrypter.

Then, as stated, use vob2mpeg to create a single mpg from the content of the dvd. At this stage, there is no quality loss.

Now use free tools such as avidemux to select the sections of the video. Use 'copy' for video and audio and mpeg-ps for the file type and save the new sections. Again, no re-encoding takes place so no quality loss.

Once you have all the sections, use another free tool - avstodvd - to create your dvd. Now you can create a menu. There is no need to put these on to more than one disk but that is up to you.

Finally, burn your files to disk with imgburn.

[sanlyn]

AVS2DVD is pretty good, but be careful with your settings. Avoid re-encoding MPEG2. Read the user manual.