Import DVD into Adobe Premiere 6

[muzicman82]

I have about 6 full DVDs of footage that I need to convert to a format that someone can import into Adobe Premiere 6. I have the DVDs ripped to IFO/VOB sets. I don't know what Premiere 6 can import. I used VOB2MPG to convert the VOB to MPG and tried importing into Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0, but it said it was an unsupported format. The DVDs were produced using a Lite-On DVD Recorder.

I suppose I need to convert it to AVI or something? Which codec should I use to maintain the same quality as the DVDs? I have used xvid or divx, but the person using Premiere 6 would also have to have that codec correct? Is there a better solution?

Thanks!

[guns1inger]

Best but largest would be uncompressed or losslessly compressed. Good lossless compression includes Huffyuv and Lagarith. These eat disk space very quickly though.

After that, DV-AVI would be the best.

[muzicman82]

Well.. I've used Huffyuv before... but ALL PCs working with these files would need the codec too then right?

If I'm just re-encoding a DVD, do I really need lossless codec? Its not great picture quality or anything... but I'd imagine lossless would be faster?

The DVD source are about 4 GB each... would lossless be bigger than this? It's like 2 hours of footage for each disc.

Thanks!

[Megahurts]

Adobe Premiere 6.0 will not import Mpeg2 files, but it will if ShowBiz is installed (trialware) in tool section. Adobe Premiere 6.5 will accept Mpeg2 files.

Chas

[muzicman82]

Why wouldn't even Premiere Pro 2.0 important an MPEG2 file?

[guns1inger]

mpeg2 is compressed using a lossy compression. Any lossy compression throws away information that you can't get back. Repeated lossy compression very quickly damages the quality.

Yes, you would have to have the codecs on all the machines editing the footage, and yes, it will require a lot more space than 4 gb.

Your other alternative is to use a dedicated mpeg editor, such as Womble Mpge VCR or VideoRedo Plus instead. Then you can work with the mpeg files. If your editing requirements are modest, you may not need to re-encode either.