Editing video from a DVD

[BobAchgill]

What free tool can I use to get a DVD movie on DVD disk over into my Adobe Premiere Pro ready for editing? The DVD was made from the contents of a home camcorder so there is no licence issue.

Or maybe you can recommend a free editor that enables importing the video from DVD for editing?

[guns1inger]

VOB2MPG to extract the video and audio content as an mpeg program stream. Some versions of Premiere will work with these, some won't. I don't believe any of them are native mpeg editors, so you will have to re-encode everything if you use Premiere.

If you look in the Tools section under Mpeg editors you will find a selection of free and payware editors that can work with mpeg files without re-encoding. Personal preference is VideoRedo for simple cuts, and Womble Mpeg Video Wizard for more extensive editing.

Otherwise, load the mpeg into virtualdub (current version or mpeg-2 version) and output as DV AVI, then edit in Premiere.

[BobAchgill]

Thanks Gun1inger!

I have been hunting for the function of VOB2MPG for yeeeears!

[Rudyard]

VOB2MPG

Otherwise, load the mpeg into virtualdub (current version or mpeg-2 version) and output as DV AVI, then edit in Premiere.

out of curiosity do you suggest DV AVI as opposed to uncompressed AVI just for disc space?? I normally go to uncompressed thinking ti is maximum quality (but I now have the HDD space to accomodate it.) is this true?

[guns1inger]

Actually, I would normally go for Lagarith or Huffyuv, which is a good compromise between the two. Both are lossless compression codecs, so you get smaller sizes (around 30GB per hour for lagarith) than uncompressed, but no image loss.

That said, DV is built for editing, and most editors handle it with ease.

[PuzZLeR]

Lossless is indeed the way to go for full quality, but it gives many editors fits (not sure with Adobe though). But for a tiny bit of quality loss (haven't noticed any yet though with my eyes) DV is ultimate for editing.

But backtracking to the original question, do you have Nero? NeroVision as well will pull out the video streams from the DvD into MPEG program streams (.mpg) with its Import function. Then you can edit them virtually losslessly with tools like Womble, VideoReDo (as GunSlinger mentioned) as well as TMPGEnc MPEG Editor. The latter three can also pull out the video from the disc as well, but may be problematic with some DvDs, when NeroVision is quite solid.

[Rudyard]

Out of interest, how can something compress a video yet still remain lossless? How does it get the info it takes out to compress back?

Maybe I just dont understand compression....

I have used massive uncompressed AVIs with Vegas and premiere along with ulead video studio with no problems at all.

[AlanHK]

Out of interest, how can something compress a video yet still remain lossless? How does it get the info it takes out to compress back?

Utilities like PKZip and WinRAR can losslessly compress files in general.
They look for patterns in the data and store the pattern.

Image (and video, and audio) compression can be done in the same general way. Video images are not random data. A given frame is usually very similar to the previous one. So by storing the difference, instead of the full frame, you can save an enormous amount of space, while not losing any information. That's in the time domain; in space you will often have large areas of the same, or similar colour, that can be reduced to a pattern too.

E.g., GIF files are lossless, convert a BMP to a GIF and you may save 99% of the space if it's a simple image.

[Rudyard]

Thanks for the info.

BMP to GIF......isnt bitmap millions of colours and GIF 256? That would be a massive loss in conversion.

[PuzZLeR]

If only there is a video format that is completely lossless, yet compresses nicely like MPEG-2, DivX or H.264 then I would have ZERO problems in this hobby. I would know right away which format to use to archive.

But I have learned that the best "lossless format" to archive to is to actually keep a copy of the original source. So, now I have two copies separately of all my video - source and encoded version, which in total still requires much less space than any current lossless video codecs would need on their own for that clip. (And, as a bonus, I have a good backup either way at worst.)

Still the best solution until technology improves or hard drive space becomes trivial at 1 ExaByte (=1,000,000 TB) at your local drug store.

[AlanHK]

Thanks for the info.
BMP to GIF......isnt bitmap millions of colours and GIF 256? That would be a massive loss in conversion.

You're right, in general. I was just reaching for a more familiar example.
(But if you have an 8-bit BMP, it is lossless, and the compression is very large.)

A better example is PNG, which does support 24 bit colour (millions):
http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/book/chapter01.html#png.ch01.div.2

Since PNG's compression is fully lossless--and since it supports up to 48-bit truecolor or 16-bit grayscale--saving, restoring, and resaving an image will not degrade its quality, unlike standard JPEG (even at its highest quality settings).

That's why when possible I use PNG rather than BMP for masks and such in Avisynth scripts, background images, etc. No loss and much smaller.