VOBs convert to what? to edit in final cut pro...

[tSu]

hey there,

i have an urgent matter in which i need assistance. i have a paper due next week on college. my task is to edit a videoclip. i own the original dvd from which i need some footage, i have the original vobs ripped ready to convert to some format suitable for editing real time in final cut. spent one week converting to various formats so i could edit them in final cut pro, but nothing works ok... although the imac is not very powerfull, it should be enough to edit some kind of footage... but it kept crashing and freeze framing randomly during work... converting to DV-PAL is out of the question as the footage has more than 3 Hours and that amount time in DV-PAL format isn´t suitable for the hard disk in question as it only has 90 GB free... can someone please help me... i´m going nuts over here...

cheers

[rhegedus]

converting to DV-PAL is out of the question as the footage has more than 3 Hours and that amount time in DV-PAL format isn´t suitable for the hard disk in question as it only has 90 GB free...

3hr of DV is 39Gb...

[redwudz]

DV is about 13.5GB per hour, so you would have about 41GB for the 3hr file. But there are a few other codecs, maybe PICVideo MJPEG that are a bit more compact, but not bad for editing, but it's payware.

More compact/compressed codecs are not good for editing. Xvid, for example, has a keyframe every 300 frames by default, so frame accurate editing is very difficult. DV would be my preferred format.

If you just need 'some' footage, it shouldn't matter if the DVD is 3 hours long. I assume you need a smaller part(s) from it. Or you could use VOB2MPG to convert to MPEG, but you apparently need a AVI type format? Myself, I would use a MPEG editor and not do format conversions.

It would help if you describe what you have in mind a little more, at least what requirements you have for your project.

[tSu]

sorry my bad about the 3hours dv-pal being more than the 39 GB.. actually it´s not.. the iMac i´m working in only has 1 GB RAM... 1,87 GHz and +/- 90 GB of disk space free... i´m converting using mpegstreamclip from the VOBs to .mov files using the compressor Apple DV PAL.. i guess this time´s a charm. i´m doing all of this at home where i have a tunned pc which can work with any format... but at the university i only have that iMac in which i have to edit the videoclip and has to be done in final cut pro... here at home i could easily work in premiere and get the stuff done in a couple of hours... with final cut pro well, that´s a different story...

it´s a 3 hour show from which i have to edit and cut little 1/2 seconds footage to make a 3/4 minute videoclip... maybe i compressed the files wrongly by assuming it would just only be needed to convert them to quicktime (using sorensen 3 codec) .. i did this because of the incompatibility of PC and MAC, looks like that sorensen 3 try wasn´t the best, now i´m converting again to .mov file but using the compression APPLE DV-PAL (already converted 20 minutes and it was 3 GB, so i assume it will be ok this time? what do you think?

thank u in advance by the way

best regards

[redwudz]

Sounds good. Let us know how it goes.