Editing Holiday video..

[sterankin]

I am editing my DV holiday video in Premiere pro on Win Vista. Whilst on holiday, we bought a dvd of us swimming with dolphins. I want to edit some of this in PPro.

I am having trouble converting it to a format and need some help with the best way to do this (NB renaming to .mpg did not work PPro still sees it as an invalid format). Funnily renaming to avi allows it to be imported though it is very slow to process.

So my 2 questions:

1. I have ripped the VOB to my HDD using stream processing in DVDDecryptor. How can I convert this best with much lossing qulaity so it can be edited in PPro? What codec should I compress to?

2. The dvd is from the USA, it is therefore NTSC. My PPro holiday project I am working on is PAL. do I need to convert to PAL - how will PPro handle an NTSC file once I import it? Should I convert to PAL first or create a separate project for this NTSC file?

Many Thanks!

[redwudz]

Just my method, but I extract the MPEGs from the VOBs in the VIDEO_TS folder with VOB2MPG, then edit. If the video is in NTSC format, I would edit it in that. If you need to combine it with PAL footage, you will likely have to re-encode it with some quality loss. But I would do that after editing, especially if you are just doing cuts and pastes. JMO

If you are doing transitions or other changes that require re-encoding anyway, then that may be a better times for a format change. But format changes aren't that easy to get right.

[guns1inger]

You will have to convert the NTSC material to PAl at some point if you want to edit it into the timeline. Assuming it is NTSC 29.970 footage, the results aren't likely to be great whichever way you do it. You will either end up with blended frames, or jerkiness, or possibly both, if you do standard conversions. However, if you don't need the audio track, you might get away with simply slowing the footage down to 25 fps, and just putting your own audio over the top. Most poeple won't notice the difference.

You will also have to resize the footage to PAL compliant 720 x 576.

I would probably use the cedocida DV codec and convert the DVD footage to DV. It is the easiest to edit and Premiere will have no problems with it.

[sterankin]

Luckily I am not using the audio from the video, as they just put on some plinky plonky music track which is awful and one of the reasons I wish to edit it.

So with this in mind, from the advice already given - I should convert the VOB first (how can I use the cedocida DV codec? - just install it but what program will convert to this codec - virtualdub?)

Then when in premiere, I need to slow down the footage to 25fps - how should I do this? Do you use "interpret footage" to tell premiere what footage it is?

Thanks again

[sterankin]

also - the NTSC video from the DVD is in widescreen - how should I account for this in Premiere Pro? My PAL DV footage which it will be mixed with is only 4:3.

Will there be any issues by importing it to PPro once I convert it to DV AVI?

Thanks

[redwudz]

If you install the Cedocida DV codec, it will be available in VirtualDub. You can resize in VD, disable the audio and output as DV. DV uses about 13GB/hr of hard drive space, so make sure you have enough.

VD Mod can open VOBs directly, but I would still convert to MPEG format first with VOB2MPG. You could also change the framerate there, but Premiere may do a better job of that part.

[sterankin]

thanks, will try this later - what should I resize the NTSC widescreen to? PAL widescreen? is there a certain pixel size I should use so it wont look stretched in anyway when I finally convert to a dvd.

I dont mind keeping the footage in widescreen, but my worry is when I import it into Premiere Pro, it will look weird as my project is PAL 4:3....