DVDs to DV to DVD will I lose quality in video?

[Endzone]

Here's my issue:

A friend gave me 3 seperate DVD disc which are all very well done--professionally. They are of his daughter's wedding. But, none of them have chapters. All the disc start automatically--in other words there is no menu. What he wants me to do is to combine all 3 discs and include only the best scenes which should total less than 2 hours of time. He also wants me to add a menu with chapters. The only way I know to do this is to convert all 3 DVDs to DV with my canopus ADVC-110 and then edit the DV with Adobe Premiere Elements 4 or Roxio and then output the final as DV and convert it to MPEG-2 for the final DVD authoring. I will add the menu with the editing program.

1. Will I lose video quality by converting the DVDs to DV and back to a DVD?

Alright, I see there is already a sticky on this. I should of checked it first. Let me rephrase my question then. Will this method work just as well as using TMPGEnc DVD Author as suggested by the forum moderator? Can I save myself 70 bucks?

[guns1inger]

Apparently you can add chapters with vobblanker without having to pull the whole thing apart, however there are limitations to this which mean that you may not get the accuracy or number of chapters that you want.

Given the scope of the project at hand, I would consider a couple of alternative approaches.

1. Converting to DV then back to mpeg-2 will cost you quality. Taking an analogue approach to a digital problem will make matters even worse.

2. Consider how much editing, and how sophisticated it needs to be. Unless you are doing lots of fancy transitions and overlays, an mpeg smart editor would be a better solution. This would allow you to make all your cuts and joins with minimal re-encoding (limited only to join points).

3. Use an authoring tool for authoring, not an editor.

4. Burn the results with Imgburn.

All of this can be done on the PC. Even if you decided, for some reason best kept to yourself, that you did have to convert to DV, you should rip the discs to your PC and convert there, not connect your player up the ADVC.

[Endzone]

Apparently you can add chapters with vobblanker without having to pull the whole thing apart, however there are limitations to this which mean that you may not get the accuracy or number of chapters that you want.

Given the scope of the project at hand, I would consider a couple of alternative approaches.

1. Converting to DV then back to mpeg-2 will cost you quality. Taking an analogue approach to a digital problem will make matters even worse.

2. Consider how much editing, and how sophisticated it needs to be. Unless you are doing lots of fancy transitions and overlays, an mpeg smart editor would be a better solution. This would allow you to make all your cuts and joins with minimal re-encoding (limited only to join points).

3. Use an authoring tool for authoring, not an editor.

4. Burn the results with Imgburn.

All of this can be done on the PC. Even if you decided, for some reason best kept to yourself, that you did have to convert to DV, you should rip the discs to your PC and convert there, not connect your player up the ADVC.

Alright, I'm with you so far I think. I'm not exactly sure what I'm doing. I think I'm just ripping the DVD Disc (chapter 1) to its original MPEG-2 format. The screen shot there says it's saving it as MPEG. I wonder if that is really MPEG-2? I didn't realize this DVD had chapters. It sure doesn't have a menu.

Thanks again your assistance. I've sent out 24 DVDs using the picture you edited on the previous project, and I'm still not done. I'm learning to use Photoshop Elements 6 now myself.

[guns1inger]

I use VOB2MPG for this type of thing. It simply extracts the video and audio as an mpg file. I then edit with VideoRedo or Womble Video Wizard, demux to elementary streams, and author with DLP.

I don't use Roxio, so I don't know what is may be doing to your files. If it is quick, then probably not much.

[Endzone]

Thanks Guns1inger. I may give that program a try. I just did the same thing using Adobe Premiere Elements 4 and it broke the DVD into 5 sections of .VOB files. It was very fast. I'm still not going to pretend that I know exactly what I'm doing though. Thanks for your assistance. Gotta rack now. 0500 will come early this morning.

[guns1inger]

Either the disc has 5 titles, or more likely, elements is importing each VOB as a separate video. VOB2MPG will give you one mpg file per title, so if the disc only has one title, you get one big file to work with.