Help Neeeded For DVD Project. Extract DVD Menu For Use In Personal Project

[sephiros]

Hi. I was hoping that someone could help me figure this out.I figure that there is no shame in admiting that you don't know and so I would like to ask people that have more knowledge and experience than me in this kind of work. I will detail what I would like to do and hopefully someone here can let me know how to do it. I will try to be as clear as possible to minimize and chance of confusion, so we can go step by step.

I have the DVDs of an anime series and I really like the menu(s) from them, but I want to consolidate them into as few discs as possible (maybe even getting it to one). The DVDs themselves are full of things that I do not want, for instance half a dozen or more previews (so there is space for more episodes), and in the case of the episodes themselves, I would like to remove some things from them. The DVDs would be made to be played in a regular DVD player.

So what I would like to do is this:

- Take the DVD and extract the Menu(s) into a form that I can import into Encore and thus retain it as a functional menu. How can I preserve the menu audio as well?

- Extract the video files (episodes) so that I can edit out the stuff I don't want -- the intros and previews and credits (In Premiere or even in DVDRemake/DVD Shrink.).

- Return/Place the edited episodes to DVD video form and place them into the new DVD project, using Encore.

- Have the Menu(s) that I extracted be functional, that is to link up appropriately with the newly edited episodes.

- If I decide to add more content to the disc, be it additional episodes or an extras section, how can I add the necessary entries to the menu in Encore so that they can be navigated with a remote?

Firstly, the tools that I would like to use are the following:

For the acquisition of the DVD Menus, and VOB, VIDEO_TS files I would like to use any of the following

DVDRemake pro
DVD Shrink
DVD Decryptor

For the authoring and any editing, I would like to use

Adobe Premiere Pro CS4
Adobe Encore

These are really the only programs that am interested in using. I would rather not have to get half a dozen other smaller programs just to do this. I'd like to learn how to use these since there are several other projects that I am interested in doing.

I'm several people out there are quite knowledgeable and this would be child's play but I just got into this and really would like to get off on the right start. If you can clearly explain things to me, I will be quite grateful. Feel free to PM me the process as well if you believe that your reply would be too lengthy.
Thank you very much for reading. I appreciate your time.

[greymalkin]

If you are only cutting off the beginning/end of the shows, then the easiest thing to do would be use DVD shrink and set the start/end frame where you want for each episode.

Premiere isn't really the best tool for mpeg editing. As far as the menu's go, I'm not sure about that...

[tinker]

You are about half way there just using Remake Pro.
You can edit each DVD as you like and combine them together after you delete or hide parts you do not like.
Hide is in case you are not familiar with using commands, because when you delete the stuff than, without command edit, DVD will stop working.
You can combine 4 DVD in one setting, if you need more, than you just combine first four or so, export, import combined DVD and add more.
This will add main menu to navigate to each section.
If you want to make your own menu, than you will have to use software which will allow you to do that.
Premiere is one of them.
There is a guide on Adobe web site how to do that.
To add new buttons you will have to make new menu each time.
After importing menu to DVD project with Remake you will have to assign commands to each button to go where you want.
Yo can also use PgcEdit for that.
Other software which will allow you to work with mpeg2 files or VOB is Mpeg Video Wizard DVD. There you can make transitions and other gimmicks on each cut. It will not re encode mpeg2 compliant file on export.