What should be a simple process is giving me grief - help needed!

[BertRito]

Hi guys,

Here's my dilemma -

All I want to do is Rip/Convert a DVD into a hi-res (or something half decent) .AVI file which can be used with both VirtualDub and Premiere CS4.

Happy for it to be DV-AVI (big file size) but my method which has worked for a while - rip with VOB2MPG, convert resultant .MPG file into DV-AVI with Adobe Media Encoder - has stopped behaving correctly with these new discs I've been getting, giving poor results (video stuttering, etc).

So I am looking for another tool to do the job.


Surely there’s something out there which does this very easily?


P.S. The DVD is non-copyright protected, and does not include a menu.

[guns1inger]

Current version of virtualdub with the mpeg-2 plugin to load the mpg or VOB files, and cedocida DV codec so you can save the results as DV avi.

Note : DV AVI is not HD/high res

[BertRito]

Thanks for that. Will give it a go.

Sorry, I should've clarified the DV AVI scenario. When I mean hi-res I really just mean high enough quality for the naked eye. DV-AVI is fine for this purpose.

[guns1inger]

DV AVI and DVD use the same resolution . . . . . . . . . .

Where does the stuttering start ? Is it after conversion, or after VOB2MPG has processed the file ?

[BertRito]

Ripping the DVD using VOB2MPG is fine. It is only after I then put it through Adobe Media Encoder that there are issues like stuttering footage.

I need to convert into DV-AVI (or similar) which plays nice with Adobe Premiere.

[guns1inger]

Personally, I would probably encode to Lagarith or Huffyuv from virtualdub, as these are lossless. DV compresses at a ratio of 5:1 and will introduce some degradation in quality.

[filmboss80]

By "stuttering," do you mean freeze-ups, or just odd-looking movements when the camera pans or there is movement in a scene? DV-AVI is bottom field first, while a lot of DVDs are top field first. You may just have a field mismatch.

Also, unless you need to do extensive editing, there is really no good reason to convert your DVD footage.

[BertRito]

As I said, it doesn't have to be super-high quality - DV-AVI is fine for what I need.

The stuttering occurs after running the .MPG file through Adobe Media Encoder - the vision never freezes up, but it seems to lose quality/pixellate/stutter the whole way through.

The reason I need to convert the DVDs is to do a lot of editing through VirtualDub/Premiere, so I definitely need a solid way of ripping the DVD and converting to a file type which will co-operate with both those programs.