Final Cut Nightmare

June 18, 2009 2:24 PM

Final Cut Nightmare

I have a movie of my own on DVD and in the form of an ISO file. Yes, really, my movie, I made it a few years ago, then lost the original footage and Final Cut project.

I'm trying to cut it up into clips in Final Cut and upload it to the web. This is JUST A FUCKING NIGHTMARE.

Things I tried:
1) installing handbrake on the Mac. Just doesnt work at all. Software doesn't work.
2) installing Mac the Ripper on the Mac. This utterly worthless piece of software seems to only want a disc, not an ISO. it does not acknowledge my burnt DVD in the drive.
3) installing Handbrake on the PC, ripping with various codecs, transferring to the Mac. After a bunch of tries I found one that sort of works. However, the file, which is only 300mb or so, when imported into Final Cut is unusable. Won't play back, can barely do anything at all without a beach ball. This is on a Quad core Intel Mac pro with 8gb of RAM.

is there anything I can do to make this awful experience better? Is there some format i can rip the ISO to that will actually work? Is there another program, for PC or Mac, that can simply snip bits out of a long video clip, and that's it? Anything, please please please.

posted by drjimmy11 to computers & internet (8 comments total)

forgot to mention: I have Quicktime Pro which refuses to play back any of my rip files, despite me installing the codecs.
posted by drjimmy11 at 2:26 PM on June 18

There are a few ways you can go about this, but here's how I would do it.

First, understand that Handbrake isn't really a DVD ripper. It can rip some DVDs, yes, it's primarily a video transcoder (converter), very similar to the excellent, but now discontinued VisualHub (which is itself just a GUI for ffmpeg). You can still download Visual Hub here.

The two tools that Mac users are using to rip DVDs, primarily, are: Fairmount and Mac the Ripper. Fairmount costs money but it works very well. MTR's main developer, (I believe his online name is geezerbutz; yes I'm serious) decided to make the development cycle for v3.0 private awhile back. So the last publicly-available version is v2.6.3, which is probably what you tried using. If you dig hard enough, you can find versions of MTR 3.0r14, which is what I've been using for about a year now successfully.

So, I would rip the DVD (MeMail if you really hit a wall on this; I can help you off-list) and then use either Visual Hub or Handbrake to convert it to a DV stream (.dv). These files can easily be imported into Final Cut Pro for editing, clipping, etc.

Hope this helps. Video transcoding can be a pain in the ass. Other tools (expensive) are Discreet's Cleaner and Telestream's Episode Pro.
posted by mrbarrett.com at 2:50 PM on June 18

Whoops, I was confusing Fairmount with Metakine's other product, DVDRemaster. Fairmount is free. DVDRemaster is not.

Other ripping tools for the Mac are: Ripit and Aimersoft DVD Ripper (no experience with the latter).
posted by mrbarrett.com at 2:57 PM on June 18

thanks, mrbarrett.com! It appears I don't need Fairmount, since my DVD is homemade and not encrypted. I am trying DVDRemaster from the same company, which seems like it will do what I want...
posted by drjimmy11 at 3:02 PM on June 18

oh jinx.
posted by drjimmy11 at 3:03 PM on June 18

Check your MeMail. Sent you a private link.
posted by mrbarrett.com at 3:27 PM on June 18

This is really, really easy -- I only found about this tool a few months ago. Use MPEG Streamclip. Free. Does what you want. Exports to eighty-gabillion formats. I used it yesterday to rip six DVDs of footage provided by a client, straight to DV.

Hope that helps.
posted by liquado at 8:10 PM on June 18

MPEG Streamclip is your answer.

You need to transcode the video into an editing friendly fomrat like DV or DVCPro 50
posted by filmgeek at 10:05 PM on June 18