editing dvd's

April 19, 2007 12:29 AM

How do you edit Hollywood DVD's you have ripped to your hard drive?

I basically just want to make something like a highlight video with movie clips. Do you have to have lower compression to get to a specific second in the movie?

posted by amsterdam63 to computers & internet (7 comments total)

videoredo provides lossless editing of DVD files. it's not free but there's a fully-functional free trial.
posted by ascullion at 12:42 AM on April 19, 2007

If you can convert the files to a compatible format (.avi recommended), Virtual Dub is a freeware program that should be able to handle your edits nicely.

I haven't done conversion of DVD to .AVI in a while, but there are some good programs with free trials that don't watermark available to do the job. The catch is your clips might have to be under a specific time limit each (say, 10 minutes).
posted by cmgonzalez at 1:08 AM on April 19, 2007

Vidomi isn't bad, for free. You can select sections and it'll pull them out and recode them into a single playable file.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 3:50 AM on April 19, 2007

MPEG Streamclip will let you cut bits out of the raw MPEG file (also works with .vob) without transcoding it.

Also for Mac
posted by Mwongozi at 4:32 AM on April 19, 2007

To support VOBs, Streamclip might require you to purchase Apple's MPEG2 decoder from their software store. It's $20. Apple's MPEG2 decoder does not handle sound, so you cannot drop the VOBs straight into iMove. My current workflow is

VOB -> streamclip -> MPEG4 avi -> iMovieHD

I was unable to find a way to get them into iMovieHD without some kind of transcoding.
posted by chairface at 9:28 AM on April 19, 2007

If you can convert the files to a compatible format (.avi recommended),

If this is the route you go, AutoGordianKnot does this very easily.
posted by tdischino at 2:02 PM on April 19, 2007

If you want accurate cuts, your best bet is to convert the video into a file that uses a non-MPEG codec. DVDs are MPEG-2. Common AVI codecs like DiVX and XVid are MPEG-4 and are not suitable for frame-accurate editing.

The problem lies in the way MPEG codecs work. Put simply, a small percentage of frames known as keyframes are encoded in full. In between frames only record what has changed from the previous keyframe. Cutting on the keyframes works just fine. Cutting in between keyframes does not.

There are frame-accurate MPEG editors available that basically re-encode the orphaned frames on either side of a cut, but there aren't any that are free or cheap that I'm aware of.

You'll get the best results quality-wise by converting to a lossless codec (huffYUV is a pretty good one), but lossless files will take a ton of disk space.

A good compromise is the DV codec used in digital camcorders. It's not lossless, but the loss is pretty much insignificant. You can expect a DV-encoded file to take around 13 GB per hour of video.

Once you've completed your edit you can encode the edited version to match whatever your method of displaying the video will be (i.e. back to MPEG-2 for DVD delivery).

An excellent source for tools, codecs and advice is www.videohelp.com. Click the "Tools" link in the left navigation bar to see a database of just about every video tool in existence. You can sort and filter by license (freeware, shareware, commercial) to find something that fits your budget (or lack thereof).
posted by scottnic at 2:24 PM on April 19, 2007 [2 favorites]