How to extract clips from a DVD, and burn them to another DVD?

December 21, 2010 10:45 AM

How would one create a digital clips reel (on DVD) from commercial DVDs?

I will be teaching a class in the spring for which I will want to show illustrative clips throughout the semester. Some of those clips will be on YouTube, and that's fine. Other clips will be small excerpts (from one to 20 minutes long) from commercial DVDs. I would like to place the smaller clips on one DVD so I can play them without having to hunt for the proper cue.

I've never authored a DVD before. I'm not even sure how to extract the particular clips I would want to use.

Can someone walk me through the process, or point me to a good resource that isn't an ad for a particular program?

Specs: I have a Mac, 10.5.8. I have copies of Handbrake, MactheRipper, and VLC, plus whatever came on my Mac (iMovie).

Thanks.

posted by OmieWise to Media & Arts (3 answers total)

On a Mac, so far as I know, the easiest way to do it is by running a DV stream from a FireWire-capable video camera into iMovie. Ripping perfect digital copies of stuff via apps like Handbrake and then hand-editing the result is considerably more labour intensive. With a DV camera you can take the analogue outputs of a DVD player into the camera, then run the FireWire connection from the camera to iMovie, which "sees" the camera and can record and stop and start very intuitively. Borrowing such a camera may be an option if you don't have one. That's what I've done in the past.
posted by galaksit at 10:52 AM on December 21, 2010

... and obviously you can rip a DVD from your iMovie content afterwards. The very most recent version of Apple's iLife seems to have orphaned iDVD, though, so this method is sadly on the way out longer term, with Apple's anti-optical-media policy slowly revealing itself in various decisions they've made.
posted by galaksit at 10:54 AM on December 21, 2010

If you just want to get clips off a commercial DVD, you can save time/drive space by using Fairmount to decrypt the disc instead. It basically goes inbetween the the DVD drive and the computer as it automagically decrypts the video stream on the fly. So now you can treat it as if the DVD was never encrypted in the first place and use handbrake to convert a particular chapter of the disc.

It can't decrypt everything. Sometimes Mac the Ripper will work when Fairmount fails, but it saves the time of ripping the entire dvd to your drive first when you don't need the whole thing.
posted by sammich at 12:38 PM on December 21, 2010