From: [sic] (email suppressed)
Date: Tue Mar 15 2005 - 07:13:27 PST
Frameworks peeps,
Thanks for all the suggestions on and offlist...after a good amount of
further research, here are some conclusions still in flux.
First, you first have to rip your streams off of any DVD you want to edit,
so the two Mac choices here seem to be:
OSEx:
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/9830
Or
Mac the Ripper:
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/22715
I think Mac the Ripper is better thus far. It has a better interface and is
kept more up to date than OSEx, which was last updated 2002. I am still
wondering if there is a ripping program out there that shows you a preview
of what you are about to rip, rather than just chapter titles, their length,
etc. that these two programs show.
Mac the Ripper lets you rip the whole disc, main feature (ie movie only, not
extras), or bits and pieces of the disc as chapters.
With these programs, you have to decide if you want to rip just the VOB
file, which is the overall encoded video and audio files on the DVD, or its
"elementary streams" which are the individual streams within a VOB like
audio, video, subtitles (I think), etc. I don't know which one is better to
extract, have been doing VOB because it's just one file rather than
multiples. The key is to figure out which way is better in order to provide
most options and also keep the timecode in check. I do not know this
yet...any suggestions?
To get the streams out to some sort of editable form, there is a clear
choice out there: MPEG Streamclip:
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/24055
This program does the same thing as Cinematize, but it's free apparently
much better than Cinematize. After playing with both, I think it's
interface is much easier to use and understand. Also, I think Cinematize
makes you rip the whole DVD, then edit it down, whereas Streamclip lets you
rip and then access individual chapters. To use Streamclip, you need to
have the MPEG2 codec installed in Quicktime Pro, which is $20 from Apple, or
if you have DVD Studio Pro, it's part of that package.
In MPEG Streamclip, you can bring in your VOB or whatever stream files and
pretty much trim, cut, edit, and tweak what you want to export out to almost
any Quicktime video format under any compresssion algorithm. And you can
both see and hear the video as you do this, even preview what your output
will look like in RAM. It's an amazing program.
So once you get what you want set up to export, you just press a button, and
voila, editable Quicktime file from DVD.
If anyone has further comments or suggestions on how this process can be
made easier, of higher quality, etc. please let me know on or off list.
Still interested to hear more about this idea that DVD video looks better
when it is recorded to MiniDV, then captured. This is obviously generation
loss, but maybe there's something about putting an already
crappy MPEG2 video file onto tape, then back into DV NTSC digital file that
makes it look one way or other?
[sic]
blog: http://www.soulincode.com
--Quotin--
A man of culture is as far from an artist as an historian is from a man of
action.
-Godard, "Sympathy for the Devil"
__________________________________________________________________
For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.