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Assembling a DVD from multiple everythings
I have the task of gathering about 20 short videos to assemble onto a single new DVD for a one-night only small festival showing. I work with the FCP 7 suite. I tried searching but have not found this particular issue, sorry if it’s been covered before. FYI: I have all rights permissions from the original filmmakers and the festival curator.
Half the shorts will be available to me as existing DVD screeners (no watermarks), the other half as miscellaneous video files.
I’m comfortable using Compressor to transcode native video files to ProRes and string them in show order on an FCP sequence with proper titles and credits. But I’m uncomfortable ripping and converting the DVD-sourced files to get at their videos.
I’ve previously had trouble extracting an actual single video (using MPEG Streamclip or Handbrake) as some of these DVDs are elaborately authored with many shorts. Also, by converting extracted MPEGs to ProRes for an FCP edit and then compressing everything again to make a full show DVD with DVD Studio Pro– those files from a DVD will really suffer in quality.
I’ve tried using DVD Studio Pro to assemble various ripped content but it won’t recognize as proper assets some of the MPEGs I extracted.
So– is there a smart way to do this that suffers not the DVD-sourced content?
Should I not be using FCP to begin with?
Is there an edit app out there that will work with MPEG native files on a sequence without recompressing before I again recompress?!
I’ll consider other (Mac) software if I can afford it.Thanks!
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4 Replies
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You really don’t want to try to edit MPEG files. You certainly never want to try to extract with Handbrake video that you want to import into Final Cut Pro. The reason is that Handbrake only supports H.264 extraction. Try using DVDxDV to rip the DVDs to Quicktime using ProRes. DVDxDV is designed specifically to handle difficult DVD so it syncs properly in Final Cut Pro. Once you’ve finished ripping the video, you should be able to import it into Final Cut Pro without any problems.
Brad Wright is software engineer, so it may be difficult to understand what he is saying. He is always happy to explain his greater detail.
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Thank you Brad, I’ll give DVDxDV a try, it looks like it won’t lose quality on the way in to FCP. And the price won’t break the bank!
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FollowUp– I tried a DVDxDV demo vs. MPEG Streamclip, and the advantage of the latter is that I could export directly to ProRes, as opposed to a more limited set of intraframe Quicktime choices for DVDxDV. So MPEG Streamclip it will be for this job.
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Use mpeg streamclip to convert the files to .dv files… It is important that you keep the dvd files at 480 interlaced and not bump them up to prores 486. You will end up with artifacts… Just edit everything in dvcpro. 720×480 sequence.
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