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best format for dvd extracts? (for dvd re-authoring)
Using Toast Titanium 10 there are several file formats for extracting video from DVDs. I’m trying to teach a producer how to extracting material from existing dvds with an eye towards authoring new dvds (new demo reels). What would be the best file format for this task? MPEG-4, H.264, Qt or DV? Since most of these can be dialed up to best quality, my question is more about advantages of any format for the most speedy, transparent way to re-encode the next dvd?
As a sidenote I had been using Cinematize 2 which allows one to save to (2) elementary streams aif & m2v believing that this was the most transparent way to accomplish the above. (This producer doesn’t have Cinematize.) Though this app had served me well the extractions I did for her resulted in a new dvd that was filled with video hits. This never happened to me before but my past extracts were done with a limited source set of dvds.
Thanks,
Paul
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4 Replies
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First let’s deal with the elephant in the room.
You’re taking a HEAVILY compressed format, compressing it AGAIN, authoring and then compressing AGAIN. UGH! if you have any concern about quality. Sure using any “best” setting minimizes the damage but it’s not a workflow I’d recommend.
If it were possible to use the VOBs as is . . .
Sorry but this is just not a good workflow. Get the master video if quality is the least bit important.
If you’re locked into the above workflow because the masters are lost, go to an uncompressed format. It isn’t going to make things look better but they’ll be less damage that way.
BTW I’m not sure why you include QT in the above as that’s a wrapper not a codec.
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Thanks Craig. I take your point about Qt but I’m passing along the options from Toast verbatim – so yes they are mixing apples and oranges.
So please excuse if this is a dumb question but when I researched extracting elementary streams with Cinematize, I had though these were native dvd files. This seemed to be confirmed when I would burned newly authored dvds (in Toast) from them… which took no time to speak of which reinforced the idea that they were not being re-encoded.
Paul
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Extracted elementary streams would have no additional and you’d simply author rather than recompress.
You had mentioned using other codecs and that’s where the problems would be.It does depend on what changes you need to make. If you want to edit files you’d need to go to another codec. If you find that adding more media means you need to change the data rate in order to decrease the file size, that would be a recompress. It depends on exactly what you have to do.
If you’re simply adding more files and the additional size doesn’t require changing the elementary streams then that would work.
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Yes re-editing is the wild card. I was trying to teach a producer how to treat existing dvd assets as cards in a deck that can be reshuffled and organized into new dvds.
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