Capturing Blu-Ray into Premiere Pro

[Jeff Pulera]

Hi Warren,

Commercially produced Blu-ray and DVD discs are certain to be encrypted. And the laws are funny about that stuff.

While there may be a case for “fair use” here, for instance you are reviewing the movie and could legally use bits of the footage for the review, that does not make it legal to break the encryption. Kind of a Catch-22, meaning yes you can use the footage but no you can’t unlock the DVD/Blu-ray to legally use the footage…

I’m not advocating skirting any laws, but search the web for “how to rip blu-ray” and you will find a ton of info. This will pull the footage from the disc and convert for instance to an .mp4 that you can then edit. Just be careful with downloading such software to make sure it does not contain adware/spyware. When installing free software, you need to pay attention to the installer steps – might have a “Browser Helper” included in the install process and is checked by default, but if you watch for it you can UNcheck the installer box to avoid loading that garbage.

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Warren Marshall]

Hi Jeff,

Thank you for stepping in and providing me with some advice – much appreciated.

I’m trying to do a trailer re-cut to upload to YouTube. I noticed that other such trailers exist for the same 90s movie. And, these trailers are in HD – 1080p. The strange thing is, you can’t buy a digital copy of this movie anywhere except iTunes – I searched high and low. Of course, the DRM encryption prevents you from editing it in PP and removing it is almost impossible with an up-to-date mac operating system.

I’m assuming that other such trailers for the same movie are either illegally ripped from the net (not something I want to do and I’m sure Paramount wouldn’t permit this either), or copied from Blu-Ray. So my way forward is to copy a Blu-Ray disc and hope this approach flies.

I have attempted to contact Paramount regarding this but have no reply as yet.

I went ahead and purchased a BDR-XS06T Pioneer Blu-Ray player/writer. It apparently comes with Toast (for macs). Hopefully this will work and if Paramount isn’t happy with my re-cut fan trailer upload (something fun and positive), they will simply request YouTube take it down… or throw me in jail and I’ll get a break form cooking for a while.

Thanks again and wish me luck!

W.Marshall