pulling video from a surveilance DVD

[John Grote, jr.]

Good day Amy,

You don’t say what platform you are working, but if it is Mac, I’d recommend MPEG Streamclip. It has been a life save in pulling footage off of dvds and it allows you to pick a wide range of formats to convert to.

Cheers,

John

J. Grote, Jr.

[Mark Suszko]

This could be very hard if the video is multiplexed, that is, multiple cameras each send a couple frames (or FIELDS!) at a time in rotating order, to save space on the tape or disc… To get just one camera out of that requires some finnicky editing. One way I did it one time was to convert it to an image stream of targa stills and apply photoshop batch operations to it to just extract the camera angle I wanted.

The easiest way to work witht his stuff is to sue the same machine it was ercorded on, geenrally, for playback. That means you may have to go to the store or whatever, where the ercorder is, ata time when they can take it offline to work with you, with a portable recorder of your own and maybe a scan converter, to pull the needed angles. Had to do that a time or two as well. Not fun.

[Amy Colson]

Yes, I am using Mac. 10.4.11, Dual 2Ghz Power PC G5; FCP 6.0.5. I’ve never heard of MPEG streamclip. Can you give me some more details? I know now that the DVD I’m to pull footage from is a DVD +R with two .dvr files, one .exe & one autorun.inf. I don’t recognize these file types and neither does FCP to import. I tried just playing the DVD on my computer and on my DVD to VCR recorder (thinking that if necessary I’d transfer to VHS then import) but neither system recognized the disc &/or gave an error message saying it was unsupported.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

[John Grote, jr.]

Amy,

MPEG Streamclip enables you to make a file that can be brought into Final Cut. I have used this software many times and it works great. I’m haven’t had to pull surveilance files off of a dvd, so I can’t help you if the MPEG Streamclip doesn’t work, but I am sure that someone else on our wonderful form maybe able to help.

Cheers,

John

J. Grote, Jr.

[Greg Hahn]

What you have on your hands is not a DVD video disc, but a DVD data disc — so it won’t play as a DVD in a set-top player.

The .dvr files you have are files recorded using a Closed-Circuit video recorder. From my experience, a lot of times, because of the way the systems record these “videos”, you need to use a proprietary application to view them (hence the .exe file). You’ll need a .dvr converter application to be able to convert the .dvr files to a usable file type to be able to edit them.

Just google “.dvr converter” and a whole host of apps come up — some free. DVR-MS Converter is one such program, but it looks like it only runs on a PC.

Greg

[Amy Colson]

Hi John,
Mpeg Streamclip works great! I didn’t have success with it for the surveillance DVD (ended up loading it up on a PC & filming it from the screenplayer – which is proprietary to the recorder from which it was pulled & this worked fine considering the quality of the recording.)

However, Mpeg Streamclip is fantastic for pulling .vob files from deposition tapes! So, thank you for the tip on this super software.

Best & thanks to all for posting,
Amy