[Toby Wilkins]

“Bad idea to tell someone how to break the law. No matter how easy or obvious it may seem to you. “

Ripping a rented DVD to avoid buying a copy is obviously theft, worse if you choose to upload it and/or share it. As a filmmaker myself I find this kind of piracy distressing. There are some legally defensible reasons to rip a dvd you actually own, for your own use, but this obviously not what we’re talking about here on this site aimed at graphics and editing professionals.

There are many legitimate reasons an editor may need to rip something from a protected DVD source. Ripping from a scene for an actor’s reel, or the filmmaker’s reel, or to create a rip-o-matic pitch reel for a new project, or to use as a temp source, or a whole host of other reasons. While technically, doing so without “written permission of the copyright holder” may be a legal grey area, many editors do so on a daily basis as part of their jobs in this industry. Where would George Lucas be without this ability? I hear he has editors assemble entire feature film rough-cuts using shots from existing movies.

But to get back on topic, this seems to be a very random and totally annoying bug with the way FCP imports qucktime files. I have been running into this problem for years, several versions of FCP, several version of QT, Handbreak, everything. Converting clips to 10 different formats in an attempt to find a solution. I have not found a consisten solve yet.

One glimmer of hope is that clips converted (M4V to ProResLT for example) using Toast (V9 or better) seem to import with more reliability than those converted in QTP. Testing is on-going, but all signs point to Toast as the solution.