Cannot view/Edit complete .VOB in Premiere or Final Cut Pro

[brotherd]

*****Full Disclosure******

I am training to be a psychologist, and therefore am completely untrained in DV editing. I make a lot of videos, so I have some experience, but I do things my way and don't often know the proper terms or language. So, I apologize in advance.


Okay, so I'm working with a .VOB file. I recorded this footage off TV, and am now in the process of inserting some of my home movies from the actual event into the broadcast footage.

When I place the DVD in the computer (Macbook Pro) or into a traditional DVD player I can watch all the footage that I recorded - roughly 1.5 hours worth.

I have both the _RM and _TS files on my hard drive. 1.5 hours of footage comes out to 3 active VOB files, _1.VOB, _2.VOB, and _3.VOB and then of course it also has the _TS.VOB file.

If I go to the footage this way, _1.VOB has ~2.5 minutes of video. I can see this by just clicking it and playing it in VLC and can also get it into the timeline on both Premiere CS5 and Final Cut Pro. When I play _2.VOB it starts off about an hour later. So, I'm somehow missing ~1hr of footage that WILL play in DVD mode or in a DVD player, but does not appear to be contained in a VOB or that is inaccessible on only this instance.

I'm relatively sure the footage data is actually in _1.VOB because that file is 1.7g.

So, any ideas why I can't see it in the _1.VOB format? I know it's there. I can watch it.

Any ideas how I can fix this situation? I'm under a deadline, b/c it's part of a birthday present for my Grandmother.

Very frustrated. Thanks!

[r0lZ]

Welcome to the forum!

The DVD-Video standard impose that a VOB file must be < 1GB, so maybe you cannot see the full content because it is too large. Also, take in mind that all VOB files (_1 to _3 in your case), must be kept together, and be considered as a whole like a large big file.

Note also that VLC has troubles with many VOB files (unless you load the full DVD-Video structure, with the IFOs). I know that it stops when there are still frames or slideshows in the VOB. It's probably not your case, but try to play the VOB with another player, such as MPC.

To re-order a VOB and extract or concatenate some parts of it, I highly recommend VideoRedo. It is not free, but it's an excellent application to treat videos recorded with a camcorder or a standalone DVD recorder, and convert the content to a fully compliant DVD-Video, without re-encoding.

[tigerman8u]

Try VOBMerge
1. Load your vob file/s in VOBMerge
2. Output the file to mpeg
3.Load the mpeg file in your video editor

This is the way I usually do it
Hope this helps you

[chris198810]

As far as I know, VOB support was added in Adobe Premiere Pro CS4, however non-standard VOB files remain problematic. For example, you cannot easily edit VOB files from a DVD with Premiere Pro.

To get rid of the issue, a quick solution is to convert VOB to MPEG-2 with Brorsoft Video Converter and then import the new file into Premiere Pro for native editing.