editing a DVD

[bobh]

I am new to video editing. One of the reasons for me to do it was because my wife is putting her Mother's 8mm film on DVD. And now she wants to edit it.

My question is how can I 'edit' a DVD without loss of quality? I have a PC, DVD burner, and Pinnacle.

Below is what I have done so far.

The DVD does not have any security protection. I can easily see all the files on it (.vob and so on). I tried to import it into my editor of choice, Pinnacle, but it would not take it. After poking around, I tried to use DVD2AVI to convert to AVI. Pinnale will take AVI.

DVD2AVI could see the disk, and converted the video. I did not know what codec to use, so I picked one. The video looks fine in Pinnacle, but the display is a thumbnail so I can't really tell.

I made a project for a few minutes of video, and burned a DVD. When I play it, the quality is degraded. I get little squares of the same color, particularly in the dark sections. (There are lots of dark sections in this 70 year old film!

So, can someone tell me how to import this to Pinnacle (or something else) so that I can chop out the bad sections and burn a new DVD whithout loosing quality?

Thank you in advance.

[setarip]

You can use Chopper.exe (or ChopperXP) to directly visually edit the .VOB files found on a DVD...

[bobh]

Thank you for the rapid reply.

But ...

Isn't there more to it that that? If I chop up the .vob's, aren't the .ifo (and whatever other control files that there are) messed up? chopperxp seems to just write a new .vob file.

[setarip]

In light of the fact that you stated that you had "made a project... and burned a DVD", I assumed you already had the requisite knowledge. Be that as it may, after you've accomplished your editing with Chopper, you'll have to:

A) Use TMPGEnc (use its DVD "wizard"/template) to create the required separate video and audio files


B) Use a DVD authoring program (e.g. DVD Wise) to create your DVD(s)

(I'm not personally familiar with your Pinnacle software. You may be able to substitute its capabilities for some or all of the steps noted above)

[bobh]

Thanks again for the reply.

ChooperXP worked fine, for the first 28 seconds. It simply refuses to read past 28 seconds. I click on the "play" button and it plays for 28 seconds. I was able to cut out a short clip, but the 28 second thing is a problem. Does 28 seconds sound familiar? Is there an alternative to ChopperXP?

I used TMPGEnc to create the files -- a .wav and a .m2v. None of the other software I have will import them. I have tried:
Pinnacle Studio 8
Ulead Video Studio
Windows Movie Maker
ArcSoft ShowBiz
Sonic MyDVD

Is it really a .m2v file I want?

MyDVD sounds perfect. But, I can't get it to open my DVD. I get a "Please select your DVD root folder". I've selected every folder that is remotely near the DVD drive and the DVD drive letter, and I've copied the DVD drive to a hard disk folder and selected that. No luck. Once Sonic's website starts working again, I'll try to resolve this. But I still would like an alternative.

[Rincewind256]

If I want to edit a film from a DVD, I take the vobs to harddisk with smartripper (so my dvd-rom can`t make any trouble).
After that I use "DVDtoAVI", too. But this program can`t handle a DV-codec, so I try the PIC-codec from MJPEG (Cause my vid-soft isn`t able to handle divx-movies ).
My videosoftware is able to read that Pic-codec and the quality is nice.

[bobh]

Thanks for the reply Rincewind256. I tried this, but I am unsure that I am doing what you suggest. It did not work for me.

Is the "PIC-codec from MJPEG " you suggest from Pegasus Imaging Corporation (PIC?) and the codec "PICVideo MJPEG Codec v2"?

[Rincewind256]

Yes, it is.