Rip high quality DV clips from your DVD (Mac/PC)

[clareanco]

^Nope - they are from proper DVD's. I have been ripping more and it turns out that it has only happened to two of the videos. Hmm. Never mind, at least I still have the audio, even if it is out of sync

Thanks for trying to help

[witchqueen]

I am having a hard work since my Magic DVD Ripper is not working anymore.

I have tried to download it again but everything I download has a trojan.

I was wondering if someone knows a link, free of trojans and virus or, even better, have the Magic DVD Ripper exe with keygen to share with me?

It would be very appreciated

[Elvira]

You don't really need to use Magic DVD ripper. Here is a tutorial for some free DVD rippers that will give you better and most stable quality, if you follow the tutorials here for ripping and converting DVDs.

[witchqueen]

Thank you Elvira again

But I have tried many DVD rippers, my Movie Maker sucks when I rip with other software (Yeap, thats probably becoz of settings)

But Magic DVD Ripper is the best, its very easy and simple to use and it works wonderful for all editing software.

Anywayz I will try the tutorial for sure.

The last one really worked.

[Elvira]

I thought Magic DVD Ripper sounded familiar; turns out I had written a tutorial for it a while ago. Alas, it's good for ripping the DVD to VOB (digital video files). You can then convert these VOB files to an editable codec (DV AVI, Lagarith AVI) with another encoder program (like MPEG Streamclip or VirtualDubMod). But, Magic DVD Ripper is not good for converting the DVD straight to AVI (or MOV or whatever). Here's my Magic DVD Ripper tutorial: sweeney32.livejournal.com/3002.html

The first part of the tutorial talks about ripping the VOB files from the DVD to your hard drive. That's fine. The second part of the tutorial (where I start to rant about how it was not working) was trying to convert to Lagarith AVI. I remember all of that now. Oh, it did not work at all. It'll convert to an AVI not suitable for editing (DivX), but that is not recommended. This tutorial explains why not all AVI files are created equal, and why DivX AVI is bad for editing.

Basically, the kind of AVI file that Magic DVD Ripper converts to is not good for editing. You might get away with it for a while, but suddenly your software starts acting up, you think your computer is broken, or you have a virus, or your editing software needs to be replaced, but all along it was the wrong kind of AVI file that was the cause of the problem. (The tutorial on AVI files explains all of it.)

[mintyj]

Hey Elvira, the whole increase in file size is a worry to me seeing as I do this on a family computer with a shared terabyte hard drive. I was wondering if DV is the only way to prevent constant rendering on Final Cut. Also when I convert my files I already have to DV, audio still needs rendering, what am I doing wrong?

[seduff]

Aug 29, 2009 9:03:34 GMT -5 mintyj said:

Hey Elvira, the whole increase in file size is a worry to me seeing as I do this on a family computer with a shared terabyte hard drive. I was wondering if DV is the only way to prevent constant rendering on Final Cut. Also when I convert my files I already have to DV, audio still needs rendering, what am I doing wrong?

My Audio has always need rendering, but only the once. Then you can move it about and do with it as you wish. (Unless you add effects to it of course ) I have never really come across a timeline of mine that hasn't needed rendering of some sort. It's just the nature of the beast imo but maybe Elvira will have a different answer for you.

[Elvira]

The funny thing is, when I edit DV MOV, I don't ever render the audio. DV (straight DV with the .dv extension) needs rendering. I don't get it. Rendering audio isn't that big of a time-consuming nuisance, so it never bothers me much.

Seduff is right, most videos will need rendering at some point. Not unless you add almost NO effects, and few of us do that! What would be the fun there? ;D

[Cadence]

Well, it's been over a year since this thread was visited so, how about a wee BUMP

So far I have not used Streamclip so I can't say if I'll have issues with it. Earlier up it said Invidia cards and Streamclip don't get along, and I have Invidia. My husband builds our systems with that instead of ATI.

Regarding codecs:

I didn't much care for MJPEG, I mean, it's okay.

I do have a question though about uncompressed files:

I use . I like to vid episodic TV, and I don't generally know in advance which clips I intend to use. I always have an idea for some of them, but for the rest I tend to work free form and always find scenes I'd forgotten about that work beautifully.

That said, it means I work with entire eps - at times 15-20. Each ep I have is cut into 2-3 pieces just for ease of use and finding stuff.

Do any of you work like this, or do you just use specific clips? (vidding movies is easier in that regard - 2 hrs footage vs 4 seasons of TV show) Uncompressed clips are huge and I'm not sure how many I could open at once in SV w/o crashing it.

What's been the most footage you've ever worked with in your video editor?

(Elvira, it's one reason you've heard me talk about wanting lots of RAM in the past)

I posted the question here and hope that's ok. You've already broached that there is no way to get away with smaller file sizes and if that is the case I need to find out if I can still go on vidding the way I do with much bigger files.

[Elvira]

Well, just so it's clear, not all editable files are "uncompressed" completely; some do use compression on each individual frame. (It's just that every frame is a keyframe.) When every frame is a keyframe, i.e. a complete image, the video editor doesn't have to try to access any other frame and try to "recreate" the missing information in non-keyframes in order to get everything looking right. (Hopefully that makes sense. This at least is my meagre understanding of the differences between interframe and intraframe compression.)

I have edited videos where I have loaded up about 30+ episodes in DV (or ProRes or MJPEG), plus episodes from a few other miniseries or shows. Maybe a total of 40-45 episodes total into my editor, though I'm not really sure.

And lately I've been doing this in HD. For instance, I've converted most all three seasons of the HD version of Robin Hood for editing. So maybe 30 episodes or so. (Total episodes, or most of the episodes, because it's easier than trying to get little snippets here and there.) No problems so far. And this is on a little Mac Mini! (An average episode in HD takes up somewhere between 5-12 GB for me, depending on the codec used, so you can do the math from there.)

I really don't think loading up a lot of episodes (in a format like DV) demands RAM the way you think it does (though of course no one is saying that more RAM is a bad thing for video editing!). My old 2002 G4 can handle hours of HD footage, and it's only a dual 1 GHz with 1.5 GB of RAM. (You have to have at least a 1 GHz G4 to edit HD, so it's a bit on the lower-end side for editing HD.) Everything runs smoothly. It's just never been a concern at all.

One thing that got one of our vidders to switch from editing in a delivery format to an editable codec was the fact that she had maxed out the amount of episodes she could load into her editor with compressed. Suddenly it started to crash as soon as she started up the application. Before she hadn't edited that many episodes at one time and had lucked out. But finally her software revolted. I told her to switch to DV and after she did that, she was able to load all the episodes and edit smoothly.

Edit: I just checked. iMovie 09 has a total of 19 hours (not episodes, hours) loaded up and ready to go whenever I start up iMovie. (That's probably 33% HD footage and the rest standard definition, in either DV or Apple Intermediate Codec for HD.) It runs very smoothly and I'm planning on adding several more hours to iMovie soon. (The way iMovie 09 works is that all the files you import into it are always on the ready, unless the hard drive where the files are stored is offline.)

[Cadence]

You just made me feel a LOT better I was so worried you were going to say that you only worked with 2 or 3 hours of footage at a time, so this is wonderful news!

The first time I converted something to vid a few years back, SV had the jumping issues with it and for the life of me I can't recall how I converted it (it certainly must be old age setting in) I'm sure it was something very compressed though b/c you couldn't really play it to preview in Sony. The sound worked, but the image kind of stayed in one place for a couple of seconds and then jumped forward to another frame further ahead and did the same thing...and on and on.

As for DV, I have heard that it is a little bit compressed but I'm not sure if that's true. But it is still supposed to be good to work with (as you've said before)

Anyway, thanx for telling me this. You just assuaged many fears. The only thing I need to do now is get some big external hard drives. I only have one at the moment and it is 750GB. My hubby's external is 2 terabytes He is going to get me something like that, or better.

BTW, for anyone who needs more hard drive space, there is a website,

newegg.com

which sells things for less than a brick and mortar store will. They have all things electronic and not just computer stuff, but TVs, satellite radios, and even appliances. You can make a wish list too and when they have a sale on your items you'll be notified

We do the bulk of our shopping there and since I know how much you guys need extra hard drive space I hope you'll go and check them out

(US store - not sure if they ship overseas)

[tracey1985]

Hii!!

Hope everyone is well!!

Hmmm...I'm having a small problem...or more to the point, my friend is!

She has ripped her DVD's using the Decrypter...all fine.
But when she opens the files in streamclip they don't play smoothly!

I know it can be a little jittery, but she presses play and just gets something like a screen cap.

I checked the Decrypter settings with her against mine and they were all matching...but I really don't know what to do next to help.
She's even redownloaded both programmes.

Help and advice from you lovely folks is very much in demand here!

Thank you in advance,

xTx

[Elvira]

What is the speed of her computer? They don't necessarily have to play smoothly in MPEG Streacmlip. What matters is that the clips she makes play smoothly in her video software.

If the picture is just frozen to one spot, so much so that she can't tell where the scrollbar (playhead thingie) is located, that is a problem. But if she sees more like still frames, but she's still able to trim to the scenes she needs, it may not be that big of a deal.

(Also I know that MPEG Streamclip may conflict with some video cards? It should say more about that on the MPEG Streamclip home page. I don't know much about it myself. )

[tracey1985]

Thank you Elvira!

I'll have a look at the website!

But thinking about it...she could edit it finer in her programme! She uses which I know very little about...but I assume it has got finer editing capability!

Thanks again!

Edit: Is there an alternative to Mpeg Streamclip?

xTx

[silvershot]

Firstly, thanks for this tutorial. It's very helpful!

I just have a couple of quick questions.
I'm converting my downloaded Xvid AVI footage and in 'show stream info' it says:

Video Tracks:
3ivx MPEG-4 5.0.2, 624 x 352, 23.975999999999999 fps, 1.00 Mbps

Does this mean I should put 624 x 352 (unscaled) as my setting or keep it to what I've been using for dvds - 720 x 576 (DV-PAL)
I tried testing it and there didn't seem to be much difference but I just wanted another opinion.

Also, would you know if there is a specific reason why one of the episodes only plays the audio and not the visual when all the others play both?

Cheers.