I often find myself being given DVDs as source videos for a project. Whether it's creating a wedding video, a sports highlight film, a tribute video, or some other project, more and more people have their video footage on DVDs (only) these days. Obviously this is not a great situation for editing - the video file has already been compressed, so you've already lost quality to begin with. But the fact is that you have to work with what you've got.
You'd think that getting the files off the DVD to edit in Premiere (or the NLE of your choice) would be simple - copy the VOB files and drop them into Premiere. Oh that life were so simple. Premiere doesn't recognize VOB files. So you rename them to .MPG (or .AVI) and drop them into. That seems to work until you put one on the timeline and get no audio. If the DVD used AC3 as the audio track, then you'll have no audio because you can't bring an AC3 file into Premiere. I wish you could, but you can't - I think it's a copyright thing. Maybe you're lucky and the DVD you have was created using MPEG-1 Layer II as the audio. You drop it on the timeline and get audio but it just doesn't play back very well. Premiere stutters and playback is so bad it's unusable.
I've used a slew of tools to try to make this process easy on me and while there is no "Easy button" I've figured out something that works for me.
Enter VirtualDubMod. You can download it from sourceforge at:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=65889Yeah, I know - it hasn't been updated forever, but it still works great. Sure it's not the most user friendly and pretty "open-source-ish" and to be honest I don't know what half of its features actually do, but it's a wonderful tool. The basic idea is that you open each VOB file and save it as an AVI. What? Render each file? That will take forever and gobs of hard disk space! Don't fret just yet, keep reading. (I'll talk using different tools to edit the compressed files later, but I prefer to edit with DV AVI files).
The first thing is getting the files off the DVD. Sure you can just copy them, and most of the time that works (for non-encrypted files) but sometimes it doesn't, you can get very weird results. For best results, I use another great little utility called DVDDecrypter. Its main purpose is really to break the Macrovision (or other) encryption on copyrighted DVDs and let you get at the video files. But that's a legal gray area, and that's not what I actually use it for. Most of the DVDs I'm given to use are not copy-protected. You can download DVDDecrypter from:
http://www.dvddecrypter.org.uk/Ok, now you've got a bunch of .VOB files on your hard drive. It's time for VirtualDubMod. The first thing is that VirtualDubMod will create uncompressed AVI files. Many people think that's what they want, but actually it isn't. What you want (for optimal editing in Premiere) are DV AVI files, which VirtualDubMod doesn't make (out of the box). You have to get a DV AVI codec, which can be suprisingly hard to find. I use the Panasonic DV codec because it's free and you can download it from:
http://www.free-codecs.com/download/Panasonic_DV_Codec.htmwhich also contains instructions on installing it. Once installed, it will show up as an available codec in VirtualDubMod (save as -> select AVI as the file type -> click change button -> select Panasonic DV Codec.) Now you can open the VOB file directly with VirtualDubMod and save it as a DV avi file and bring it into Premiere. Life's getting better (we're not done yet)!
Sometimes I have 10-12 DVDs of a whole football season and I need to make a highlight video. Sometimes the VOB files are little 5 minute clips on the DVD (depending on how it was created), so there are hundreds of VOB files. I don't want to open each one individually and click save as hundreds of times and wait for each file to transcode. Here's where VirtualDubMod gets cool. You can save that task for later, and then run them all at once with "Job Control." Ok, so that's better, but I still need to open the file (which takes a few seconds by itself), click save as, and give it a file name. That can still take forever. This brings me to the real reason I'm writing this article: scripting the VOB to AVI Job Control list for VirtualDubMod.
I wrote a little vbs utility (I know, you PHP and perl gurus out there are gagging) to search through a directory structure, find all the VOB files, and create a job control script that can be opened in VDubMod. (download link below) Ok, now your work flow looks like this:
1 - Use DVDDecrypter to get the VOB files onto your hard disk, in a separate folder for each DVD, all in the same parent folder. (I use two machines for this so I have two going at once, then copy the VOBs over to the same machine later)
2 - Run my script to create the Job Control List for VDubMod
3 - Open VDubMod, load the script, hit start and watch it crank away.
4 - Go to bed. It's going to be awhile. (Or if you have a fancy enough processor do something else while it's processing, like write a blog about it, which is what I'm doing write now. :-) )
Here is the script (lots of programs might complain about you downloading a VBS file, so I've renamed the extension to JRR. Rename it back to VBS after downloading):
createVirtualDubModJobs.jrrMy script is VERY unrefined, as I just created it. I'll probably refine it and upload a better version, but it works. You just need to edit the script and find the variables that set the parent folder for all your VOB files and the destination folder. The script assumes you have one parent folder with one or more subfolders that contain VOB files. Feel free to tweak to your liking.
Yes this will take gobs of hard disk space. Yes you still need to copy all the VOB files from the disks to your computer. Yes you still need to wait for VirtualDobMod to transcode all the VOB (MPEG II) files to DV AVI files.
Can't I just edit the VOB files in Premiere you ask? Yes - sort of. You can get a AVISynth Premiere Plugin, but it's a complicated, laborious process that you can't really script (have to do each VOB one by one). Also, I haven't played with it a lot, but I haven't had much luck getting it to work with Premiere CS3 anyway. If you want to look into it, here's the instructions and all download links for the relevant utilities:
http://www.wrigleyvideo.com/forum/index.php?s=776d0be8c3c99092874bce53a3756694&showtopic=22869Labels: premiere, video editing