This may seem to be a long and complicated process, but it has given me the best results for the past three years of bringing video from a DVD-Video disc into Premiere Pro 1.5. I've tried a few programs that will rip a DVD-Video into an AVI file, but the quality of the results was not good. Color gradients usually become banded.
Simply renaming the VOB files into MPG and importing them to Premiere Pro 1.5 is not the best solution because MPG files are compressed into I-frames, P-frames, and B-frames. I-frames contain the entire picture whereas P-frames and B-frames contain only parts of the picture and must depend on the preceding or following frames to recreate the entire picture. Premiere Pro 1.5 cannot properly edit this type of compressed video because advancing by single frame in the timeline gives you only a partial picture. You have to convert the file into full frame video such as an AVI file where every frame is a complete picture. Based on my experiences for the past three years, VirtualDub does the best quality conversion, however the original VirtualDub cannot read MP2 files, so you have to get the modified version, VirtualDub-MPEG2 at http://fcchandler.home.comcast.net/~fcchandler/stable/index.html. VirtualDub-MPEG2 comes as a ZIP file, not an EXE file that would automatically install the program. You have to create a new folder called C:\Program Files\VirtualDub and unzip the files into C:\Program Files\VirtualDub. Then create a shortcut that points to C:\Program Files\VirtualDub\VirtualDub.exe and place the shortcut in C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu\Programs. Once you install VirtualDub-MPEG2 and an AC-3 ACM codec (available from the link mentioned earlier), you can start converting the VOB files off of a DVD movie disc. (Another source for an AC-3 ACM codec can be found at http://ac3filter.net/.) First, locate the correct VOB file in the VIDEO_TS folder on the DVD. VOB files are named as follows: VTS_XX_Y.VOB where XX represents the title and Y the part of the title. They are usually numbered in sequence VTS_01_1.VOB, VTS_01_2.VOB, and so on for video in the first title and for the second title, VTS_02_1.VOB, VTS_02_2.VOB, and so on. Each VOB file is approximately 22-23 minutes long. So, a clip that's 35 minutes into the film will most likely be found in VTS_01_2.VOB. Copy the appropriate VOB onto a hard drive. If you want to convert the entire movie, copy all the VOB files into a folder on the hard drive. Rename the VOB files to MPG. Start VirtualDub-MPEG2 and open the MPG file. Use the Mark In and Mark Out buttons to mark the in and out point of the clip you want extract (or skip this step if you are converting the entire file). Click on File | Save as AVI and give it a filename. Bear in mind that this will convert to AVI Type 1 (as opposed to Type 2) and the resulting files will be extremely large. It will be approximately one gigabyte of data for every minute of video or over 30 gigabytes for a half-hour of video. Next step is to convert those AVI Type 1 files to AVI Type 2 files and Premiere Pro can do that. Import the AVI Type 1 files into Premiere Pro. You will find that the video and audio in the first file VTS_01_1.AVI is in synch. But they may be slightly out of synch in the second file VTS_01_2.AVI and it gets more out of synch in each progressive file. If this problem occurs, you will have to unlink the audio track from the video track and offset the audio from the video by about 7 frames for VTS_01_2.AVI and 12 frames for VTS_01_3.VOB. However, it's best to playback the clips to make some fine tuning adjustments to the audio/video synch. Now you can render out the sequence into an AVI Type 2 file and delete those large AVI Type 1 and MP2 files from your hard drive to free up disk space. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Adobe-Premiere/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Adobe-Premiere/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: mailto:[email protected] mailto:[email protected] <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [email protected] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
