Creating DVD projects, high quality

[jasonk]

Perhaps everyone knows this now (sorry if that's the case), but I speant a good deal of searching and finding plenty of silly advice for doing what I think many expect to do with little or no effort since they have a Mac. I'm a recent Mac switcher from FreeBSD (KDE), still use FreeBSD for all of my server needs.

 

I have a Sony DVD video recorder that I use for family events and such. What I was expecting to do was just copy the video from the miniDVD disc and then drag-n-drop parts of it as I wanted with menus, titles, transitions and such while maintaining the clear DVD quality that I paid for when I purchased the camera. Almost all of the How-To's that I found had some form of file conversion that resulted in either great or at least noticible video/audio loss, I found this to be unacceptible.

 

The steps shown below work for my case, I am using a MacPro with fastest available CPU and highest density of RAM supported so I'm not sure how long the process will take for everyone. The only third party utility you will need for this is a working ffmpeg installation, check http://homepage.mac.com/major4/ for info on that.

 

- copy entire VIDEO_TS folder from original dvd to a local folder.

 

- encode the local copy of the VIDEO_TS/VTS_01_*.VOB files (likely to be two files, maybe more or less) into DV format (it's selected from a drop-down) using ffmpeg. dont mess with the settings in ffmpeg, just select DV and encode it.

 

- drag-n-drop the completed DV file into bottom drop section of iMovie.

 

- edit.

 

- burn.

 

You can delete the local copy of the VIDEO_TS folder when done if you want.

 

Good luck. Just wanted to share this somwhere since I have yet to find a single How-To illustrating so few steps with this. Perhaps a different Input device (camera) would allow you to import directly to iMovie however my camera does not. The above works assuming there is no special encryption which I don't think personal DVD cameras do.