DVD clip capture in iMovie 08?

[BOSS10L]

I did a search and nothing returned, so I apologize if it has already been asked. I'm doing a group presentation for one of my English classes, and we have to use a few different films. What I would like to do is be able to capture certain clips from the movies, rather than clumsily seeking around the DVDs to queue them up.

Possible copyright issues aside (it's Shakespeare, I don't want to keep it ), is there a way to do this in iMovie 08 or another free program?

Thanks!

 

[mkaake]

For what you're looking to do, you'd want to rip the appropriate sections from a dvd with handbrake, and use the clips in iMovie.

With Shakespear, I'd imagine you could find source material to use that wouldn't cause you to violate copyright law...

 

[BOSS10L]

For what you're looking to do, you'd want to rip the appropriate sections from a dvd with handbrake, and use the clips in iMovie.

With Shakespear, I'd imagine you could find source material to use that wouldn't cause you to violate copyright law...

Thanks for the reply.

Well, it is Shakespeare, but adaptations. One was a TV movie at one point, so conceivably it could have been recorded from that. Semantics are always fun.

 

[krye]

Yes. In short, my 18 month old loves Darth Maul and light sabers. Weird, I know. Anyway he loves the whole light saber dual at the end of Episode I. But the fight cuts back and forth between the battle on Naboo and other stuff, so when you see Darth Maul in the hanger to when Obi Wan cuts him in half, it takes like 20 minutes to watch the thing. I wanted to make him a DVD that just has the 5 minute light saber dual edited down to one clip.

So I used handbrake to rip the DVD to .mp4. I then dumped that into iMovie 08 and dragged all the clips of the light saber sequence to the project pane. I think there was 6 or 7 little clips. I added "overlap" scene transitions in between and a fade to black at the end. I then exported it to the Media Browser and burned it in iDVD. He loves it. It's not DVD quality, but good for an 18 month old. And I can just play it over and over again instead of having to skip back on the Episode I DVD.

 

[BOSS10L]

I'm having an issue, not sure what is causing it. I can handbrake the movie (I did chapters 1-9 just to test it out) to my desktop no problem, but when I attempt to import it into iMovie 08, it is taking forever to "generate thumbnails" before I can even start to edit the clip.

Any ideas?

 

[krye]

I'm having an issue, not sure what is causing it. I can handbrake the movie (I did chapters 1-9 just to test it out) to my desktop no problem, but when I attempt to import it into iMovie 08, it is taking forever to "generate thumbnails" before I can even start to edit the clip.

Any ideas?

Yeh, it takes a while to do that. It needs to create a thumb nail image for every 1/2 second of video. Just let it do its thing. Overnight if it has to.

 

[iphonerules]

DVD capture for editing in Final Cut Pro

Slightly different question. I have (a lot) of 30-minute programs that were recorded as playable DVDs. I would like to be able to read them into Final Cut Pro for editing purposes--with the least amount of quality loss. I used to take the DVD's (standard DVD-R, which hold 4.7 gig) to a dubbing house and they would convert them to MiniDV, which I would read back into Final Cut using my camcorder (I get a Quicktime file that is about 6 gig.) However, I recently tried converting the same DVD using Streamclip. I ended up with a Quicktime file that was 14 gig. The picture was noticeably sharper when I converted difreclty from the DVD using Streamclip rather than first converitng to MiniDV. But the file is more than twice as alrge (14 gig vs. 6 gig). Anyway, all of this has gotten me to wonder what is the best way (to get the best quality) by converting a playable DVD into a Quicktime file. What settings in Streamclip? Thank you.