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Intel iMac DVD extraction program

Brad Raple

Brad Raple

macrumors newbie
Original poster
May 7, 2004
25
0
Giant Bucket, USA
My office just purchased a 17" iMac CoreDuo for video duplication and editing programs. Basically we need to be able to import and edit video from non-protected, non-commercial DVD's that are produced in house.

iMovie will do everything we need for the video editing, it's pretty basic stuff, but we need turn the DVD disc into a digital file to edit. I tried importing from iMovie directly, but that definitely doesn't work, at least according to Apple.

I downloaded HandBrake, but it takes FOREVER. I don't know what I should expect as far as speed, but it seems too slow. It imports about as fast as it takes to play the video. I'm doing it at pretty high quality settings because I need it, although I could sacrifice some quality for a significant speed increase if possible. It's running in emulated mode, so I assume that slows it down significantly.

Does anyone have any suggestions on the best/fastest way to get a non-protected, non-commercial DVD into iMovie on a new Intel iMac?
 
No, unfortunately I don't have access. I work for a prosecutor's office, and when I say "in-house" it's actually done by the police department, and they either won't or can't give us the originals, but they turn them into DVD's for us. So I'm kinda stuck. I saw that there's a intel beta for HandBrake, so I'm going to try that at some point, but I need a good solution before the end of the month, or else my boss will return the mac. If it weren't for the BS 2x faster comments from Steve, and the fear of getting left in the dust, I would have just picked up a G5 iMac.

I may have to pick up an external device that will import analog video into a digital file. I know there are some good options, but I assume they were all designed for Power based CPU's, and the software would have to be emulated on this mac.

All I need to do is cut some sections of video, and drop portions of the audio from a DVD. I would think that iMovie would have an import from DVD feature, assuming the dvd is not a protected commercial DVD, but apparently not.

Any other help is greatly appreciated.
 
Well, I'm comparing them to my 1.5 Ghz Powerbook, but they seem very fast, even with only 512 MB of RAM. Which would be perfect if iMovie did what I need it to do, but apparently there are no native apps that will import DVD to .MPG or .MOV, aside from what appears to be an early beta of HandBrake.

Any other help would be great. It's kind of making me reconsider the MacBook that I was planning on purchasing. Emulation is seamless, but slow. I'd like to see if the rumors of something much better in a few months are true, but I don't want to be stuck always waiting for the next thing.
 
Toast 7 has a media browser with a DVD browser... which can browse through and identify individual titles or chapters on a DVD... which you can select and then extract and convert into editable formats like .DV.

This will do exactly what you want... repurpose and convert an existing DVD into a usable format for editing.

It's called the Toast Export function.
 
Does toast have a intel version out? If not, how long do you think it will take? I'm a little worried with the supposed 50% performance hit under Rosetta that this would run fairly slowly. I can see how the chapter feature would be nice though, but I think most of these videos are police interrogations that are one long video clip, with no chapters. One of the things I'll be doing is inserting chapters into them.
 
Brad Raple said:
I'm a little worried with the supposed 50% performance hit under Rosetta
Click to expand...

I personally think 50% is best case. Many apps will be much worse than that, especially processor intensive apps like Handbrake. Let us know how the Intel version works out, I think you should find it much, much faster.
 
You can do this kind of basic editing in QuickTime Pro. Just move the bottom sliders to select the portion of the video you want, cut or copy it appropriately and you can use the movie properties (cmd + J) to select if you want the audio or not. Maybe not as straight forward and easy as using iMovie, but it can definitely be done, if your video will play in QT
 
Well, surprisingly HandBrake actually runs slower using the intel version of the program. It's technically not even listed as a beta, but "experimental version". I was finally able to get the video imported using it, but it took a couple of hours. iMovie is doing everything I need it to, and reasonably quickly to boot.

I hope that when the universal binaries come out for these programs it will speed it up quite a bit. How much difference do you think going from 512 to 1GB would help?

Also, if anyone knows of a good hardware/software solution for doing the same thing from analog sources, let me know, and I'll wait for them to release a universal version of their software.

I appreciate all the help.
 
With the new release of Handbrake .7 or w/e ... you can download the Intel client... I tried it out and I was shocked to see I could rip an episode of Seinfeld season 1 for 320 x 240 settings in 7 minutes....that's what I'd call pretty fast
 
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