Transfer a DVD to Imovie, How?

[BeeVeePee]

I had a Hi-8 video transferred to DVD, via Walmart, now I want to pull clips from the DVD....I "dragged n dropped" the DVD thingy on my desktop to imovie..but they became only stills and were freakish colors...

please help...
oh..by the way ..this forum is spectacular..
thanks in advanced

 

[treehorn]

Long story short: video on DVDs can't be edited/manipulated. It's compressed and encoded in a manner that they are basically proprietary for DVD use only.

So you have to uncompress/convert them into something that can manipulated.

You can use either a program like Cinematize

http://www.miraizon.com/products/products.html

or a freebee like MPEG Streamclip.

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/video/mpegstreamclip.html

Both give you options to convert DVDs into an editable format. For IMovie, you'll be wanting export it into DV (which will uncompress your footage into very large files.

 

[mperkins37]

Try Visual Hub

I found VisualHub to be great for any kind of encoding & it's cheap.

 

[gkarris]

Got this one...

Use Handbrake to make an .mp4 file, then put into iMovie...

 

[-DH]

Use Handbrake to make an .mp4 file, then put into iMovie...

Why compress an already heavily compressed video (DVD) even more (MPEG-4, only to have to convert it to a DV stream for iMovie? That makes no sense at all. Talk about having some quality hits! Sheesh.

Use MPEG Streamclip to convert it directly into the format that iMovie uses natively.

-DH