Trying to build a video montage from DVDs

[dtmsurf]

I am trying to build a montage of movie clips onto DVD to play in my restaurant. I have been ripping DVDs with both handbrake and mactheripper and I have toast 9 to burn. The problem is that importing the movies into imovie after I have ripped them will take forever. Then, once I have them in imovie Im not sure if I will be able to build a clip montage in imovie or not. I just want to find out if its going to work now before I wait the 250+ minutes per movie to put them into imovie. Should I buy final cut express?? would that speed up the process.

I have a new (4 months old) macbook, and not much experience. Thanks for any help.

Bill

 

[dtmsurf]

I have been searching the forum and now understand that this may be considered copyright infringement. I am currently just showing DVDs that I bought in my restaurant and there is nothing wrong with that, businesses do it everyday. I just want to build a montage of the action scenes (no sound) to make a more visually stimulating experience. I ate at a major hotel chain restaurant this morning and they were showing a movie clip montage exactly like what I am trying to do. Maybe they bought rights to all the movies??

 

[gauchogolfer]

I'd be careful when you say "playing movies I bought for my restaurant", since I'm pretty sure there's a difference between playing a DVD at home and in a public space. Kind of like playing music at home vs. your restaurant.
Do you fall into the following category?

Now the Music Licensing Act draws the line between private and public in terms of the type of public establishment, the size, and the stereo equipment used. Restaurants and bars under 3,750 square feet or retail establishments under 2,000 square feet are exempt from paying fees for playing radio or TV broadcasts for their customers. Public places of any size that play radio or TV broadcasts are exempt from paying fees if they use no more than six external speakers (not more than four speakers in each room) for playing music. Public places that play CDs or hire live musicians (that play cover songs or copy songs) are still subject to being licensed for fees.

 

[spinnerlys]

I don't know where you live and how your country handles copyrights, but where I live (Germany) you have to pay a fee if you want to play copyright protected material in a public place, be it music or films.

As for ripping, you should encode the source material to a video editing friendly format. As this does not seem possible with Handbrake, you could look elsewhere, or encode with the highest settings possible to h264, and then import to iMovie, and let it recode it to its proprietary format.

 

[dtmsurf]

Yes, we are under the square footage and as part of our liquor license we are allowed to play amplified music with a DJ. We do have DJs that play as well as a program called pcdj red and another digital juke box type program. I am just the chef but it is a new restaurant and I am helping to develop a certain atmosphere that, decor, audio, visuals, and food create. The owners own other restaurants, bars, and nightclubs including live music venues so I am sure they have their bases covered. We could hire someone to do this project but it sounded fun to me so I am trying to do it myself.

 

[dtmsurf]

I don't know where you live and how your country handles copyrights, but where I live (Germany) you have to pay a fee if you want to play copyright protected material in a public place, be it music or films.

As for ripping, you should encode the source material to a video editing friendly format. As this does not seem possible with Handbrake, you could look elsewhere, or encode with the highest settings possible to h264, and then import to iMovie, and let it recode it to its proprietary format.

I am encoding it with h.264 using handbrake and it will import to imovie the problem is that it will take over 250min to import (for one of the six movies I am sampling clips from) and I am wondering if I will even be able to make a montage in imovie.

 

[spinnerlys]

A h264 encoded movie is highly compressed, as is a DVD.
Mpeg2, used as the compression codec fo DVDs has a maximum bitrate of 7 to 8 Mbit/s which means around one MB for one second, which leads to 40 KB per frame (if you could look at it that way).

iMovie needs a format that is not that much compressed, so it can maybe have a bitrate of around 3.5 MB/s (DV), so it takes a while to decode/encode.

And by montage you simply mean cuts and dissolves? iMovie can handle that, if the material is properly coded, with no hassle.

 

[dtmsurf]

Thank you, ill try that