A buddy gave me a DVD he had burned on his PeeCee and the videos on it are in .BUP, .IFO, and .VOB format. The disc plays OK on my MBP (great on the main TV/DVD player) and I'd like to import the videos to edit them on iMovie (his brother's skills with a camera leave much to be desired) but I don't know how to import files with those extensions. Is there an app I could use to do video (audio too--the clips are of our band playing) capture or is there a converter anyone could recommend to convert those files into a format iMovie '08 can recognize?
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Video capture/conversion?
- Thread starter jvencius
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iMovie will only accept video in the DV, MPEG4 or .mov formats. You'll have to convert the .vob file(s) to one of those before you can edit it in iMovie. I think that iMovie will convert MPEG4 or .mov to DV on import, so it might be best just to stick with DV (which is not as lossy as the other two), but that takes a lot of HD space, I think around 16Gb/hr. Anyway I've had good luck converting to DV with MPEG Streamclip, which is free. You could also use Handbrake to convert to MP4 (Handbrake doesn't output DV).
I downloaded Handbrake and used it to convert the vids to mpeg-4 (the image quality isn't all that great to start with, so using a lossy format isn't really a big deal) and now I have iMovie importing the footage. I'm not sure if it's a problem or not, but iMovie seems to be taking FOREVER (projecting 240 minutes) to finish the import. It's odd, that it would take 4 hours to import 1/2 hour of video but not having messed with digital video in the past, I'm not sure if this is normal or not...
I downloaded Handbrake and used it to convert the vids to mpeg-4 (the image quality isn't all that great to start with, so using a lossy format isn't really a big deal) and now I have iMovie importing the footage. I'm not sure if it's a problem or not, but iMovie seems to be taking FOREVER (projecting 240 minutes) to finish the import. It's odd, that it would take 4 hours to import 1/2 hour of video but not having messed with digital video in the past, I'm not sure if this is normal or not...
It's not abnormal. I think iMovie converts the video to DV as it imports, and transcoding takes a while. It think iMovie may overestimate how long it takes. Be patient. I think the process goes a little faster if you convert to DV before you import, but it takes a lot of HD space.
I'm pretty sure, and maybe someone can confirm, that iMovie does all its work in DV. Unfortunately, not only does this mean it takes a while to import, but as I mentioned before the iMovie project file sizes are big.
Use the right tools for the job.
Handbrake is not the program you should have used. Why convert from one compressed format to another when the editing program you're using will need to convert it to yet another format?
MPEG Streamclip can demux and convert the DVD's VOB files to DV format which can be used directly in iMovie without further conversion.
-DH
Nope--the DVD is not protected in any way so there aren't any concerns re: the legality of what I'm doing.
Right, I understood that from your original post, and because of that you could have gone straight from the .vob file to DV (using MPEG Streamclip), but I if you had been working with a copy-protected DVD you wouldn't be able to. Just wanted to point that out. Sorry for confusion.
There's no need to apologize--I'm a new switcher and can get plenty confused all by myself so your contribution didn't change things much.
I finally figured out how to use MPEG-Streamclip tonight and the MBP has been crunching like mad converting the clips to DV. I just started it working on a ~30 min clip so I'm going to let it work overnight and deal with iMovie tomorrow morning.