Video editing-DVD-Rip

[MajereXYU]

Hello!

My girlfriend likes to do AMV's (Animation Music Videos).
It means she takes short clips from various movies (mainly animation movies) and arranges them on top of a soundtrack so it fits the music.

She can do that pretty well, that's not the problem.

The problem is, to make the clips, she uses a digital photo camera to film the video playing on the computer screen. Yes, you read right, she films the screen. As you can imagine, the quality is less (much less) than stellar.

What I need to know, being the complete newbie to video editing is the following :

Is there a piece of software that would allow her to rip only selected parts of a DVD movie (I don't mean chapters, I mean 5-15 sec clips) to hard drive and/or same thing but with DivX/Xvid/H.264/Mpeg2 movies??

She does that only for fun though, so no need to tell me about copyright issues and the like. It stays in the home and she only uses movies we own, or DivX/Xvid clips of home footage.

I know about Handbrake etc. but I don't want to rip a complete DVD or even a complete chapter. I want to be able to rip only specific sections that I would define with a start and finish frame.(pardon my potentially incorrect vocabulary).

Any ideas?

BTW, She's using Tiger 10.4.6 on a 17" iMac CoreDuo, has access to iMovie and maybe even FCE/FCP (friend will be lending us his copy so we can try it).

Thanks!

 

[n-abounds]

Why not rip the chapter and just remove any portions of that chapter you don't want?

 

[MajereXYU]

I may sound ignorant, but how would I go about removing said portions?
I can rip a chapter fine but I don't know how to remove excess portions.

What software do I have to use? Can iMovie do that? Or maybe FFMpegX (which I heard about but never used).

Please bear with me and provide detail in your solutions, I am a complete newbie when it comes to video editing.
Thanks again, please keep those replies coming.

 

[PegasusMedia]

For quick clips where supreme quality doesn't matter, I would...

-Buy a cheap analog to digital converter from CompUSA/BestBuy, whatever.
-take the analog output of a dvd player into the converter.
-take the firewire output into your mac & launch imovie.
-just play the portion of the dvd you want & capture the few seconds you're interested in.

Alternatively, of course, you could do what was stated before....rip a chapter & trim in imovie. It's not a difficult program to learn. A quick read of the help file & you'll be good to go.

 

[n-abounds]

I know these instructions are long and look complex, but they aren't. They're just to be very specific so that you can't go wrong:

Download "0SEx" and "Drop2DV". Google them or look for them on versiontracker.com, they'll be there.

Put the DVD in, and find the title and chapter you want to rip. You can do this by viewing going to Window> Navigator in the DVD Player. Write down the title and chapter the clip you want is found in.

Quit DVD Player. Open OSEx, and go to "Ti" and select only the title you want. Then go to "Ch" and select only the chapter you want. Press begin, and choose a place to save it. This is a .VOB file, so you have to convert it with "Drop2DV".

Take the .VOB file and literally drop it onto the Drop2DV icon. It will start automatically. You can quit Drop2DV, but don't quit the Terminal window that comes up. This converts your .VOB file into .DV which you can import into iMovie.

So open iMovie, make a new file using DV as your format. Drag the .DV file (it probably has a quicktime symbol on it) into iMove, wait for it to import. Now select the clip. Look just below the blue timeline bar...there should be two triangles. Think of like the triangle on the left is the "starting triangle" and the one on the right is the "ending triangle". Put the "left triangle" exactly where you want the clip to start. Put the "right triangle" exactly where you want the clip to end. It should turn the bar yellow between those points. Then go to "Edit" and choose "Crop". That should be it. Then you can save it, or export it by going to File, Export..., and select "Expert Settings" under the Quicktime tab, click "Share". Then you can use whatever settings work best for playing/compression (if you want).

Any questions, just ask.

 

[MajereXYU]

Thanks! Sounds good.

Like I said earlier, I am not a computer newbie (been building/installing/maintaining computers for 12years) but I never use movie editing software so I wasn't aware of my options.

Your instructions make sense, thank you.

I didn't know I had to convert the VOB's to DV to be able to trim them in iMovie.

 

[n-abounds]

Thanks! Sounds good.
I didn't know I had to convert the VOB's to DV to be able to trim them in iMovie.

Hmm I guess I'm not really sure that you need to...but anytime I've come across a .VOB file, the video worked but the audio didn't. I'm pretty sure iMovie imports it only as a white screen or something weird.

Anyways, no prob, hope it works.