Best Way to Extract short scenes from a DVD

John222 wrote on 4/7/2015, 11:22 AM
I need to collect short scenes from several DVD's to compile a audition demo reel. The highlight scenes would typically be a few minutes or less. Basically I want to create a bin with many of the artist clips so they can be re-arranged as required to best suit the audition. Is there a way of slicing and dicing the vob's to get what I want? Or do I have to import the entire file to Vegas and render to cineform or some uncompressed format?

Comments

john_dennis wrote on 4/7/2015, 12:25 PM
An MPEG-2 cutter like VideoReDo will operate on .VOB files and cut with no loss of quality except at the cut point where a few frames will have to be recompressed (leave some extra in your selection). If your subject crosses a .VOB boundary, you will have to rejoin the two affected files. Try these methods.
johnmeyer wrote on 4/7/2015, 12:33 PM
This has come up quite a bit over the years. I have given pretty much the same advice each time, although others have somewhat simpler workflows. My way of doing it lets you take the video from the DVD, cut it, and then create a new DVD, without changing or re-rendering anything, except for a few frames at the cuts.

Here are some great threads for you to read, in reverse chronological order. If you search for my user name, you'll see what I recommended, but there are some other great ideas as well:

Best way to ingest DVDs

This link describes how to get the VOBs into Vegas, cut and re-arrange in Vegas, but then use the excellent Womble utility to do lossless cutting of the VOB so that the video is not re-encoded.
Quality issues working with DVD footage

Consoildating DVDs - please advise....

DVD "to" Video??
John222 wrote on 4/7/2015, 5:55 PM
John,

Is the Womble software your referring to mpeg2vcr? Also is it necessary to combine the vob's if the the several seconds you need is contained within one vob?
PeterDuke wrote on 4/7/2015, 6:36 PM
"Also is it necessary to combine the vob's if the the several seconds you need is contained within one vob?"

It is OK provided that the part you want is not within a second or two of either end. The audio may clip more than the video if this is not the case.
John222 wrote on 4/7/2015, 7:28 PM
Is the Womble software mpeg2vcr?
johnmeyer wrote on 4/7/2015, 7:43 PM
Is the Womble software mpeg2vcr?Yes, you can use the cheapest MPEG cutter, which is mpeg2vcr.

If everything is contained within one VOB, you can usually just drop that on the timeline. However, VOBs contain a lot more than just video and audio, and Vegas sometimes chokes. In that case, drop the VOB into Womble and create an MPEG-2 file from that. It only takes a few minutes if you copy from Womble to a second disk drive.