Combining Two DVDs into one

dfred wrote on 2/18/2008, 4:44 PM
I'm copying video from my DVDs to hard drive. These are my personal discs, nothing copyrighted. Someone suggested creating folders in the media bins for organizing such video. Got that down pretty good.

There are approximately 100 DVDs in my collection - about 35 created from VHS tapes and the rest from digital tapes (Hi-8 and mini DV). I do not have enough space on my hard drive to copy all of that video.

Here is what I'm doing thus far in the project: I have 18 years of video that I am turning into a hopefully-less-than one hour video to be saved onto DVD. Nine years of video is on the hard drive, which leaves me ample room to begin creating/editing the first portion.

Once I finish the first 9 years, should I save it, render it, or render it to a DVD?

When the above is complete, I'd like to follow the same procedure for the remaining 9 years of DVDs.

After the first 9 years is finished, if it is saved to a DVD, can the video on my hard drive be erased to give me enough room for importing the remaining 9 years? Or should I use my external hard drive for importing the remainder?

Either way, could I then load the first part of the video from the DVD (I could use a DVD-RW) into Sony Vegas, then add the edited portion of the remaining video in order to combine both sets (if you will) into one continuous video?

Comments

Himanshu wrote on 2/18/2008, 8:38 PM
Wow! You've got a lot of video to sort through to condense into 1 hour.

You said you've got 9 years (how many hours of video is that?) on your hard drive. First thing: no matter what you do, do not erase this! Why would you want to erase so much captured footage (I'm assuming its all the best possible quality that you could capture)? I would leave it all on the hard drive, and keep it for future use. Disk space is cheap; your time in capturing all this is not.

Within SVMS you're working on a project (.vf) so you can start it now, and continue it whenever you want to (i.e. after you capture the rest of the video from your collection). You do not have to render any of it, or make DVDs till you really want to or need to. So start your project now, and continue later. I'm assuming that you will keep your source video as I mentioned earlier.

If you are not going to keep your source video, then yes, you will have to render it and keep it on your disk instead of the original source. In that case, make sure you render to an uncompressed format. Do not use a delivery format such as MPEG-2 (DVD).

But really, my take on this is that you will inevitably want to make changes to the first half when you see the footage in the second half. In fact you may learn more editing tricks and may need the source footage again to make it work. See what I'm getting at? Don't delete your source footage :)

BTW, working off of external drives will only slow you down. Put the drives in the box and save your self agony of dropped frames in captures.
dfred wrote on 2/19/2008, 12:37 PM
Yes, I have a lot of video! It is somewhere between 75-100 DVDs but, fortunately, all the DVDs are labeled with at least a date or range of a few months so I can easily look at the labels and figure out whether it has anything I want to use in the project or not.

It looks like each DVD is using 3-4Gb of hard drive space. As far as I know it's the best quality I can come up with at this point. Most of it is from Hi-8 or DV digital video so we're good there. The first 35 DVDs were made from analog (VHS) video. I suppose I could do as another forum member mentioned and copy all that VHS tape onto DV tape then load it back into my computer. That would take me, well, forever. I don't have that much time now as I need to finish this project for a June graduation.

Thank you for all the feedback and suggestions. Based on the available space on my hard drive and what I've loaded this far, if I load the rest onto my main hard drive, that will leave me around 50GB or less of usable space. I've decided to load it onto my external hard drive. Two reasons here. I appreciate knowing the external drive will slow me down but my son is going to add his own music to portions of this video and I use my home PC for a job so he may need to work on it on the laptop. Also, I may want to take the portable drive with me on vacation so would be easier to have it on there to begin with.

That said, I can keep my source video on the hard drive at least until the project is completed. But would I render it to .avi format? If not, then what is an uncompressed format as opposed to a delivery format?

You're right, I will probably discover changes to be made on the second half as I navigate into that and I am sure I'll learn along the way. I'm actually impressed with myself that I knew it could be done - even though when I started this I wasn't 100% certain of how to accomplish it.

It'd sure be a lot easier to do a slide show with pictures but I decided to print pics for display and it was my son's suggestion to do the movie. I had thought of doing this months ago anyway and really should have started it months ago! I have 3 months and am sure that's ample time. Like I said, not all the DVDs will be used.

Some day my dream is to purchase a 1TB hard drive to keep all video on. Perhaps when that day comes, I'll copy all the old VHS tapes onto DV tapes and load into the computer all as digital.

Surprisingly, editing the clips (thus far, at least) has been both enjoyable and fairly easy to do. Being able to load it into Vegas then fast forward to review it helps me a lot. It'll be interesting to see how much footage I actually use but know that folks who come to the party will really enjoy it. Even I can't believe how much people have changed over the 18 years!

Thank you again for all the help. This forum is great.
Himanshu wrote on 2/19/2008, 6:39 PM
Looks like you've got a lot of work ahead. Two comments:

1. Uncompressed format - AVI is a good choice, but in going through the "Render As..." and file types, I found QuickTime .mov's default is also uncompressed - I've never used it, and I am not sure if I would use it instead of AVI at all.

2. So out of the hundreds/thousands of hours of source footage, you will probably end up using relatively few clips in your final footage. What you can do is create save your project with the "Copy and trim media with project" option. I have to say that I do not use this option, so you may want to get opinions before doing so. The advantage is that it will make copies of only the part of the footage you use (which presumably will be much smaller than your captured footage) and so you will need much less disk space.

3. If you still have your Hi-8 and DV cassettes, you should definitely capture again from them rather than reading that from DVDs that were produced from those cassettes. Especially the DV tapes - you have fully uncompressed digital video there, whereas what you pull off of DVDs is compressed (read, "lossy") MPEG-2 video.

4. It's probably OK if you store video on external drives. However, if you are capturing video you should capture to your internal drives & then move it out to external drives. Keep an eye on dropped frames during capture -- it should stay at zero for best results.
Chienworks wrote on 2/19/2008, 8:44 PM
DV is compressed about 8:1, so it's not uncompressed. However, it does work much better and faster than MPEG. Sony's DV codec is so good that it's almost as good as uncompressed in almost all situations.

Save As with Trimmed Media won't trim MPEG clips, so no matter how small a piece you choose on the timeline you'll still get the full original MPEG clip. That won't help to save space.

What i would do is find the small bits i want to keep, set a loop region (select that section) and render to that section only to a new DV .avi file. Since the intention is to create a single DVD in the end this probably won't be more than 2 hours worth of video. 2 hours of DV is about 26GB. After you've got the pieces selected and rendered to DV use those DV files for the final project.
dfred wrote on 2/20/2008, 1:33 PM
My clips all appear to be VOB files - that's the format they were saved onto the DVDs and thus what's copied back to my hard drive.

I like the idea of reloading all the Hi-8 and DV video from my tapes directly to my hard drive but don't have the time or the hard drive space to do all of that right now. Perhaps down the road I'll get a larger hard drive and have more time. Working and other activities takes a lot of time these days so I'm lucky to be doing as much as I am with this project.

I noticed the save as with the trimmed media but didn't notice that it did anything with the source video.

Please explain a bit more about the "loop region" as I haven't used that feature at all.

Thus far, I load video into Vegas that is on one DVD, then split out what I don't want and crossfade the sections I want to keep. Then I save the file and move on to the next DVD. Sounds good except I've only done that for 2 DVDs and I have a lot more clips to do.

One thing I did which I'm finding works very well for me is to save each clip in a separate folder and name that folder according to the DVD content. As I go through the DVDs, perhaps I'll be able to modify the folder names and be more specific about the video contained in them - instead of having "2000 vacation" I might have "2000 vacation to the Adirondaks."

The one thing I'm still not 100% certain of, probably because I haven't had much time to work with it in recent days, is this: Should I render this every time I add more footage to the project? Or should I just save it and render once the entire project is completed?

Maybe that will be answered when I learn more about the loop region.

Thanks.
Himanshu wrote on 2/20/2008, 7:53 PM
Chienworks - I stand corrected on DV compression, and thanks for the additional info on "Save as with trimmed media."
Chienworks wrote on 2/20/2008, 8:08 PM
VOB files contain MPEG2 video and audio.

Vegas is a non-destructive editor. This means that nothing you do with it ever changes the source files in any way. You can trim and hack and slash on the timeline all you want and save, but all that does is tell Vegas what part of the source files to use. It doesn't trim the source files to those parts. If you want to get rid of the unused video from your hard drive and keep only the 'good' parts you have to render to a new video file. Then you can go back and delete the original source file and keep only the new trimmed version.

Note also that 'Save' doesn't create a new video file. It saves your timeline editing instructions into a .vf project file. This file contains a list of source files and what parts of them you have placed on the timeline, where you've put them, what effects you've applied, and so forth. The .vf file doesn't contain any media at all. You only save (actually create) new media files when you render.

"Should I render this every time I add more footage to the project?"

The only reason to render is to get a new output media file. Generally there's no reason to render until you're finished editing. You might want to render pieces as you go just to see what they'll look like when you're done. Playing back in the preview window from the timeline isn't always a good representation since it's a small window and your computer might not be able to keep up the full frame rate for smooth playback. Rendering what you've done so far will let you see a final output version of what you've done up to that point. It doesn't really help the final render at all* so aside from critical previewing there's no reason to do it.

* I will point out one situation where it could be helpful. If you have a project that you know is going to take a long time to render because of all the effects and compositing and titles you've done, you can render small pieces as you finish them or when you have some spare time, then load these pieces onto a new track above the other tracks of your project, aligned perfectly with the tracks below. That way when you do a final render Vegas will only have to look at and copy those rendered pieces instead of redoing all the effort it took to render them to begin with.
dfred wrote on 2/21/2008, 1:09 PM
From the looks of all the good information I've received, I'm thinking maybe I should print it out for easy reference as I do this project. I really like the idea of rendering small pieces and loading them onto a new track above the others.

I also like the idea (either yours or someone else's) of loading all the video directly into the computer. Obviously that'll take a long time but something that would preserve the video better than having tapes lying around. Maybe that'll be a project to be done after this first project is complete.

Thanks, to you all, too for explaining about how the save works and that it doesn't actually create a new video file. I sort of figured this out when my source video was gone when I removed the DVD from the drive.

The other thing that would be helpful to know is what excatly is to "render loop region?" I've read some about it but have not had time yet this week to experiment with it at all. I've been too busy thus far this week to do much except read the forums and work on the computer. Hopefully this weekend I can get some work done on the video project.

Thanks again for all the help. Keep the ideas coming.
Chienworks wrote on 2/21/2008, 2:54 PM
"Loop" region is sort of a misnomer in this context. It comes from the fact that if you have playback looping turned on and select a region of the timeline then this selection will play over and over again in a loop.

However, for what we're talking about here "selection" is probably a much better name than "loop region". There are a few ways to create a selection. One is to drag the mouse across the timeline to highlight a section and this section turns blue. You'll see a blue line across the top with yellow triangles at each end. Another way is to double-click an event and this sets the selection to start and end where that event starts and ends. Another method is to place the cursor where you want the selection to start and press i (for in) and then place the cursor at the end of the selection and press o (for out). However you do it you'll end up with a portion of your project selected.

When you render there is an option for "render loop region only". I'm sure a lot of people would be far less confused if this said "render selection only". In any case, when you check that option the new output video file will contain only the selected part of the timeline.

The upshot is, suppose you have 107 minutes of video on your timeline from a DVD and you only want a 2 minute section near the beginning and a 3 minute section near the middle. You can highlight that 2 minutes and render just that to a new file, then highlight the 3 minutes and render that to another new file. Delete the original 107 minute .vob file and then all you'll have left is two files containing the 5 minutes you want to use. Move on to the next DVD and repeat. When you're done you'll have only the hour or two of video that you actually want to use sitting on your hard drive.