Editing Vobs with Vegas 7 - tips anyone?

ken c wrote on 10/13/2006, 7:11 AM

Hi -

I've got a lot of DVDs that I want to create edited versions of, and don't have source footage, and I wanted to ask if any of you have suggestions on how to best edit VOBs on the Vegas 7 timeline?

It seems that scrubbing them is laborious, because V7 needs to decode compressed footage, as I want to split a lot of the vobs, then render to uncompressed avi, then pull back into DVDA to create edited versions of DVDs... eg let's say there's a 2 hour DVD and I want to make a 30-minute 'highlight reel DVD', that's what I'm trying to do.

It does work, finally, being able to at least see vobs in vegas' timeline, without having to demux or use womble ... but scrubbing vobs is a challenge...
would it be better to render out the vobs to uncompressed avi, then edit? for example..

the challenge is, it takes awhile for vegas to decode the vob compressed footage, and I'm trying to edit a lot of vobs down, so scrubbing is very slow on vobs... it would probably be faster if I rendered vobs out to avi, then edited the avis, then pulled those back into dvda to create the final edited version dvds.. though time consuming, and I have a couple of dozen dvds I want to do this for ..

I appreciate any insights anyone could share - thanks!

-ken

Comments

ScottW wrote on 10/13/2006, 7:33 AM

If you're willing to take the quality hit by using Vegas to begin with, rather than something like womble, then yes, my suggestion would be to render the VOB's to DV AVI files using something like DVD2AVI

--Scott

John_Cline wrote on 10/13/2006, 8:08 AM

I use SmartRipper to extract the VOB files and then use VideoReDo to edit them. VideoReDo will allow you to cut and trim VOB files without having to rerender them. It works great.

ForumAdmin wrote on 10/13/2006, 9:33 AM

The Import DVD camcorder disc function will typically give you files with better seeking behavior than simply dropping a .vob on the timeline.

Hulk wrote on 10/13/2006, 9:35 AM

Perhaps I'm missing something here but you can rename the "vob" extenion to "mpg" and then drag the clips into the Vegas 7 timeline.

The same trick works in MediaStudio. Even better actually because MSPro will NOT rerender unedited portions of the timeline if the project properties are set properly.

jdinkins wrote on 10/13/2006, 12:12 PM

Renaming the vob doesn't always work EXACTLY right, but that is worth a shot.

I have a friend who has a POS record straight to DVD type camera. When I added the renamed vob to the trimmer/timeline, it would only play like the first 15 seconds of the mpg. For some reason I had to run the mpg once through a demultiplex pass with tmpgenc before I could add it to the trimmer/timeline.

It was the strangest thing.

riredale wrote on 10/13/2006, 6:29 PM

I did the "import from DVD camcorder" thing a few days ago. It worked, but left a couple of audio glitches at the beginning of several of the vobs. Fortunately there were in a place where they could be patched easily.

fldave wrote on 10/13/2006, 6:45 PM

==="rename the "vob" extenion to "mpg"

I have had bad audio problems with this method.

I second the Forum Admin's suggestion by using the Import DVD. With V7, if the DVD audio is 5.1, set your project properties to 5.1 before the import, and you end up with mpg files that after you drag to the timeline, you get all surround audio in 4 tracks: stereo front, stereo rear, mono front center, mono LFE.

No problems yet with DVD import with V7, although V6 was not very good at it.