I have tried many NLE's regarding import DVD / VOB files, and found that Vegas does the absolutly best job. I use this function once a week with a disc recorded in a DVD camera nad it is just great.

I have tried with other "home burned" DVD's too and no probs. at all.

/Ulf

I've decrypted it and then copied to a burnable DVD. Vegas won't import encrypted DVDs, at least in my experience.

Like I said, I've done this maybe 25 times before with absolutely no problems.

Yes, I agree that Vegas is the best at importing DVDs. That's why I'm a bit mystified.

I've run across clips that have sync problems, but it's usually a source problem, and I can fix it in Vegas. But this is different -- when I preview the clip in Vegas it's fine. but when I try to put the clips together the problem show up.

I think I'll try to fix it in the timeline when it's been combined with the other clips and see if that works. But it still doesn't solve the mystery.

I've even re-renderd the clip with Vegas to conform to NTSC format, but it doesn't fix it.

Vegas is the best at importing DVDs? WOW. Man, that's horrifying news. In my experience Vegas is simply awful at importing them. If other NLEs are even worse .... ouch. I gave up after dozens of attempts that never worked right. Now i play the DVD in my set-top player and use an external A/V -> DV converter to capture.

The only problem I have had with V7 (haven't tried V8 yet) was each chapter lost one frame of sound at the end. This was with the discs I made and not commercial.
JJK

What kind of problems did you have importing from Vegas? Outside of the problem I've currently having, the only real shortcoming I've found is that you must import the entire DVD -- you don't have the options of selecting chapters to import.

Hi,

Decrypting sounds easy but I'm not sure how to do this. Can you help please?

Presumably you then copy by transferring to the hard disc and then burning a DVD from that. If this is right can you not import the copied file from the hard disc straight into Vegas? If you don't make the copy via the hard disc in this way how do you do it?

Sorry if this seems straightforward.

Regards,

Richard Jones

hurricane, are you asking me? If so, the major problem is sync. The audio track seems to always end up running at a randomly variable rate, with occasional tiny sections missing or repeated. I can get one section more or less in sync and then a minute farther down the timeline it's suddenly off by a few seconds again. This happens with every DVD i've ever tried to import, whether home-grown or commercial.

There are lots of decrypters out there -- some are included in DVD copy utilities. I use one called DVD43. You just run it and it sits there watching for any DVD inserted into the drive. I then use a DVD copy utility to make a copy of the DVD, which Vegas doesn't have trouble with.

I haven't found a way to import the DVD structure into Vegas from the hard drive. Most rippers compress the individual mpg files into avi files using either DiVX or XViD codecs, neither of which are supported by Vegas. I've been playing around with rippers that use a variety of codecs, and trying to use the Microsoft MPEG4 V3 codec, but so far the results have been mixed.

Well, that's the end result when I assemble the clips into the timeline. However when I view the individual clips they are in sync.

OK, I found the problem, and feel stupid for not finding it sooner.

On this particular DVD disk, the first chapter in each episode (there are 4 episodes per DVD) has an audio sync problem. Not serious -- the audio track is shorter than the video. When I combine the tracks, everything get's out of sync.

I fixed it by ungrouping the video and audio tracks in the first clip, aligning them, then regrouping. After that everything stayed in sync.

On the other hand, I can't explain why particular chapters on this DVD behave this way. It plays perfectly well in my DVD player.

I'll have to check out the other DVDs in the collection.

Chienworks, I spoke too soon. I, too, am experiencing the same problem. It seems to be related to the video track having random blank frames inserted into it. I would think that would progressively "push" the audio track more and more out of sync, but it appears to be a problem only around the inserted frames, then straightens itself out. I'm not knowledgeable enough to know why this happens. Possible it resyncs when Vegas realizes the timecode on the two tracks is not synced.

I've never noticed any black frames being inserted. What i see is more along the lines of the video playing (apparently) perfectly while the audio gets slightly ahead. Then suddenly a word of dialog is repeated and it's all back in sync again. Other times the audio gets behind, then suddenly a word is missing and it's back in sync. It's always at the same places too each time it's played.

I like to take my educational DVDs I've purchased and put them on my video iPod so I can watch them when I travel (never seem to find time to pop the DVD in to watch when I'm at home). I have imported quite a few of them with no problem. But interestingly, the one DVD I had trouble with was Gary Kleiner's DVDA 3 tutorial. Most of the mpg segments imported fine. But a couple of them were out of sync (MUCH shorter audio for the segment). One segment toward the end of disk 2 was so corrupted that it froze up Vegas each time it tried to build peaks.

This occurred a few months ago using V7. Haven't retried with V8.

Gary, have you tried this? It would be a good test case for the import function.

Just an update.

After trying the first four DVDs of the series, I decided to investigate various DVD Rippers. I must have tried a dozen. While none of them had success with these DVDs (so I've got to assume the problem is with the DVDs), I did find one that seems to be fully featured that I kept as my ripper of choice.

It's called AoA DVD Ripper, and one of the things that separates it from the others it full configuration for Microsoft's MPEG4 and Windows Media 9. All of the others provide some configuration settings, but this tool provides the Microsoft configuration screens, just like VirtualDub. It decrypts protected DVDs, so it results in AVI files Vegas can import easily.

It's got a poor interface that is illogical (to my eye), but its strengths overcome the interface. Plus, like all DVD rippers, it lets you choose the chapters you want to rip, something not available when using Vegas.

The rip time if you choose to go for higher quality is slow, not much better than 1:1 on my CoreDuo cpu, but considering that I had to create a decrypted copy of the DVD before I could import it into Vegas, then rip all of the chapters on the DVD, overall it's faster, even at the highest quality settings.

So I tried it on some other DVDs and it had no problems with the last few DVDs of the TV series I was originally trying to import, plus it was successful on other comercial DVDs. So it seems that my original problem was related to the DVDs, NOT Vegas.

Here's my last entry on this thread. I've found a workaround that seems to solve the problem, but it's a bit of work.

I use a DVD ripper (AoA DVD Ripper, but I think any ripper that converts to codecs Vegas supports would work) to convert my DVD into separate chapters, each one about 6-12 minutes long. I'm using the Windows Media Video 9 (WMV), but I suppose that any of the other supported codecs would work. WMV9 gives you a little more configuration ability.

Once I have the chapters added to my Project List, I add the first one to my timeline. I make sure Auto Ripple is off, then I ungroup the video and audio tracks, and sync up the audio to the video. I then trim of the ends of the clips to match them up. The tracks are only out of sync about 3-5 frames, so I really don't lose any content, and most of the chapters begin and end with fades anyway. I then continue with the succeeding chapters.

I then turn Auto Ripple on and push all the clips together to create a continuous stream.

Since I'm adjusting only a short clip each time, it avoids the cumulative sync problems that eludes correction when you are working with a single event.

Once you've done it a few times it works pretty well. If I find that a clip is too long and it's starting to get out of sync near the end, I just split it into two clips and sync up each one.

Whew!

Your problem is probably because you are importing .VOB files from the DVD directly, not MPEG files.

What is the difference? VOBs are a container for *all* the content on a DVD, which may vary in format - different aspect ratios, frame rates, stills, etc.

The IFO file on a DVD is an index, a table of contents, which identifies which parts of the VOB correspond to which content. You can have multiple IFOs for the same VOBs, which is what lets you set up things like Play All vs. Play One Episode, or things like the alternate play order on films like Memento.

The problem is a single VOB may contain a bit of 29.976 video (eg. for the menu) followed by part of an episode at 23.976. Vegas will assume the framerate for the beginning applies to the entire thing, and hence things will get out of sync.

So what you want to do is use the information in the IFO to decode the VOB into individual segments.

There are numerous ways to do this, but I have found the easiest is to use a free program called DVD Shrink. Basically copy your DVD to the hard drive, using whatever tool you prefer, then run DVD Shrink. It has a re-author mode that will let you pick out different parts of the DVD and build a new DVD. Turn off recompression (to maintain quality and speed). Get DVD Shrink to make a new DVD. DVD Shrink makes completely separate VOBs for each item - so each episode, menu, etc would end up in a separate VOB.

Vegas will read these VOBS with no issues, since they are all internally consistent.