If you want to "re-author" a DVD from bits and pieces of existing DVD content -- perhaps even from multiple disks -- then Vegas is not a very good tool because it does not let you cut or join existing MPEG-2 or AC-3 files without recompressing them. The needless recompression that Vegas insists on doing not only takes a lot of computer time, but it also significantly degrades the quality of video.

If you don't mind shelling out the money for Womble's MPEG-VCR or Video Wizard, or for another product called VideoReDo, these products can do exactly what you want, and do it very quickly.

I sure have sold a lot of products for Womble.

What I do is put the DVD in the computer, and then drag all the VOBs on the disk directly to Womble's timeline. I can scrub and cut them there. Then, I specify a destination on my hard disk, and Womble copies only the portions of the VOBs that I want, cutting and joining them as necessary. I then end up with one MPEG file on my hard disk. If I want to use content from other DVDs, I repeat this process for those as well. I then take these MPEG files and drop them into a Music Compilation in DVD Architect, or if I want better navigation, I take one more step and put all the MPEG-2 files back into Womble and join them together into one. In this step, I always choose a different physical disk for the destination because 99% of the work is simply copying the bits to a new location, and if you try to both read AND write to the same disk you get about 1/2 the throughput you would if you instead read on one disk and write to another (i.e., you cut the time in half). Big difference. Generally it only takes 2-3 minutes to merge even 4 GBytes of MPEG files this way.

I have often done a complete re-author job in less than half an hour, including all the computer time, which is cut down to just a few minutes.

Why Sony can't figure out how important this is and provide lossless MPEG cut/join facilities is beyond me. I am going to keep posting every time this comes up (I'm sure I've posted over 100 times, because it comes up almost every day).

thanks for the tip, sorry to ask repedative questions on the foruns (i scanned a couple of pages and didn't see it).

i downloaded the free trial demos versions for a couple of the programs (video wizard dvd and videoredo plus). they dont seem to load the .ifo files that are used to just play using the dvd play programs on the computer. when i tried to load it, videa redo it says ":elementry streams no yet supported".

also i tried importing them into vegas using the dvd camcorder import option without sucess.

i bought and formated an external hard drive to store all the files to once i edit and catalog all the home dvd files from home dvd.

I use MPEG Wizard from womble.com to re-edit old DVD video. It works extremely well for this.

However, if you want to stick a little older video in a new project, Vegas can do this nicely. What I've started doing lately is to rename to VOB file with a .m2t extension and generating a Gearshift proxy to edit this. That way I can edit freely and yet have only one generation extra in the final project. This is not what Gearshift is meant to do, but it does it nicely.

The IFO are navigation files. They contain absolutely no video. There are a few re-authoring tools that attempt to re-use some of your existing DVD navigation, but I believe that all of them require that you use their own authoring tools to create the DVD in the first place. For most situations, you completely ignore the IFO and BUP files. The only ones you want to use are the VOB files.