VOB files in Movie Studio

cherring wrote on 1/28/2008, 8:05 AM

Our church records its services using cameras in our sanctuary and burns them to DVD each Sunday. We bought Sony Vegas Movie Studio 8.0 Platinum so we could edit down these videos, but we're having all sorts of trouble importing them.

I understand that VOB files are essentially MPEG-2 audio and video data with title and menu information. I saw some suggestions to try the Import->Camcorder DVD feature, but this doesn't work. The screen shows up for less than a second and then closes. I saw a suggestion to change the vob extension to mpg, and this didn't work, either.

Can anyone advise? I understand that Sony might want to protect vob files from being transferred because of commercial DVDs, but it really would be a logistical nightmare for us to have to import this data via a DVD player direct through a capture feature.

Thanks in advance.

Comments

mickbadal wrote on 1/28/2008, 8:24 AM

I have imported VOB files into VMS (I use 6.0) by dragging the VOB file and dropping onto the timeline. However sometimes the file does not add, or it adds but the Video is slowed down and lags the audio over time. Net-net: VOB usage is buggy.

I would suggest two things:

1) If your cameras are recording to a format such as Hi-8 or Digital-8, do a direct capture from your camcorder into the system if at all possible. Yes this takes an hour, but that can be done overnight or during lunch. And you don't lose any quality in the source, since it will come in as an uncompressed AVI, rather than an already-compressed MPEG-2 (the format used in VOB files).

2) If you can't do #1 above but must start with the DVD as your source, then you can use a free utility called SUPER to re-encode the video to another more acceptable format (such as avi).

I would strongly suggest #1 above, but if not, #2 approach might help.

Hope that helps - God bless :)

Chienworks wrote on 1/28/2008, 11:12 AM

Regarding 1) ... or DV.

Also, if the camcorder has a firewire port then one could capture directly to the hard drive while the service is going on. No lengthy capture afterwards would be required. There are also external converters that will allow this sort of real-time capture from non-firewire camcorders too.

autopilot wrote on 1/28/2008, 11:34 AM

We record all of our church services through a mixer & 3 camera setup to a Pioneer burner, then to a DVD. We also record our services on CD, which sometimes doesn't take, so I'll copy the Video_TS file from the DVD, put it in Vegas, delete the video and burn a CD from the audio.

For your needs, this seems like the long way around, but it could work.

owlsroost wrote on 1/28/2008, 3:52 PM

I always use Nero Vision Express (the video editing/DVD authoring app in the full Nero suite) to import DVD recorder discs - it 'rips' each title on the DVD to single MPEG file. I'm currently using Nero 7 - the latest is version 8.

(Note - if the MPEG files have AC3 or LPCM audio, you may need to change the file extension to .vob to get the audio to show up - due to a bug in VMS8.....)

Tony