Importing From DVD

[Dennis R. Cohen]

On 6/5/04 at 11:28 AM, Neil Bennett <ibenz at mac.com> transmitted the
following electronic message:

>
>Hi (again)
>I have a DVD of a wedding that I burned using iDVD 3 which I would like 
>to re-import into the iMovie 4 to re-edit (I no longer have the 
>original camera footage or iDVD project file) but I'm unsure of how to 
>do it. When I insert the DVD into my Superdrive an icon appears on my 
>desktop and when I double click the icon it produces two files which 
>are named AUDIO_TS and VIDEO_TS. Do I have to somehow convert these 
>files into a DV file before I can import them into iMovie again?
>Thanks (again)

Well, those two should be folders (not files). AUDIO_TS should be an
empty folder unless you have Digital Audio tracks. The VIDEO_TS folder
should have various .IFO, .VOB, .BUF, etc files -- those are your menus
and movies.

Now, using any of a variety of tools, you can convert the VOB files
(Video OBject) to some format that iMovie will accept, preferably DV
Stream. You're going to have lesser quality than your originals --
MPEG-2 is lossy encoding on the DVD, after all.

After you finally get the editing all done in iMovie, you're going to
have to recreate the iDVD Project -- I'm not aware of any extant tools
to reconstruct an iDVD project from a DVD's contents.

Some tools you might look at adding to your tool shed include:
    ffmpegX
    DVDxDV
    MPEG2Works
    DVDBackup
    ExportToQT
    DivXRay
    Missing MPEG Edit
There are more, if you search Version Tracker, but the above are a good
start.

Let this be a lesson, though, to ALWAYS back up an iMovie project to
tape if there is even the remotest chance you might want to tweak it at
some later date.

-- 
Dennis R. Cohen