imac dvd to imovie???

Question

Hi, we just had a play at our school and someone there recorded it w/ a viedo camera. They then took it home and burned it to a dvd. They gave the dvd to me so i could use idvd to make a menu and stuff. I put it into my computer and its in 2 folders (VIDEO_RM and VIDEO_TS) in these folders there are icons that look like blank pieces of paper. The names of these icons all end in things like: .BUP; .IFO; .VOB does any one know how i can put these in imovie?

Thank you VERY much,
Stealth

Answer 1

Smack the idiot who burned the dvd. If he had just given you his camera and let you uploaded the footage, it would've saved a ton of work. It's possible to make a menu, but I'm not sure you would want to do that due to two reasons: it'll degrade the quality, and it's not really worth it, considering the work involved. First off, you'll need a dvd ripper/mpeg-avi converter. Sometimes these come as separate programs, or as a combined dvd to avi program (because any files ripped from a dvd are mpeg-2). All I can say is, google will come in handy. And chances are, the easiest ones to use aren't free. After you've ripped your files of your dvd and converted them to avi, you can then put them into iMovie/iDVD and do whatever. Like I said, it's not really worth it. However, there might be a solution. Have your friend burn another DVD, but instead of burning it as a DVD movie, have him burn it as a file that you can access from your computer. It might take him several DVDs to burn, but that's okay. After he's done, you can just copy and paste the files to your hard drive and import into imovie. Hope this helps!

Answer 2

What I'm saying applies to standard dvds. I don't know for sure if this applies to your friends camcorder dvds or not.

Some of the VOB files, the biggest ones, are mpeg2 files that are alread multiplexed (video and audio interleved). So while you can sometimes copy them off the disc, rename them to .mpg or .m2v, and get them to play, I don't think you will be able to import them into idvd. Maybe but I don't think so.

Some of them are other stuff like menus and short video clips leading up to menus.

The easy way to identify the main movie files is as follows, they are in the VIDEO_TS folder. They are named sequentially. They are broken down into a series of vob files about 1 gigabyte each plus the last one (which could be any size under 1 gigabyte).


Another way: If you have a firewire miniDV camcorder, switch it into vcr mode and plug your dvd player's outputs into the svideo or composite and audio input of the camcorder. Hook a firewire cable from the mac to the camcorder. Start the dvd player. Go into iMovie and try go in to the capture window. If you can see the video and hear the audio, then recue the dvd and begin the capture. Video you capture thru iMove will definitely work in iDVD.