[PixelPete17]

I'm trying to help a friend edit some video for a presentation he has to give.

Here's what he wants to do:

take about a minute to three minutes of video w/sound from a few different DVD's and put them together into about a seven minute presentation.

then he wants to burn that seven minute presentation to a DVD so it can play back automatically on a PC laptop which will be connected to a projector at church.

The DVD's are not commercially made, so I don't think they have copy protection, but I don't understand how to IMPORT the DVD content and then EXPORT it back to DVD again...

Between the two of us, we have:

an Apple powerbook with 768MB RAM, a G4 400 with 1 GB RAM, an external firewire Pioneer DVD burner, and an Athlon XP2700+ PC with 512MB RAM. Software wise I have Final Cut Studio (FCP 5, Motion 2, etc) for the Macs, but nothing owned for video for the PC.

Can someone guide me on this, or link me to a better site to post this question please?

Thanks for the help,

Pete

[Spoffo]

Do it all on the Mac (of course)

First you need to get the MPEG component for Quicktime (it's a $20 or $25 download from Apple)

This will allow you to open up the .VOB files from the three DVDs with Quicktime and then export them in a form that can be used in Final Cut. The best is probably DV Stream, which is what FInal Cut most often imports.

Then in Final cut, you can edit the three together so you have a nice smooth presentation, with appropriate transitions between the three clips, sound levels equalized, maybe even some titles or effects.

When this is finished, export it from Final Cut as a single file, probably in DV Stream format again. Then use Toast 6 to burn it into a DVD using the Pioneer burner. Toast will let you set it up with or without an opening menu. If you don't have Toast, you can do this with iDVD, but it's slower and a little more complicated.

[Uncle Skeleton]

QTPro won't play or export the sound for you, but MPEG StreamClip will (Apple MPEG-2 decoder still required). MPEG StreamClip is a godsend for dealing with any MPEG content. Highly recommended (and free)

[grovberg]

You could also use Handbrake to rip the DVDs to MPEG-4. Then you don't have to buy Apple's MPEG-2 component. You can edit the MP4 directly in FC.

While this does theoretically cause some quality loss, it's pretty negligable in most cases (especially for what it sounds like you're doing).

[OogaBooga]

Depending on the speed of the powerbook, all of this is gonna take a considerable amount of time. I wouldn't recommend doing it on the G4 desktop you have.

And leave the PC out of this project - this is Apple's specialty.

[PixelPete17]

Thanks so much you guys.

I'm not yet at the point that I want to buy a new desktop, so I know my powerbook isn't the ideal choice for this. Hopefully by the end of the year I'll own a Dual 2.7 with 2 or 3 GB RAM.

By the way...what's about the baseline Powermac that one would recommend for working on DV and HD content? I DO want to learn FCP for my own projects, so I'll be doing more of this kinda work myself later, but for now I just need to help with this presentation project. There's a chance though that this project may not even come to be now.

Would a Dual 1.8 with 2GB RAM be super smooth for this kind of work...they are a whole lot cheaper than the Dual 2.7's.

Pete

[PixelPete17]

Oh yeah...just what part of this would take so much time on the powerbook? The rendering? The converting in Handbrake? What is the bottleneck and how much of that bottleneck is improved by a speedier desktop Mac?

Pete

[grovberg]

Your powerbook will be just fine for working with standard definition files in FCP. As to HD, well I know that I've tried to work with it on a Dual 2 and let's just say that it's a lesson in patience. That being said, as much as Apple wants this to be the year of HD, it really just isn't. Unless you plan on spending 5k on a HD camera, and even then you'll still be outputting to standard def DVDs, so HD really isn't something any small shop/one man shop should be too concerned with right now.

Again, I completely disagree with the assertion that you can't do FCP with DV footage on that PB. Motion will be a problem, and any machine you want to use motion with should have at least 1gb of RAM and a pretty decent graphics card.

[OogaBooga]

First of all, what model PowerBook do you have?


For all we know, it could be a Pismo.

[grovberg]

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