[ghporter]

First, I'm not interested in editing commercial DVDs. But the really nice (and inexpensive) DVD recorder I just bought turns out DVDs in the same format as commercial discs, so iMovie won't work on them. Neither will MovieMaker on my PC.

I misposted an earlier question on this subject in the Lounge, so think of this as my question "reimagined." One response asked why I didn't get a DVD recorder with a hard drive. Because there weren't any around for less than $90 is a very good answer to that one.

Anyway, I'd still like to do basic editing on the discs I've converted from my old VHS home movies. Does anyone have a suggestion for a usable, inexpensive (free is better!) app that works on either OS X or Windows XP?

[- - e r i k - -]

As I said, use Handbrake to get the video off the DVDs into a usable format (use a high bitrate) and then edit with iMovie (free with your mac!)

Or better yet capture the video from the VHSes themselves through a capture card or through a MiniDV-cam directly into iMovie (or FCE).

[mduell]

There are plenty of free ripping programs for both platforms (see videohelp.com's tools section). That will leave you with MPEG2 files that you can edit in Windows Movie Maker, iMovie, etc.

[Spoffo]

There are a bunch of mostly shareware tools that allow you to do a certain amount of basic trimming and joining within the MPEG format, though you'll have to get familar with the joys of demuxing and remuxing sound tracks. However, because MPEG is a highly compressed format, you have to convert it to a frame-by-frame digital format before you can do anything you'd really call "Editing."

Again, there are all sorts of tools to do this, most of them free or inexpensive shareware, but be prepared for a significant learning curve. The videoForum here can get you started, but the best source of education and problem solving for this stuff is probably Videohelp.com.

[ghporter]

So the drill is to convert the .vob files into straight MPEG2 files, edit using available free tools like iMovie, save, and then...

Do the DVD-MPEG converters do a good job in the MPEG-DVD direction?

mduell, thanks for the pointer to videohelp. It looks like they have much more than I'd need to do what I want to do.

Spoffo, do you have any suggestions for good "pure digital" converters/editors?

[Uncle Skeleton]

MPEG StreamClip is pretty much the only option for Macs that allows native MPEG editing (editing without re-encoding or re-rendering). This is important because it doesn't involve re-encoding the video. This is important because re-encoding degrades video quality and takes a lot of time. The drawback is that it doesn't allow you to add effects (like titles or transitions), or even frame-accurate editing. But if you just want to trim it, this is the tool to use.

If you want to do fancier editing (like iMovie), there's DVDxDV which was made specifically to convert DVD back to DV for editing. But you should note that in NTSC-land (America), doing this instantly discards half the color information in the video. So you want to avoid it. Going to MPEG-4 instead of DV would avoid this problem if done correctly, but MPEG-4 is still not an editing format, so apps like iMovie will just convert that right to DV on importing it (still bad). I believe Final Cut can edit other formats natively besides DV, and thus get around the color loss problem, but it would then have to render everything all the time in real time, and thus be slow. But I've never actually used Final Cut for that so I'm not sure about that.

[kapsula]

PV is not bad editing software but not 4 professional installation (but, as i understand u don't need this ) *omg, I forgot, 4 pc* =\