thoughton:digitallife DVD clips onto VHS

DVD clips onto VHS

Emma recently asked me if I could compile a selection of clips from amongst our DVDs that would illustrate various aspects of life in the future for her Religious Studies students. After thinking about it for a while and viewing a few scenes we decided to rent a few more select titles. We find the DVD-by-post service of LoveFilm very useful as the local Blockbuster is quite small and only has a limited selection of non-chart titles.

The final caveat was that Emma had to have three identical copies of these clips which ruled out me just sitting there pressing the record button on the VCR at the correct times!

Getting hold of all the clips

I started by figuring out which DVD chapters contained the scenes we wanted and then using Cinematize to export those chapters. The process is very quick (a couple of minutes each) and you end up with mpeg2 QuickTime files. The extracted clips are interesting - there is a faint dithered effect you don't get when watching the DVD itself, but the quality is otherwise excellent. It's as if it is a perfect copy but with a smaller colour palette.

I could have used a plain vanilla DVD ripper such as 0sex instead, but I would ended up with vob files or elementary mpeg streams which I would have had to do more work on to get them into an editable format. The quality may have been slightly better without the dithered effect, but Cinematize was the quick and dirty option. Additionally Cinematize lets you preview which chapter it is that you're extracting (although the preview is limited to fifteen or thirty seconds which isn't always enough). With 0sex you'd have to skip through the film beforehand and write down the chapter numbers.

Editing out unwanted material

The one other odd thing about the mpeg2 clips that Cinematize outputs is that many mpeg editing programs will not accept them as 'true' mpeg2 files (for instance the mpeg splitters mpgtx and Gumby). I eventually solved that by using Goldberg to cut out the unwanted parts of each chapter. Goldberg doesn't seem to be a 'true' mpeg splitter, but it does the job if you aren't worried about file sizes (using Goldberg to cut an mpeg in half will only reduce its size by ten or twenty percent). Note that you need Apple's mpeg2 decoder for Goldberg to play mpeg2 files.

One clip that we really wanted to use had one instance of foul language which we had to cut out. This is harder than it sounds. Since I had iMovie experience from doing the wedding video I at first tried to use that before discovering that iMovie isn't designed to handle widescreen formats. After much trial and error I ended up imported the clip into Final Cut Pro (which I've never used before) where I was able to reduce the volume to zero to blot out the offending word. After this single edit I re-saved the clip as a QuickTime file. Importing an mpeg into FCP and re-saving loses some quality, but the final result is still pretty good.

Creating titles

Finally I used iMovie to create some titles on black backgrounds to place in between each clip. These just contained the name of the movie to inform the audience what clip was coming next and also to serve as spacers in between clips so searching via fast-forward would be easier. Unfortunately as iMovie only operates in 4:3 format, there is a bit of a flicker when Cellulo changes resolution as it moves from a widescreen clip to a 4:3 title. In hindsight instead of using iMovie I should probably have tried to figure out how to do the titles in widescreen format in FCP.

Getting it all onto VHS tapes

Emma's school doesn't have any DVD players, so I had to get it all onto three VHS tapes. The simplest solution I could think of was to simply put all the clips and titles into a playlist in Cellulo and then connect my laptop to the VHS recorder via the S-Video output for a straight analog recording. On the playback settings for the FCP-edited clip I had to set the playback size to 110% of screen size since the FCP output had a thick black border around it and enlarging it made it fill the screen.

I could have obtained a prettier final result (with cross fades between scenes, fade-outs at the end, etc.) if I had imported the whole thing into FCP to edit and author as a DVD, but that would have probably take ten times as long for a minor benefit. After recording the DVD onto VHS tape the quality of each clip would have been the same as my current method but it would have pretty transitions between scenes. Oh well, it would have been nice but not worth all the extra work.

Posted on 21 February 2004, to How To... | Mac OS X | Mac Video