I’ve been asked by a friend to edit his wedding DVD. Specifically, he wants to trim out a few minutes here and there that they consider bland, pointless, etc. No, I don’t know why he doesn’t take it back to the videographer…it’s certainly not because I’ll do it for free, because he’s offered to buy software as needed.
Anyway, the technical obstacle is this: How can I edit a DVD? Is it possible to edit the VOBs in-place, or do I need to convert them to MPEG? I obviously want to do this in an uncompressed format so I don’t lose any quality. If I rip it to MPEG and then convert it back to VOB, is it possible to keep the original menus? Can I just drop the new VOBs in place of the old ones?
Also: What software would work for this? VirtualDub doesn’t seem to like MPEGs. Should I go with something like Pinnacle or is there a cheaper solution for the quick chop edit?
WMM doesn’t directly support DVDs, which means falling back to Sonic’s MyDVD (their recommended product). That might work for the editing/burning, but I still need to figure out how to rip/recreate menus and VOBs.
A VOB file is essentially just an MPEG2 file and can be imported as such into any video editor that imports MPEG2. This is a simplification of the real situation as the VOB format supports a few things like encryption and multi-angles, but I’m pretty sure none of those features will have been used on your friend’s wedding DVD and so you can treat the VOBs just like MPEG2 files.
After editing and saving (making sure you use exactly the same resolution/framerate/etc settings) you should be able to just drop the new VOB over the old one and burn the same disc structure as you started with, just with new vob(s) (assuming you don’t want to change any of the menus or add/remove new selections).
