A buddy of mine has lots of acting material on DVDs, but needs them to turn into Quicktime movies for editing into his reel. Any tips on good (preferably easy to use and cheap) programs?
Handbrake?
Handbrake isn’t actually optimal for this task, because he wants to edit them. h.264 is a presentation format, not an editing format – while it’s technically possible to edit h.264, you pretty much never want to. That being said, you surely can use Handbrake for this, and then do the edits in iMovie.
I would probably use VisualHub for this task, and convert into something like the Apple Intermediate Codec, or DV.
All of that being said, MPEG2 (which is what you have on DVD) is a lossy format, so if your friend has the original DV tapes for his project, he’d preserve the quality better if he re-captured the DV output in Final Cut Pro, if possible.
Ah, I missed the editing part.
While we’re on the subject. Anyway to convert a legitimately purchased Apple movie (.m4v) to stream on a TV without iTunes?
doubletwist?