Best Way to Grab Movie Clips?

DorkusMasterus asks: "I work for my church in a volunteer sense, and I'm trying to produce a video that will incorporate video clips from films (short, less than 30 seconds per clip, more likely 5-10 seconds), and I am wondering what you fine folks use to grab clips from DVD and TV (in preferably an MPEG or AVI format when completed). Please keep in mind that I am not interested in something that would copy a full-length film, nor am I'm not advocating discussion on how to best pirate films. What utilities would you use to retrieve short clips from DVDs and other digital sources?"

Comments

DVD Shrink & TMPGenc

[dada21]

I run a church media ministry out of my home, and we use DVD Shrink. The software is freeware, and it is excellent. It lets you select what scenes/chapters/frames you want to copy, and creates a new DVD-compatible clip on your hard drive. What is nice about VOB files (the DVD files) is that they are MPEG-compliant, so you can just rename the VOB extension to MPG and off you go.

If you need to shrink the file to lower res than DVD, I recommend TMPGenc, which works very well. You can also import your VOB/MPG into Adobe Premiere Pro and export it to a new format, while editing clips together with fades, titles, etc.

What is your budget? Do you prefer F/OSS? Windows? Mac? Linux?

Re:DVD Shrink & TMPGenc

[Baricom]

I understand, and I'd completely agree that the media industry has definitely been taking things overboard in all sorts of ways, and that church performances help them far more than they lose in revenue. However, I don't know if I'd go as far as not paying attention to all laws - see Romans 13:1-7, for example.

Anyway, for the reference of everybody, I did my own research and CCLI claims you need a separate license for performance of movies. The license costs $50-$600 annually depending on which studios you license and your church's attendance, and it seems to imply that you must play clips off the original media - no dubbing allowed, even for production purposes.

I suppose one should let the Holy Spirit and one's fear of Roman/corporate punishment determine how to proceed. Best of luck regardless of what path you take.

MEncoder

[Dutch_Cap]

MEncoder (the media encoder that comes with mplayer) should be able to do this pretty easily.

mencoder -oac copy -ovc copy -ss <START> -endpos <END> dvd://<CHAPTER> -of mpeg -o <FILENAME>.mpg

..will copy part of the video to an mpeg file, where START and END are formatted as [[HOURS:]MINUTES:]SECONDS. Note that -endpos is relative to the starting position, it's not the position in the file.

Re:MEncoder

[simm1701]

There is a problem in doing this with MPEG4 clibs in that you have to start at a key frame otherwise it gets a little messy

Its a little easier with DVDs since there are usually 2 key frames per second (or more) where as MPEG4 will usually only have a key frame once every 10 seconds (240 frames) or on scene changes.

If you want to take a section of a MPEG4 clip (or even from a DVD if you are getting problems) you can tell mplayer to re-encode a larger section of the file (atleast 30 seconds either side of what you want) using raw audio and a key frame every frame. This will produce a very large file - but its only temporary and will enable you to grab the subsection that you want without the usual video mess the above command will give you.

Mplayer also has a method of printing out exactly where the key frames are, I can't remember it exactly off hand but its in the man page so shouldn't be hard to find. One problem I have found with mplayer is its granularity is seconds - atleast on the version I last used. I don't know of a way to specify timings by frame number (I would love to hear of a way if there is one!)