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Best Way to Grab Movie Clips?

Posted by Cliff on from the no-we're-not-talking-full-rips-here dept.

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?"

2 of 58 comments (clear)

  1. DVD Shrink & TMPGenc by dada21 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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?

  2. MEncoder by Dutch_Cap · · Score: 4, Informative
    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.