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.

Re:"But I only stole the hubcaps!"

[earnest murderer]

Fair use covers the use of short clips in specific circumstances.

Also, copyright infringement is not theft.

Re:"But I only stole the hubcaps!"

[EzInKy]

I don't know if you're the religious type (I assume so if you're volunteering for your church) but stealing short clips is still stealing. "Thou shall not steal" doesn't come with size qualifiers.


Funny thing is that no matter how large a portion he uses nothing is missing from the original work. Nothing missing, nothing stolen.


Producing a video for an audience to watch is even worse, you're basically using someone else's effort to create a product.


Nobody creates anything in a vacuum so every new work is based on someone else's effort.


And soliciting advice on how to hack into DVDs is a violation of the DMCA, agree with it or not.


Most religions require their followers to violate immoral laws.

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.

Illumination

[HTH NE1]

You could go the traditional church route and get a bunch of monks to "illuminate" the excerpts you want by having them painstakingly reproduce each frame by hand and scan each frame back into a computer and sequence it for full motion playback. Get a few more trained in the foley arts and some excellent impressionists to get the soundtrack.

With the man hours involved, no one would dare accuse you of exploiting the works for profit.