Ripping Sections of DVDs with Free Stuff

I've been working on a monster of a documentary and some of the footage is showing up on DVDs despite what I've been telling sources and clients. I am typing this in english right?

So here's my (free) workflow for ripping portions of source DVDs to extract the bits of footage that's needed for this project.

You'll need:

MPEG Streamclip
Perian

Optional:
Fairmount

I'm avoiding using Cinematize Pro because, frankly, it's old. I think the last update was something like two years ago. Ok, here we go...

0) Optionally, use Fairmount to copy the DVD's VIDEO_TS to your hard drive. (I'll let you figure this one out on your own but it's of Very Low Complexity)
1) Open up the VIDEO_TS folder and start looking at the .VOB files until you find the one with the clip you need. With Perian, you can open them up in Quicktime Player 7 (which I like to call Quicktime That Doesn't Suck).
2. Make notes of which .VOB files you need and then open them up with MPEG Streamclip. Why not open then with MPEG Streamclip right away? It's your choice but I feel that Quicktime is faster for previewing.

Oh, Quicktime will likely be unable to play the audio since they're MUXed files so if audio is important head straight to MPEG Streamclip here. I should have told you that earlier.

Now, when you open a .VOB file with MPEG Streamclip you may (probably will) see this:

Since the purpose of this post is to just get sections of .VOB files and not the entire file hit "Open 1 file".

3) Now, set In and Out points in MPEG Streamclip using the I and O keys. How about that?
4) Under File in MPEG Streamclip select "Export to Quicktime..." and choose your poison. I like ProRes but select whatever you want. Hit "Make Movie" and grab a sip of coffee.
5) There is no step 5. Hah!

How to Copy your own discs made in a Sony DVD recorder

I'm not sure what Sony is thinking here but if you burn a DVD using one of their DVD Recorders and then pop it into your Mac you'll see the contents are shown as empty despite it playing in DVD Player.app.

It's not empty. There really is a VIDEO_TS folder in there, only Sony doesn't want you to see it. I'm not sure what they've done to make it invisible since it'll still be invisible even if you show hidden files in the Finder (still gotta figure that one out, see below). Sure it'll show up on some Windows and Ubuntu boxes but not on Snow Leopard. Lets see if we can just change the permissions to access the VIDEO_TS folder...

Nope.

So how can you copy it?

Well, the usual methods work like Toast & Disk Utility although I had an issue with Disk Utility not ever "finishing" the disc. It just unmounted, never said it was done and the disc kept spinning in the drive forcing me to restart the Mac to get it to eject (Hey, holding the mouse button while the Mac boots still ejects stuff after all these years...go figure).

So, angry at Sony for hiding the VIDEO_TS folder from me even though the client who handed it to me OWNS the content on the disc (and couldn't have known about Sony's degage draconian attitude) I decided to find a way to get to the VIDEO_TS folder just to spite them in Snow Leopard. Here's what I did:

1. Pop the disc in. Open it in a Finder window.

2. Launch the Terminal.

3. Type cd (spacebar) and then click and hold on the icon at the top of the Finder window for the disc and after a beat drag it into the Terminal to set the path.

4. Hit Return while in the Terminal.

5. For fun type ls (for list) and see "ls: .: Permission denied" so force it to list the contents by typing "sudo ls" without the quotes and then enter your password and hit return.

6. Bang. VIDEO_TS is listed. Screw Sony.

7. Copy this to your Desktop with "sudo cp -R VIDEO_TS ~/Desktop" sans quotes and enter your password. If you want to copy to a place other than the desktop just put a space after VIDEO_TS and drag the window icon of the volume or folder you want to copy it to to the Terminal window. An example would be "sudo cp -R VIDEO_TS Volumes/volumename/foldername"

8. Toss the VIDEO_TS folder into Disk Utility or Toast and burn it as the client requested and screw Sony.

9. Feel free to change the permissions for the VIDEO_TS folder as you need from the Finder now.

About why the VIDEO_TS folder is invisible I suspect it has something to do with this:

Macintosh:SONY_DVD_RECORDER_VOLUME user$ sudo ls -al

total 8

d--x--x---   3 4294967295  nogroup   88 Jan  2  2004 .

drwxrwxrwt@ 12 root        admin    408 Sep  8 23:03 ..

dr-xr-xr-x   2 4294967295  nogroup  768 Jan  2  2004 VIDEO_TS

Macintosh:SONY_DVD_RECORDER_VOLUME user$ 

"sudo ls -al" forces the Terminal to show the permissions of the files in the directory and as you can see two files are assigned to "nogroup". I suspect this is what's helping to hide the folder although I'm not done investigating just yet.

UPDATE:

Another option is to just pop the disc into a box running Ubuntu and simply drag it to some volume to copy it. How can you not love that?

Super-Quick Way to Import CD (RedBook) Audio

Here's a quick one:

If you need to "rip" some music from a CD a client has burned off as a regular (RedBook) audio CD, don't bother going into iTunes or QuickTime or anything like that. Just pop the CD into the Mac, open it up in the Finder and Drag the audio files to your project's media folder, then load them into FCP.

The process of dragging them from the CD's window in the Finder to your Media folder (or anywhere else) rips them as .AIF files automatically.

Hushing Loud CD/DVD Drives

Here's a neat little utility someone just emailed me about. DiscRotate 0.2 is a little freeware app that lets you control the spin speed of your CD/DVD drive to try and make it a bit more quiet.