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Old 29th December 2011, 10:34   #1  |  Link
JoeH
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Join Date: Jan 2009
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GUIDE: How to prepare a DVD for NLE editing

Guide to prepare a DVD for editing in a NLE

In this guide I will explain how to prepare a DVD for editing. Our goal is to extract the video and audio from the DVD into a format which we can use to edit. We want to do so as quickly and simply as possible, and in a lossless fashion both for video and audio, and regardless of whether the audio is MPEG, AC3 or DTS. We will extract the video and audio tracks from the DVD, converting the audio at the same time as we extract it to mono WAV files corresponding to each channel of audio. This will work with MPEG, AC3 and even DTS audio! If you have the right codecs installed this process will be lossless. We will edit the video without reencoding to an intermediate format, and we will do so in a frame accurate way.

This whole process takes about 10 minutes on a normal hard drive, and probably around 5 minutes on an SSD.

Programs which need to be installed
Download and install the following programs (all free), if you haven’t done so already.
The following programs will be used “in the background” and need to be installed first:
AviSynth (latest stable build) – The following programs require this to be installed.
AviSynth Virtual File System – This and the next program will allow us to directly edit the DVD video file without re-encoding it.
Pismo File Mount Audit Package

Also install MeGUI, which is the only program we will need to open during the entire process of preparing our DVD for editing:
MeGUI – The will be the program we use to extract the streams from the DVD and convert the audio losslessly to mono WAV files. We will also index the video with MeGUI.

Copy DVD to hard drive
Using AnyDVD, DVDFab Decrypter, or some similar program, copy the DVD to your hard drive.

Export video and audio streams from the DVD
Open MeGUI. Open the “HD Streams Extractor” in the “Tools” menu. This tool is normally used to extract streams from Blu-ray folders or files, but it can do the same with DVD folder structures!


Select the option “Select File as Input” and then hit the button on the upper right to select the files.


Navigate to the folder where you copied your movie, and then into the VIDEO_TS folder. If the “Size” and “Length” columns are not visible, right click on one of the column headers and make them visible. Order the files in alphabetical order.

You need to look for the VOB files that correspond to the main movie and select them. This is usually easy, but some videos have lots of VOB files. Look for a bunch of VOBS in a row which are 1GB big each. These will usually be the movie. Select the VOB files beginning with the VOB file which ends in “_1” (important – don’t select the “_0” file) and select all the VOB files with the same prefix. For example, here I selected from “VTS_01_1.VOB” until “VTS_01_5.VOB”, but not the file after it because the prefix changed, and not the file before it because it ended in 0.

Once you have your VOB files selected, click on the button “Open”.


MeGUI will analyze the VOB Structure and present a list of video, audio and subtitle tracks available in the movie. You can now choose to export the video, audio, and subtitle tracks you are interested in.

Select the check box of the video track and then change the “Extract As” option to the format “M2V”. Do not use the “MKV” option for DVD videos (MeGUI will warn you that it could give problems for DVD videos). For HD or Blu-ray streams MKV works well.


Select the audio tracks you want and change the output format to “WAVS”. This will output a single mono WAV file for every channel in the audio file (v.gr. it will output 6 files for 5.1 audio, 2 files for stereo audio, etc.). If there are any other tracks you want select them and the output format as well. Deselect any tracks you aren't interested in.


Select the Output directory and hit “Queue”.


Go to the “Queue” tab and hit the button “Start”.


MeGUI will export a log file, the video file, and the audio tracks. Notice that the audio tracks are named according to their channel names – “L” is for the “Front Left” channel, “R” for the “Front Right”, etc.


Notice that the video seems to be shorter than the audio! This error happens sometimes. This is only appearance, however. All the information is there. Our next steps will unlock it.

Index the video file
We must now index the video file. This will allow us to edit it in any video editor, and will make sure that any edits we make are frame accurate. Even if you video editor directly supports editing M2V files you will probably find that it will run faster if you index the file.

In MeGUI open the “File Indexer” from the “Tools” menu.


In the File Indexer, select the video file you just exported as your “Input File”. The file extension should be M2V. Then select “DGIndex” or “DGIndexNV” as the “File Indexer”, and hit “Queue”. Make sure the options “On completion load files” and “and close” are selected. Do not select the option to “Demux Video Stream”.


Go to the Queue tab and hit the “Start” button.


When it finishes indexing the file, a window like this will appear, as well as a window with an image from the video. Hit the button “Save” on the bottom right. This will save an AVS file (i.e. an Avisynth script) in the folder where you exported the video and audio tracks. Don’t worry if you don’t understand what’s going on, just keep following the instructions!


After hitting the save button another window may appear. You can now close that window and MeGUI as well. Your folder will now look something like this:


The files “T2_Video - .d2v.bad” and “T2_Video - .fix.txt” are the files with the information about how to access the hidden part of our video. If your video length was already correct you will not see those two files. The important thing is that you now have an AviSynth file with the extension AVS. This small AVS text file plus our index (the D2V file) will allow us to edit the original DVD video in a frame accurate manner without an intermediate codec!

Mount the AVS file
Right click on the file with the extension “AVS” and select “Quick Mount”. If the option to “Quick Mount” does not appear, install these two programs, both free:
AviSynth Virtual File System – This and the next program will allow us to directly edit the DVD video file without re-encoding it.
Pismo File Mount Audit Package
After selecting “Quick Mount” the AVS file will disappear, and a folder will appear. It should look like this:


If you go into that folder you will see three files, one of which is a video file with the extension AVI which you can then use in your video editing program. Don’t worry if the video file appears to be huge. It is a “virtual” file, and takes up only a few KB. This virtual file is what you want to edit with, not the M2V file directly.


Edit your DVD
At this point you are ready to begin editing your DVD. Simply import the AVI video file and the audio streams into your video editing program (v.gr. Sony Vegas Movie Studio or Magix Movie Edit Pro). Here is how it looks in Sony Vegas. The video and audio are in perfect sync and are complete. In this case there is a little extra video at the end from one of the “extras”, but you can just cut that off. You are now ready to edit the DVD!


NOTE: If your video editing program does not recognize the video stream, add the command "ConvertToYUY2()" to your AviSynth script. If that doesn't work, try "ConvertToRGB24()".

Last edited by JoeH; 11th January 2012 at 18:06. Reason: Added note at the end about what to do if video editing program doesn't recognize video
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