converting Vob question

[Aramil]

I have a DV camera and i film movies.I dont have firewire or USB2 so I use the miniDVD to tranfer the video to my computer.I use the Adobe Premiere Pro which does not support VOB files.Could u plz tell me how can i convert my vob files to mpeg2 and how I wont be losing any quality?Thx a lot

[E-Male]

please read the forum rules, especially rule 9 and edit your post accordingly

[ammck55]

Welcome to the Forum, Aramil:

I think your life would be much easier if you'd acquire a Firewire card and cable (most likely supplied in your cam's purchase kit) and capture the .AVI files straight from your DV cam to your PC. This method has several advantages, mainly, the captured AVI file/files are highly editable in PrePro, and that you can export to a variety of destination formats.

Connect the Firewire cable to both your PC and your cam, then power up using the "VCR" option on your cam's controls. After identifying your camera, your OS should give you a dialogue box offering options as to what piece of software to capture the files with. PrePro should be in this selection, choose it, and you're on your way. If this doesn't happen, manually pull up PrePro and proceed to the next step.

After Premiere opens, choose File > Capture, this will open the Capture interface, complete with controls for manipulating your footage. Capturing through the "Capture" interface has the added benefit of accomplishing tons of editing without moving the entire tape's footage onto your hdrive and sucking up several extra GB's of storage space; you can just move the clips you desire onto your hdrive for final cleanup.

After you get familiar with the controls, you can even do a "batch" capture; using the reverse and forward buttons, you can figure out the exact "in-points" and "out-points" of an individual clip, leaving out all of the bogus footage that you'll not want to use. Manually make a list of all of your in-points and out-points, enter them into the batch capture interface, and Premiere will capture them in succession. Amazing! You can even have a default transition set so that as the clips are captured, a transition is automatically set between the clips. At this point, you're not far away from adding a soundtrack and a menu (an authoring app will be needed for this last step).

There are other ways to skin this cat, but like I said, if you've got PrePro and a DV cam, Firewire is the way to go for capture.

Wait a minute, I may have a wire crossed. When you said you have a "DV" camera, I assumed that you're using a Mini DV. Are you actually using a digital camcorder that writes a file to disc in MPEG format as you're shooting? Maybe that would explain the comment, "... so I use the miniDVD to tranfer the video to my computer." I may have wasted a bunch of your time, and mine, but I'll post this, anyway. Please submit more detail and we'll try to get this straightened out.

ammck55

[Aramil]

I am using a miniDV camera yes,which writes a file to disc in .Vob format.Thx a lot for this but I konw the PrePro very well. know firewire is the best way but how can i transfer via the CD and convert it?I want to edit the video and then burn it to a DVD if that helps....

[jggimi]

If its in VOB format, and you want to go to MPEG-2? Easy. Use DVD Decrypter in IFO mode, and select your video and audio stream on the Streams Processing tab. You'll have a separate video and audio file that you can then load into your editor.

See the IFO Mode section of Doom9's DVD Decrypter Guide (http://www.doom9.org/dvddec.htm).