DVD --> Edit in Premiere --> DVD?

[j_olson]

I had a photographer video film my daughter's wedding and he delivered the result as two DVD movies. They are watchable in a DVD Player, but need to be edited, and I have Adobe Premiere for that (not the very latest version). A friend has Video Vegas BTW, and I could edit the movie on his machine if it would be better.

I know I can use DVD Decrypter to demux the video and audio and get an .m2v + .ac3 files. Premiere (at least my version) can't handle .ac3 files, so I would need to convert that (to .mpg I guess, using what program?). I have only used Premier for .avi files, captured using the capture card I have, so I don't need which way to go to get the least number of conversions done in this situation.

Is there a simple, and free, program that can make a simple surround - DD5.1 - stream? I just thought to mix the stereo sound from the video camera with some background ("elevator") music for the back speakers. When there's no more than wind noise from the camera I would turn that sound down to almost nothing and up the volume of the music, when something important is said or there's music in the church I would turn the background music volume down. It's nice with some background music to "hold together" short scene cuts.

For authoring I have a simple but adequate program that came with my DVD burner.

Any suggestions for how to get what I want from the DVD to something editable in Premiere? Anything for the surround sound mix?

[j_olson]

Seems like I should convert the .ac3 file to .mpg using besweet, and then edit in Premiere. Then convert back to .ac3 after editing/before authoring?

[Nick]

I am unsure of the merits of doing this. Especially since you wish to have a 5.1 soundtrack.

mpeg 5.1 audio is pretty dismal and does not really compare to AC3.
Also re-encoding the audio twice to different compressed formats is going to severely affect quality.

Can you not decompress the audio to a LPCM wav file then recompress this after editing? I don't use Premier but surely it could handle this?

[j_olson]

I'm not sure what Premiere can handle, but I will try that since it sounds like a much better solution... :) Though I have no real clue about the 5.1 soundtrack - but I will first try with just uncompressed stereo and see how that comes out.

Thanks for your answer!

[ammck55]

j_olsen:

Nick has you going in the right direction, convert the AC3 to a .wav file and import this into Premiere. I'm currently using PPro 1.0 and also have Premiere 6.5 on hand, but you didn't mention which version you have....please do so, or, dig around in the help files, that's where I find most of my info.

PPro supports output channel mappings to 5.1, but I don't have Premiere 6.5 loaded to check it for same, again, go to your help files. Help > Index > S, then scroll down to "surround audio", if your version of Premiere supports 5.1, there'll be a listing there.

The knowledge base at adobe.com is the most comprehensive collection of Premiere info I know of, get into the user-to-user forum and hit the search button in the Premiere sub-forum. Select the radio button for "Premiere forum only", or however it's worded, otherwise you'll get returns on your keys from every forum that they host. Stick with it, if you can't find it anywhere else, it's in that forum, and you might get lucky enough to locate a step-by-step tutorial on the topic.

If your videographer kept a project file for you daughter's wedding, you might luck out and get a copy of this from him and save yourself a small headache. If he farmed the project out to a commercial shop, the chances are even better of locating a project file (in an unrendered, uncompressed format, hopefully, built with Premiere!), but you may need to do a little finessing to find this information, then, actually get your hands on the file.

Your idea of starting with stereo sound is a good one, I'd start there and then work up to 5.1. I hope you're a quicker study than I, I'd realistically expect to devote a full day to getting on top of this one....and maybe much longer! :)

ammck55

[j_olson]

Thanks for your info, I got some other "must-do" things so I haven't had time to start even with how to convert the AC3 to a WAV file... ;)
I will install Premiere tonight - have built a new computer so it's not installed anywhere - but it's the last version before Premiere Pro came. I remember, because I thought the upgrade price was to high since I hardly use it anymore. Until now.

[j_olson]

Found an old version of BeSweetGUI and got it to work :)