Thursday, October 11, 2007

Video on the Mac

I have had a little time to work on some minor video projects on the Mac and I have been happy with the process so far. Everything has been simple and straight forward and the iVideo/iDVD software has worked as expected. The first thing that I did was create a DVD slideshow out of 100+ pictures for my wife's birthday party. I selected all of the photos that I wanted to use in iPhoto and then sent them to a DVD project in iDVD and was able to create a very professional looking project with only 20 minutes worth of work.

The next thing I did was play around with iMovie a little bit using the integrated camera that has really good quality! Using iMovie I recorded a segment, chopped it up into the little piece that I wanted and was able to quickly share it with my video iPod via iTunes or even send it to YouTube with one click.

The video quality of YouTube videos is not that great but here's an example of a quick movie project I did. The iPod version looks much nicer.



Ok, once you finish laughing you can resume reading this blog! The sharing features built into iMovie really do make it simple to get the movie projects in the format that you want.

DVD Ripping/Burning

Another video project I've had to do was burning a few DVD movies where I only had the the .vob files from a VIDEO_TS folder that were copied off of a DVD recorded by a DVR that can burn TV shows to DVD. This procecss is similiar to if you were going to make a copy of a commercial DVD movie however you would have to use some extra software to bypass the movie encryption.

I found  a freeware software program called DVD Imager (http://lonestar.utsa.edu/llee/applescript/dvdimager.html) that lets you drag the VIDEO_TS folder onto it and then it will burn a finalized DVD playable in a movie DVD player. A friend had burned a few TV shows on the Dallas Cowboys for me and I copied the video files from the DVD onto my hard drive and dragged those onto DVD Imager to have my own copy of the DVDs.

If you are wanting to copy a commercial DVD for backup reasons give this program a try, Mac the Ripper: http://www.mactheripper.org/  I haven't actually tried it yet but I ran across it while researching how to burn my DVD.

3 comments:

MB-switcher said...

your daughter (?) is adorable...cool clip.
I haven't played around that much with imovie but heard wonderful things also.
great to see that the experiment is still going...when can we expect a first summary?
looking forward to that.

have a nice sunday.

Anonymous said...

Mac the ripper is good. But if you want to rip dvd to many other video format files. It can not help you. you need other dvd ripper for mac. You can also use freeware-handbrake(http://handbrake.fr) which can rip dvd to mp4.

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