Turning DVD into a self contained viewable movie on a hard drive

Forgive me if this sounds stupid, but we need to put a bunch of dvd's of trial footage onto a hard drive for the loggers and director to be able to view. A QT file or such would be best. Is there a quick and simple way of doing this?

This is for a documentary project that has literally hundreds of hours of courtroom footage that needs to be put onto a hard drive so the quicker and easier the better.

-paul-

[www.lafcpug.org]


www.derekmok.com

And once you have captured that into FCP, export each movie from the timeline as a Self contained Quicktime movie by going to File > Export > Quicktime Movie.

If you wanted, you could put lots of them together, with title cards between and export those as single units, or keep them all separated.

One caveat. If you are sending these files out to an external drive that is formatted for Macs and PCs, make sure the files are under 4GB, or the drive won't accept them.

Come to think of it, have you considered getting those guys to just get MPEG Streamclip so that they can watch the .VOB files without converting them? It'll save you lots of conversion time, and MPEG Streamclip is free. Or, to split the difference, copy them those files to them, and while they watch them, you can convert the files for posterity.

Make sure when you're making the movie files that you have a way of tracking which file came from which DVD, at what format. When you have that much footage, a logical organizational system is essential.


www.derekmok.com

And there isn't already in the DVD recording, there should be some sort of visible reference, like Time of Day or SMPTE, which prosecution or defense can quote to cue up... but of course you'd add the Timecode Reader filter in FCP for that... give each seq a prefix DVD number, etc. Play the QT's right from the drive.

- Loren

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