Clips project: Best way forward

I have a project that just came in the door & I need advice, please.

Golden Globes are this Sunday. It's Wednesday now (more or less). The marketing department of a major studio has asked me to put together an approx. 7 minute movie clips montage built on scenes from their own films. The montage will be looped on large flat panel monitors at the Golden Globes party they're hosting before, during & after the awards ceremony. This was obviously a last minute decision.

The issue is this: if they go through the normal channels - identifying films they want to pull from (already done), then requisitioning tapes of those films - it might be weeks before we get anything. And then digitizing will take days, etc etc. Project needs to be completed for Late Sunday afternoon, so the normal channels/methodologies are not an option.

Instead, they've decide to go around all that and give me DVDs of the films in question. They want ME to pull the scenes in question off the DVDs, edit them together and burn DVDs for them to play at their party.

It's been years since I ripped from DVD. The last time I did it (for a similar project), it was problematic. The ripping software reported errors (bad disc sectors etc), then there was the hunting through the various files to get the scenes I needed... don't have time for that for this project. What's the current state of the art in ripping software? What are my alternatives for ingest? In other words:

What's the fastest, lowest image-quality-penalty way of getting these scenes into FCP? What codec should I use? ProRes 422? I have an MXO2 I can ingest through, but what's that quality going to be like, bearing in mind that it needs to be re-compressed for DVD at the end?

Thanks so much in advance for your help!

Reid C

as far as i know, the ripping software hasnt advanced much,
(but i haven't really been paying attention)

Mac the Ripper to pull segs off the DVD and make them, er.. easier to convert to QuickTime.
then Mpeg Streamclip to do the converting.

there is a new, universal version of MTR that may be more up to date in making it easier to convert.

capturing via an MXO should be about the same image quality, given the source,
but you would most likely run into issues with protected disks.
at the film school i used to work at they simply went though a Time Base Corrector and that seemed to get around the issues.


nick

If you're not fighting copyright protection, then MPEG streamclip is pretty awesome for this. Free download, simple interface, export as whatever codecs you have access to - only pull the scenes you need to, to reduce capture/conversion time. Quality will be reduced in the first place by the DVD compression, but you can get almost the same quality as this out through mpeg streamclip.

The DVD's I'm given will be standard, off-the-shelf DVDs, i.e. most likely some form of copy protection (CSS?) employed. So technically, there is copy protection to deal with. Is that what you mean Jude, or when you say "If you're not fighting copyright protection"are you meaning legally? Legally we have no issues. Does MPEG Streamclip make copy protection a non-issue?

no. that's why you need something else that might make the VOB files easier to convert to QuickTime, and even that night not work.
that's if you're taking a software approach. a hardware approach like MXO or other capture card needs a hardware solution.
i guess if some DVDs are too well protected, and you really need them represented, you could use some sort of screen capture software.

nick

Mac The Ripper & MPEG Streamclip it is. I'll test tomorrow. Thanks so much!

MPEG Streamclip doesn't do anything to get around copy protection. And Mac the Ripper is quite old (the workflow is something like six, seven years old), and there have been reports of it failing on newer DVDs.

But your options aren't too numerous, so I'd start with those. And as Nick suggested, have a screen-capture software in your back pocket. Those things can get around all the copyright issues (if it plays on your computer, it will capture), but quality will take a huge hit, and in my experience, motion looks especially iffy if you screen-capture it. But your deadline is so insane that you'll need to have it as a backup plan.


www.derekmok.com

there is another option --it's worked when we needed (and got permission to use) movie clips at a network news operation

Play the clips real time through a frame sync/frame store -- somehow - and I don't know how - it bypasses the copy protection and we were able to dub to Beta SP (remember the good old days) If Mac the Ripper doesn't work - that may be your best option