?s re: Reassembling a ripped DVD

[Denis Danatzko]

Hi all,

my problem: I produced a DVD 2 yrs ago using Adobe PPro and Encore/CS2, and have since gotten rid of almost everything except the raw footage. (By luck, I forgot about Adobe's "autosave" feature, and found the piece I needed in an autosaved backup).
There is no protection on the DVD; I shot and produced it; and there's no copyright on it.
The customer, a consumer, recently called telling me a name is mispelled in the opening credits. It hasn't bothered them til now, but they now want copies of the DVD, and they want the name corrected before I make the copies. (They hinted there may be other changes, but I haven't heard back from them yet).

I kept 2 copies of the original DVD, so I have everything I need, and I think the correction can be a simple cut & insert or overlay of the erroneous title clip. The total run time of the corrected DVD will be the same as the original/wrong one.

My problem: I've never ripped a DVD.
Here's what I've done so far and my thoughts on how to proceed:
-I got mpegStreamclip AND the QT mpeg reader.
-Using Streamclip, I converted the VIDEO_TS.VOB to 'new.avi'
(Did I lose some quality by doing that)?
-Imported 'new.avi' to PPro, edited in the change, and filed it.

When I open VTS_01_0.VOB in Streamclip, I can see the various menu items/panels.
From reading various posts, I'm under the impression I can "glue" the pieces back together without having to re-author the entire DVD, but I'm not sure how.

How to proceed?
I figure my next steps are:
- to convert my corrected .avi to MPEG-2 using Streamclip, and name it VIDEO_TS.mpeg
- convert all other .VOB files on the orig DVD to '.mpeg'. (Does it matter if it's 'mpg' or '.mpeg')?
- import to Encore as "Assets"
- 'Build' the new DVD

Am I correct about that? Is it that "simple"?

Do I need other software or a different approach? (Maybe to preserve quality and/or the menu structure)? Someone suggested Womble would have prevented loss of quality, but I have no idea how much loss of quality I'll suffer.

I have the entire Production Studio Premium/CS2 running on XP Pro, so I have Encore and PPro.

Do I need to do anything with all the other non-VOB files I see? Here are all the files on the DVD:

OpenDVD/Sources/
---> VTS_01_1_VOB (Folder containing a file of the same name:
VTS_01_1_VOB)

and these files in the Sources folder:

Menu_000 thru Menu_008 (these are all bitmap images)
Menu_000_SubPict thru Menu_008_SubPict (also bitmaps)
SPU_Apgc_Asf thru SPU_Ipgc_Qsf (these are Encore DVD Subtitles)
Video_Apgc_Asf thru Video_Ipgc_Qsf (these are all movie clips)

ClickMe (a FireFox document file in the "OpenDVD" folder)
opendvd.pvm (a PVM file in the "OpenDVD" folder; I don't know what a PVM file is/does)
Untitled (a DVD file in the "OpenDVD" folder, also don't know what it is/does)

Video_TS (A folder on same level as OpenDVD; clear to anyone capable of answering my questions).

I'm afraid of ruining the menu structure.

How do I reassemble this DVD to include the correction?

(Apologies for the length; hoping all the details might help).
All help greatly appreciated.
Thanks.

[Ervin Farkas]

I believe it can't be done with our normal video editing tools, the ones you mention. Internally, the different files have references to each other and changing one will result in no longer being recognized, so I don't think you will be able to simply reconstruct the DVD.

I remember seeing some sort of DVD re-authoring software... long time ago, one of those sleepless nights... Looked more like writing software code using WordPad. I don't think you really want to go that far.

But if you have the auto-saved PPRO project and the raw footage, why not re-doing it that way?

[Tripp Woelfel]

Denis... I've never gotten into the guts of a DVD's structure and don't do a lot of ripping but I've found Nero to be a very helpful basket of tools. I know that it will rip a disk out to a single video file that Premier Pro should be able to handle. It will do it without transcoding so no quality will be lost. You should be able to recreate the credit section, cut it into the original footage from DVD without problems and you should be able to match up the look pretty easily.

I don't know if you still have the DVD menu graphics, but if you dig around in the DVD's folders you should be able to find them there. I don't know how editable they will be.

BTW: Nero generally retails for about US$100. They periodically offer discounts and "two for one" deals.

[Vito DeFilippo]

I think you are overcomplicating the idea of trying to alter the DVD itself. That's usually a big pain in the butt, and you lose quality by working from a compressed source, then re-compressing it.

Assuming you have the raw footage and can open your project in Premiere Pro, try this.

Open the project, fix the offending title without changing the length of your timeline. Re-export your timeline into a new mpeg2 of the same length as the original.

Open your DVD project in Encore. In the assets list, right click the mpeg2 that has the error and choose "replace asset". Point it to the new mpeg2.

Burn your new DVD.