Capturing Clips from DVD's to the Computer
 

Hey guys, I was recently asked how to capture clips from a DVD movie onto your computer. This person has an HP DVD burner. Is there a way he can capture a scene from a movie with this and Premiere? He wants to capture a series of clips from a film and practice editing with them. How would you go about doing this?

Thanks.

The process is called ripping. There are a number of different programs you can use to do it but it's too involved to describe in this post. Look on this site:

http://www.doom9.org

It contains tons of guides on how to do this.

I don't want to start a big yang-yang on this point here. But you should also note that if your friend is trying to copy a protected, commercially released DVD "ripping" may also be illegal throughout much of the world, depending on the intentions.

There are 4 reasons why it is difficult to get stuff of a commercial
DVD in either digital or analog:

1. analog: DVD's usually employ macrovision which messes up the signal if you are trying to record it on a VCR

2. digital: encryption. Most content on the commercial discs is encrypted. So you cannot copy an MPEG2 file of the disc to your PC

3. digital: MPEG2 fileformat is hard to read/edit/convert. Althought quite possible, but you will have to do some work for this

3.5 digital: authorisation. Discs need to be authorised before you can access them (not a real problem)

4 digital: region protection which might not allow you to read the disc on your player (not a real problem)

As Ken noted copying is illegal but since he is using it for personal
learning use it should be okay.

As Keith pointed out, that site contains a lot of information on
how to rip the information of the disc, but it is highly involved
work.

Personally I would try to see if my camera ignores the macro-
vision stream and if it does simply hook it up to your DVD player
and record the analog information of it. Then capture that back
into your computer.

I posed this question last year and found a satisfactory solution. This thread might be of use.

thanks for the explanations guys. Wow, the process is a lot more complicated than I thought. Might not even be worth it for him because is not very tech savy. Supposedly he has Premiere but no camera (go figure) so he was trying to use real movie clips to practice Premiere with since he has no raw footage. Thanks again guys.

Some good info at www.dvdrhelp.com

"Personal use" per se, as far as I know is not necessarily a way to circumvent US and International copyright laws. In the US and I suspect many parts of the world do give provisions for "fair use" which is a highly debated and argued provision in the copyright laws. It is usually refers to educational and things of a satirical nature like spoofs etc. and for purpose of commentary or criticism. But if your friend gave you a copyrighted DVD and you made a backup of it for personal use, this is still a violation of the copyright law. If you own the DVD and is making a backup of it for personal use and that alone then this could be within lines of fair use. With all things copyrighted the key element to understand is that we do not own the intellectual property per se (unless an agreement specifically states this.) but is merely buying licenses to view and enjoy the intellectual property. So if you were to distribute, regardless of profit gained or not, it will still be a violation of the copyright law.

that's all understandable. If he were planning on taking these captured clips outside of his computer...ie making copies and distributing them (either for profit or not for profit) or if he uploaded the footage to the internet, then that of course wouldn't fall in the lines of fair use.

I would think that becomes a mute point if he only plans on viewing his own purchased DVD on his own computer for editing practice.

I don't see the difference between playing a purchased DVD on your computer for viewing purposes, or using clips of the same DVD on your computer to tinker around with- as long as you own that DVD. If it stays on your computer, not only would nobody find out, but I wouldnt' see any reason for legal recourse.

The same thing I believe should apply to music. If I make a copy of my own legally purchaced CD to my computer and play around with it in Sound Forge for kicks and grins, is that illegal? I would doubt it. I'm not a lawyer and I don't know the actual law as it pertains to this, just thinking common sense here.