My neice gave me a mini DVD from her camera. She formated it so it's in .VOD. I think I have to play it through a DVD player to get it into my PC. Is this a correct assumption or are there any programs that will convert this back to an .AVI? Thanks....
A miniDVD (sometimes also called cDVD) is actually a DVD structure burend on a CD. I guess you mean it is a .VOB file. It is actually encoded in MPEG-2. If you want to convert it to AVI, read this tutorial: http://www.digitalvideoclub.com/tutorials/dvdedit.php
Tried what you said. Was going along splendidly until I had to change the Audio. I selected Full processing mode as directed and selected Conversion. There was no "DV Audio - NTSC" on the list. So I left it alone and just went to the Export Footage portion. It would not convert - I got an error message "Cannot Start Video Compression - source image format is unacceptable." I installed a Panasonic CODEC - though I have several on my machine. Wish error message were more explicit so I could understand what's happening. Sorry... things just don't seem to go right for me sometimes. I have other Codecs installed so just selected the first one "Cinepak Codec by Radius" - did a test sample and it seemed to work. Haven't tried to actually work with the movie yet.
Don't know why things don't work for you, difficult to say. It may be possible that the MPEG is in PAL format and you're trying to go to NTSC. Anyway, it seems to work converting to AVI with Cinepak compression which brings me to the following question. Why do you want it in AVI? If it is for sharing with others Cinepak can be a good choice because it is an old codec and vitually everybody has it on its system. Disadvantage is that the quality of theat codec is not very good. A better alternative from quality perspective is to use a divX codec. It gives good quality, but people will need to install a divX codec on their PC in order to watch it.
No actually I am not sharing. I just want to get it into Premiere and edit the video. Then go into Pinnecle and I add still images and the video so I can make a DVD for my neice and nephew to have of their son's baptism. I maybe should tell her next time not to format the DVD using the Camcorder. By the way - thanks for all your help - I really appreciate it.
