I have a situation that is driving me crazy, and I'm running out of time for this project. I have 3 DVD's that I'm trying to combine into 1 and add a menu to the overall DVD. So the final result is basically a DVD with a menu that allows you to access the video from the original DVD's. Now, I've figured out that I have to Demux those 3 DVD's (the VOB's that is) in order to do any kind of editing to the video(s), which I'm being asked to do. Well, I've got the demuxing part under control using VobEdit 0.61. My end result is a *.m2v video file with corresponding *.ac3 audio. Now,..here's my problem. I have to edit the *.m2v (which I rename to *.mpg after demuxing) files because of issues with typos and certain footage in the video that needs to be taken out per my clients request. I'm not having ANY luck opening these video files into Sony Vegas 5 which is my preferred video editor. I keep getting any unsupported format error. However, when you look at the list of supported files that you can open, MPEG-2 is there as plain as day!@#@?*&* Now, low and behold, I can open the video files in Premiere Pro 1.5 all day long,...but,...when I do my editing and make my changes and go to render,...hours later,...I've got a file that's not the same aspect ratio as my original,...it's like it's adding some kinda black box around the video, so I'm afraid to even consider using that at the DVD-authoring stage. I'm at a lost because I don't know how to edit this video, and render it back out at the same quality and size. I don't know why Premiere is doing this,...though it's probably something simple that I'm overlooking. I'd love to just pop it into Vegas, which I'm more comfortable with using, but I keep getting that stupid error! I'm thing about using Procoder to convert it to an mpeg-1 and try using it that way. Hell, I even tried rendering the edited video as an *.avi from Premiere Pro and still got that black box...almost like it's truncating the video and I don't know why. Any help regarding my little spat here would be GREATLY appreciated. Thanks.
Dude? M2V files are the compressed mpeg file. My capture card creates these MP2 and M2V files automatically. And it allows me to make edits on the timeline. But on a system without the capture card, Premiere can't handle the conversion. I guess you'd need to render the entire set out to AVI so that you can do edits, then compress to M2V,MP2 or what ever is accepted. Editing M2Vs requires an MPEG capture card. What I would have to do is capture those 3 DVDs and make the edits on that same system. Then the file would be re-rendered to include those edits, with only the edit getting rendered, the rest of the file would be unchanged. MPG files contain audio, don't they? Why would you rename to that? MP2 and M2V should be acceptable. I only use MPG files when the MainConcept encoder is outputing a file suitable for CD / computer uses. It has audio and video mixed. At any rate, you will not be able to edit the MP2 or M2V file without a proper capture card and even then, expect a lenghty re-render. Usually small black boxes get cropped. You can't see the perimeter of my videos when played on TV. I wonder what the resolution of the footage is. One of my DVDs actaully has 512x384 footage and gets boxed. The rest of my DVDs use 720x486 footage, sometimes producing minor border, sometimes just on the sides, sometimes top and bottom. Go ahead and crank out a DVD of it and see what it plays like. Resizing the video is always an option but will require time consuming re-render / degradation. The frames may be 720x486 but the video signal is different, with black bars making up the remainder space. Cropping/Resizing the video is easy but will need to be captured as AVI and would get re-compressed to MP2/M2V for authoring. In summary, you're not going to edit an mpeg. But you can make changes to AVIs. I'm sure you read about the mpeg compression process, and the GOP structure, so you understand that you can't make edits. You can use the footage direct or just parts to make other files though. If you can't capture at all and can only convert, then the demuxed m2v+ac3 will need to be converted to AVI for editing and put back to m2v for authoring. During the edit, don't forget to crop / resize those black bars out. Expect loss of quality.
