[rosegrrl]

Hi,

Here's my problem:
I need to find a program that will allow me to take very small pieces of standard dvds for my animation reel. Because it's a reel intended for screening on a fairly big screen, I need the quality of the images to be as high as possible.
I will be using imovie and idvd to edit and burn the final dvd, so files compatible with Quicktime seem the solution. I have been using Imtoo DVD to rip files but cannot seem to find an acceptable image quality.
On another thread here someone said that Crunch doesn't convert to MPeg2 (i think), but I could have sworn I saw that on the description of what Crunch does.
My question then:
Can I use Crunch to rip files from dvds into Quicktime/idvd compatible formats?
Can I get high quality images that won't pixelate in a large screen using Crunch?
How, exactly?

Any help would be much appreciated. I feel like I'm fumbling around in the dark here and since I have no experience with editing, I need HELP!

Thanks

[tsantee]

I presume the source DVD is not encrypted with copy protection. Popcorn 2 or Toast 8 will be more appropriate than Crunch for what you want. Toast 8 can export video from a DVD to either DV or MPEG 4 for editing in iMovie. It is a two step process. The first step is using Toast to extract the MPEG 2 video from the DVD (or VIDEO_TS folder) and the second step is converting that video to DV or MPEG 4. You can select individual chapters to extract from the DVD as well as entire titles.

Popcorn 2 cannot convert to DV video but can export to MPEG 4. It is a one step process because the MPEG 2 files do not need to first be extracted from the DVD (or from the VIDEO_TS folder). It also can select individual chapters as well as titles.

As for quality everything depends on the quality of the source video. Converting compressed MPEG 2 video that's on your DVD can lose some quality. Then it needs to get recompressed to MPEG 2 if you want to make a new DVD after editing in iMovie. I think you'd be best off converting to DV as it has the least compression. Then, if you need it to be burned to a video DVD again, don't put more than 75 minutes of video on a disc using Toast or 60 minutes using iDVD. That way the MPEG encoding will be near the highest quality bit rate.

If you don't plan to make a video DVD after editing in iMovie then convert to MPEG 4 instead of DV. That way you can play the MPEG 4 video directly from you Mac without needing another lossy encoding and you'll gain the benefit of the much smaller file size of MPEG 4 compared with DV.