Basic Video Editing from DVD with Vegas 6.0

Thanks to these forums, I'm slowly learning how to edit videos.

I set out to do what I thought was a relatively simple thing: cut a few parts of scenes out of a store-bought DVD. I have the first four Harry Potter movies, which I've purchased, and have been showing them to my kids, but some parts are still too scary for them, so I've been fast-forwarding through them. Until they are old enough, I wanted to make a less-scary edit of each of the movies.

Thanks to these forums, I have DVD Decrypter and DVD Shrink 3.2 and I had purchased Sony Vegas 6.0 and Nero 6 prior to asking for help here.

Here's how far I've gotten: I've used DVD Decrypter to bring the video and audio into my laptop (Core 2 Duo and 7200RPM HD). I've opened it with DVD Shrink, but got stuck when I unchecked all but what I think is the movie itself (although the size is still more than 4.7G... I wouldn't mind having the final video on two disks, even though I have a dual-layer burner (Benq 1655), although I don't have any blank dual-layer disks). I got stuck there. I didn't know how to begin editing the movie with DVD Shrink (i.e. cutting out those scenes).

Actually, what would be ideal would be if I could just replace the scary scene (leave the audio) with a not-so-scary still frame and maybe I could sometimes do a voice over saying what's happening so that if the scene is important to the plot, viewers could follow what's happening in the movie.

So, I tried opening up the video in Vegas 6.0 and, after some fumbling around, I opened up VTS_01_1.VOB and brought it into the application. At first, the audio and video were out-of-sync, and the "right click and select Sync" had both sub-options grayed out, and the Rate slider had the orange triangle a bit to the right. Somehow, I accidentally did something and when I played the video again, the orange triangle jumped to the middle of the grey icon and the audio was in-sync. When I stop or pause, thought, the orange triangle is back to being to the right of the gray icon.

Everything seemed great, so I clicked the "move to the end" transport button and tried to bring in the second VOB file, VTS_01_2.VOB. The video came in, as expected and when I play from the end of the 01_1 file, the transition to the video of 01_2 is flawless. The audio during 01_2 is from the nearly the end of the movie.

What am I doing wrong?

Is there a way to bring the whole movie in all at once in the proper order?

I read in the manual that when you bring in a VOB file, any 5.1 audio is downconverted to stereo. Why is that? The surround in these Harry Potter movies is quite well done and I would like to have my "Rated G" version have nice audio. Can I get a plug-in to retain the 5.1 or do I have to upgrade to Vegas 7.0?

Thanks.

Al.

You should check out ifoedit, vobedit, vobblanker and dvdlab.

DVD Shrink 3.2 did mostly what I wanted it to do and it really was pretty easy once I figured it out. When I copied the second disc's vob files into the first disc's directory and opened DVD Shrink, I found that I had multiple Title 13's, one was from disc 1 and the other from disc 2. DVD Shrink sorted it out.

The only problems are:

1. after I insert the deleted scenes, the sound doesn't match... the backing music of the main movie ends, abruptly, and the restored scene's backing music starts, and

2. each switch from main movie to restored scene and back is the start of a new Title... the the last frame of one and the first frame of the other pauses briefly.

I think that if I was to bring it all in to Vegas and edit it there, I might be able to bring all the Titles in together into a single Title, with a series of chapters, but the audio I won't be able to fix... maybe I can loop a bit and fade it, but only if there isn't any immediate dialog.

Nonetheless, it looks acceptable for now and I can show the movies to my kids without having to worry about the scary scenes.

Thank you all for this great resource.

Al.