A non-technical, no nonsense explanation for anyone who's confused by all the misinformation and Googling dead-ends out there.
So, you've got your VOBs on your hard drive. You want them in a good quality format that Premiere Pro can edit without any glitches.
The task is proving way harder than you thought it would be, right?
Sounds familiar...
Well, it is simple, as long as you know the answers to the following three questions:
Let's answer them...
The format you need to convert your VOBs to for use in Premiere Pro is "DV Avi".
Anything else is inferior.
Please don't listen to anyone who tells you to simply change the file extension from .vob to .mpg
True, sometimes the resulting file will play successfully in, say, Windows Media Player, and sometimes it will import succesfully into Premiere Pro, but there's a big 'but'...
The details of why this trick doesn't always work are unimportant. What is important is that you're gonna have all sorts of problems while editing (jerky transition effects etc) if attempting to edit with MPGs.
Mpg was never designed for editing — it was deigned as an archival/viewing format, and should only be used as such.
To convert the VOBs to DV Avi, I would recommend #1DVD Ripper or AoA DVD Ripper. Many rippers will work fine, but ensure that the software you choose meets the following requirements:
Both #1DVD Ripper and AoA DVD Ripper meet the above two requirements.
Depending on how the DVD you took your VOBs from was originally burnt, the sound may be distorted in the avi you create with the ripping software. If the DV AVI you import into Premiere Pro is already distorted, there's nothing you can do to fix it later. Fiddling with keyframe volumes and track volumes, or even the master volume output won't make the blindest bit of difference.
A ripper that allows you to lower the output volume of the converted files has saved me on numerous occasions. Many rippers don't offer this functionality.
By the way, if you've ever exported a movie from Premiere Pro, only to find that the audio was distorted despite sounding fine in the playback inside Premiere, the solution is: lower the keyframe volume of the footage by half a decibel before exporting.
There is a limit to the file size that AVIs can be without creating problems. You will often hear that if your hard drives are FAT32, the limit is 2Gbs; if NTFS — 4Gbs.
That's not quite true, but there is a file size limit.
Again, forgetting the details, you're gonna want to convert your VOBs not into one large avi file, but into several smaller AVIs, each of which we will then import into Premiere Pro.
Fear not: when placed back-to-back, they play as if one avi, with no nasty artefacts between files. That's why they call it 'seamless'.
GSpot, a nifty bit of codec analysing software, will warn you of "corrupt avi headers" with files that are too large. Equally, your ripper will create a file with a maximum size of 4Gbs if you try to export as one avi, which means, naturally, that most of the data won't be there.
So, we've got our ripping software, and we know we want DV Avi format, but first we need to tell the ripping software which codec to use before converting.
A codec is simply a programme that deals with encoding and decoding the video information.
The word 'codec' is simply an abbreviation of CO-mpression/DEC-ompression.
Choosing the right one is therefore critical when it comes to quality.
Simple answer: yes, but not too much. Read on for the 'why's.
Many newbies think along these lines. After all, we all want our videos to end up looking the best quality possible, right? But converting your VOBs to DV Avi without any compression is probably unwise...
Bear in mind that vob files are already compressed. That's how they fit on a DVD: by being compressed.
That means that we've already lost some quality by starting with source material on a DVD.
In the world of truly proffessional video editing, no-one would ever use VOBs as their source material for this very reason. But let's resign ourselves to the fact that we're not gonna achieve Hollywood quality, and acknowledge that compression (the right compression) is OK. Remember, the VOBs are already compressed, and I bet the quality looks fine to you when you play the DVD, no?
As a close analogy, consider commercialy released CDs. No-one ever complains about the audio quality, do they? And yet, the data on the CD has considerably less information on it than the original source materal at the recording studio. Recording audio with a bit depth of 24 is very common, and 32-bit float is also used, yet no CDs are able to store anything higher than 16. Similarly, 44.1 kHz is the sample rate of the audio on a CD, although 48 kHz or even 96 are often used in the studio. (So what's the point of recording higher quality when CDs refuse to participate? An Interesting and complex question. Google it, or we'll be here all day!)
So you see, 'compression' does not necessarily equal 'bad'.
If you were to grab all the data in those vob files and turn them into DV AVIs without compressing further, the resulting files could be pushing 100Gbs. Even if we have the patience to wait for all that converting, rendering, and copying (...and we're talking DAYS of waiting!), the hard drive space required is ludicrous. Don't forget that we need much more free hard drive space than the size of the original file in order to edit: every time we render something, a new file is created alongside the original, sending the total through the roof.
And all that for a difference in quality that is barely perceptible, if at all.
Well, if you insist, then you'll need to go 'lossless'.
'Lossless' means that all the information of the original source is retained, without compressing at all. Put more technically, the output from the decompressor is identical — bit-for-bit — to the compressor's input material.
'Lossless' contrasts with 'lossy'. A 'lossy' format (compressed) is one that isn't 'lossless' (uncompressed). MPGs (for example) are lossy.
Huffyuv is a lossless Win32 video codec. That's what you need to go for. And it has a compression throughput of 36 Mb/s (or more, depending on the speed of your machine). That's fast.
If you're Hell-bent on 'going Huffyuv', then the rest of this article is not for you. Let me warn you, though, of all the problems you're gonna have to Google when your DV AVIs that you made with your lossless codec don't import successfully into Premiere Pro... There's no audio; the picture is scrambled, etc. The details of such problems (and their solutions — which thankfully do exist), are outisde the scope of this article, however.
Perhaps you have examples in your mind of bad quality compressed footage with horrible motion blurs, horizontal line artefacts, dropped frames, etc. That's the sort of quality you'll get by converting with any of the 'legacy' codecs that come bundled with various pieces of software for free. The results are always very disappointing (which isn't surprising, given that many of them were developed ten-odd years ago).
But don't worry, we're not gonna use any of those...
As a result of the higher quality of codec we need, we're gonna have to shell out some dough.
Perhaps the best codec is the Panasonic codec, but that isn't compatible with Permiere Pro (unless you're on CS3), so forget that one.
Second choice (though still superb), is the MainConcept DV codec. As already stated, it isn't free, but it's really the only way to go.
Using the MainConcept DV codec, the converted AVIs will be big, only nowhere near as big as uncompressed ones would be. Be prepared for file sizes of, say, 10Gbs (ish) per hour of film.
You can download the MainConcept demo here (which has full functionality save a discreet watermark added), or buy the full version of the MainConcept DV codec here. And here is the official MainConcept Site Hompage, in case the other links go dead.
Alas, no.
Adobe Premiere Pro saves as DV Avi by default when exporting a movie, and yes, the quality is great. That's because the Microsoft DV Avi codec is being used, which is sort of the same thing as the MainConcept DV codec (based on the same code, I believe). Unfortunately, we can't simply use that codec for our conversions, however: it can't be accessed by software outside of Premiere Pro.
Now that our ripper and our codec are installed, I'll walk you through the settings that are necessary to produce high-quality files that can be edited flawlessly in Premiere Pro.
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| Fig 1 Premiere Pro Project Settings (©) |
The images that follow are presuming that we're dealing with PAL (i.e. Europe, not America). But whichever format, all the following settings apply.
The only thing you'll have to check by yourself is that the ripper, and indeed Premiere Pro later on, are both set to either PAL or NTSC (whichever you require). If PAL, then the Premiere Pro preset template you'll need to choose in order to correctly import and play your successfully converted DV AVIs is shown in Fig 1.
While these images are showing the software #1DVD Ripper, it shouldn't prove too hard to find the equilvalent settings in your software of choice.
First, let's import our VOBs into the ripper by clicking on the icon circled in red in Fig 2.
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| Fig 2 Import your VOBs (©a) |
Next, make sure the output video format (shown at the bottom of the screen) reads "Avi" as in Fig 3. (It might say "Avi (Divx,Xvid...)", as it does in #1DVD Ripper, but that doesn't mean it will use DivX or Xvid compression, don't worry!)
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| Fig 3 Select 'Avi' (©b) |
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| Fig 4 Click on the 'Settings' Button (©c) |
Now click the icon shown in Fig 4, which will take us to Settings.
On the Output tab, make sure that the MainConcept codec is chosen, as in Fig 5, and choose the output directory. Also note the setting for keeping the original DVD resolution.
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| Fig 5 Select Output Path + Codec (©d) |
Now, on the Size/Bitrate tab, we need to choose 'ACM Audio (uncompressed)', as shown in Fig 6. Premiere Pro won't like the 'lame mp3' format, and the audio will be either completely missing or horribly scrambled if you try to import files with any other audio setting. Upon choosing ACM, another window will immediately appear, as in Fig 7.
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| Fig 6 Select Audio ACM (©e) |
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| Fig 7 Select 'CD Quality' (©f) |
Simply choose 'CD Quality', which will give you 44.1kHz, 16bit, stereo: precisely what a CD uses.
The last crucial step is to go to the General tab, shown in Fig 8, and choose 80Min from Split Mode. This by-passes the file size limit problem by forcing the creation of multiple files, as mentioned earlier. Sure, many other rippers offer this possibility, but even more don't.
On the same tab, either PAL or NTSC needs to be selected as appropriate.
Note the 'Default Volume' I talked about that can save you from distorted exports. '2' is probably the right choice, although this may require experimentation.
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| Fig 8 Split Mode + Volume (©g) |
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| Fig 9 Click on 'Start' (©h) |
Finally, click the 'Start' icon shown in Fig 9, and hey presto, we have good quality DV Avi files that can be edited in Premier Pro.
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Site last updated: 24th December 2008 03:10 pm (EST). |
