Video Editing Update--A Nightmare Explained

Guest blogger--Deb Jacobson recounts the struggles we encountered trying to find a way to make the Sony mini DVD videos usable.

Struggle??  I don't know what Kari is talking about - it was a piece of cake.  Ok - maybe not!  The game plan was to make some videos using iMovie from footage taken with a Sony Handicam DCR-DVD 301.  Sounds simple.  First obstacle -I have an iMac with a side transfer CD/DCD drive which you can not use mini DVDs.  Oh, sorry that wasn't the first obstacle.  We were going to hook up a firewire directly to the camera to make the transfer.  The camera doesn't support a firewire - but has a USB transfer but that doesn't work to the Mac.  We even traveled 60 miles to talk with some "experts" but they were not that helpful.   So back to the disks.   I have copying equipment so we made copies of the mini-discs to regular size discs so that I could load them into my Mac.  The file format from the mini-discs is VOB.  Which of course is not compatible with iMovie.  So the search began for software to convert the files to something we could use - such as Mp4 or avi  We searched the web and read a lot of forums from people who had the same problems and they suggested a number of free and inexpensive downloads  - such as: DVDZip, AVS Video Converter, MPEG2 Works Manager, 3VX, ffMpegx, and Handbrake.  I pretty much tried them all and the closest we came was it would work for one file but the next file would not have synchronization with audio and video.  It was a frustrating learning experience.  A lot of the problems came with me the operator.  I am not up with all the ins and outs of video conversion - and it is very possible that any of those programs could have been our solution - but they were our nemesis.  It was in reading information in documentation for Handbook (after that program failed me) that I read about MPEG Streamclip.  So what the hey - I downloaded it and IT WORKED.  I was able to easily select the VOB file, it checked for any time differences and  downloaded it - then I simply selected to export it as a Mp4 movie and now we can work with it in iMovie as well as Final Cut Express.  After a lot of frustration Kari is now learning iMovie (more frustration) and has already made two movies for her class.  So the end does justify the means.