[exley71]

Okay, I work at an ad agency, and we just finished our new commercial (8 months of my life...)

I need to send it to some Clients nationally, and don't really have time to dub and ship 30+ copies of the commercial.

I have a DVD of the commercial. I realize this is sort of a "grey" area, but is there a Mac program our guys in the studio can use to decode the DVD into a file that accessible by Quicktime, to make it a Quicktime file?

Thanks.

 

[jlcinc]

On the DVD do you see the file Mpeg? What Mpeg is it, Mpeg1/Mpeg 2/ or Mpeg4?

John

 

[jlcinc]

It just may have a .mov ending on the file. If you can find this file you probably can use it, let me know and I will give you more info.

John

 

[Vorvis]

Once the video has been multiplexed, it can't be decoded.

Best thing to do is dump it down to digital tape from the DVD and upload it again through firewire. As long as there is not any copy protection added to the disc you shouldn't have a problem.

 

[Havoc]

Where is the master? Doesn't really make sense. If it's your commercial and you did it why don't you have the source?

Seems kind of strange. Who mastered the DVD? Ask them to export it into another format for you.

 

[MacDoc]

ON X try these ultilities

OSEX - no I'm not kidding - will rip to a file that you can then use with other apps

BBDOGMUX - decodes to Quicktime

MacMPEG2 decoder

Hope it helps.
Not my turf but the guys who do this say these are the Big 3

On 9 can't help you.

 

[MannyP Design]

Why can't you just use DISC Copy to make a dup of the DVD onto your Mac and then use Toast to create a DVD?

Or am I missing something?

 

[MacDoc]

Yeah but I think he wants to stream it as Quicktime - 30 DVD dupes is very time consuming.
A VCD might work but it would still have to ripped which brings us back to the original issue

 

[gordguide]

Well, let's make the "grey area" black and white.

The DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) probibits US residents from defeating encryption. It doesn't prevent Canadians from doing anything. So, no problem there.

There may well be no encryption on the DVD; it's not mandatory to use it. If so, that simplifies things quite a bit for you.

I'm not quite sure why you don't have a QT stream available, since it's your company. But, assuming your firm owns the copyrights, there's no copyright issues. No problem there.

The tools you need are readily available. You may find it worth your while to invest in QTPro and QTMPEG-2 decoder options (available from the AppleStore). QTPro comes with the Sorenson Pro 3.1 encoder built in, which preserves the most quality in medium to large file sizes (my latest project went from 700MB raw DV to 120MB via Sorensen @720x480 pixels and 12MB via Sorenson @ 320x240). Quality is very good (about the same as a hollywood movie trailer available from the QT sites).

Still, the guys who produced this project should be doing this for you. It's a lot easier for them to do it than to do it the hard way (what you'll be doing).