After you transfer your films, VHS tapes, mini-DV tapes or old-generation media into a DVD, you may decide you want to edit them. You may want to trim out the slow parts, or add music to those silent films you transferred from 8mm or 16mm films to DVD. To edit your videos, you can’t just copy files from the DVD to your video editor because the DVD you have is not a data DVD but a movie DVD that’s meant to play on DVD players.
So how to edit your video? First thing you need to do is to extract or “rip” your video from the DVD. There are many software that can do this. A popular DVD ripper that’s free and available for download on the internet is MPEG Streamclip. My video editor friend, Jon Kazanjian at Life’s Highlights tipped me to it.
MPEG Streamclip is a powerful free video converter, player, editor for both Mac and Windows. You can use MPEG Streamclip to open and play most movie formats including MPEG files which is the format your DVD is in, then convert them to QuickTime, AVI, DV and MPEG-4 files. Once your video has been converted to those formats, you can import them into your video editor.
If you have never used a video editing software, the process may be daunting. If you are a Windows user, I recommend the free Windows Movie Maker that comes with your PC. I’ve created some video tutorials to help you get started. Check them out at http://simplevideoediting.com/howto/
Happy Editing!
