Help for a small non-profit desperately needed

[Anonymous]

Dear Forum – I’m a small non-profit PR director who finds herself totally in over her head – with no choice but to move forward. I need to produce/edit a series of videos – 52 to be exact — I know crazy. (right now I’m using windows movie maker — I know I can do way better – but first things first). Our executive director is out on the road walking the perimeter of the US and is recording video on his camcorder — Sony I think and direct to disk — I need to be able to import this video into the aforementioned program – but it doesn’t seem to recognize the “format” or “extensions” _TS? — on the video files which leads me to believe that they need to be converted. So two questions —

1. How can I educate my 62 year old technologically challenged Exec Dir to save/import/export these files so that I can use them (they will need to be emailed or uploaded to an FTP site) since he’s in Georgia and I’m in California — What can I tell him – step by step

2. What do I need to do to convert the dvd’s I already have with video on them? I assume that I need a piece of software. Budgets are tight can you make a wallet friendly recommendation?

Thank you from the bottom of my heart

dswidorski

[Anonymous]

Its actually pretty simple to do. All the dvds that are made can be captured in Adobe Premier Elements 3.0 or 4.0. I’m not sure where you can get 3 anymore but 4.0 is available at any Best Buy for $99.99 (I work there so I know for sure they carry it.) When it prompts you to capture the media, you will have different choices and one will be from a you disc. And do you mean miniDVD disc or do you mean HDD (hard drive disk). The task is simple. I do this as a side job for a large Corporation in Milwaukee. Let me know if there is anything else that can be done.

[Anonymous]

I checked adobe’s website and they offered something called premiere pro — at a very steep 799.00. How does what you are talking about differ from this program (more features obviously) — but if I purchase premiere elements can I edit in that program as well?

[derek]

yes you can edit in elements, but not to the same extent. Adobe is a pretty good platform to work in the interface will be very similar in the entire family of products. There are also websites taht will give you access to online versions of their editing solutions. http://photobucket.com/ allows you to re-mix videos online.

[Anonymous]

Okay – for anyone out there…I downloaded a trial version of Adobe Premiere Pro with the intention of importing this raw video off a DVD – at this point I don’t even care if I can edit it…I just want to see it in some sort of a format such as: .avi, .wmv, .mpeg, .mpg something anything that the computer will recognize — What I’m looking at now has file names and extensions such as video_TS.BUP, .IFO, .VOB — Premiere says that it doesn’t support those formats — so what the heck have I got here? and how do I get it into one of the previously mentioned formats — This doesn’t seem like it should be rocket science

[Anonymous]

TS.BUP, .IFO, .VOB are DVD file formats that are generally not edit-able. What you’ll need to do is use a editing program with the camcorder or similar camcorder to extract the video from the DVD disc in the camcorder. I’d suggest using Adobe Premiere Elements, their interface for doing this is simple. What you’ll need to do is connect the camcorder with the DVD disc inside the camcorder to your PC via USB cable (supplied with camcorder), run Premiere Elements, select import/capture from DVD Camcorder and then choose the scenes for capture. That will give you an edit-able file. Sometimes you can do the same thing without the camcorder by placing the DVD disc in a DVD readable drive in your PC, but that doesn’t always work.

Mark

[Anonymous]

PS– In the future, I’d suggest using a camcorder that does not record to DVDs. DVD camcorders are the most difficult to deal with in editing. A tape-based camcorder (i.e., Mini DV or HDV) is much easier, or, consider a memory card solution, although it can be a little more costly if you need to mail memory cards back to home-base. Tape is more cost effective in terms of “disposable” media.

[Author]

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