Mrs BigJohn just got a load of our old home videos transferred onto DVD. All kids growing up, holidays, that sort of thing.
I'd like to be able to pick out some of the better bits, chop out a lot of the boring stuff (of which there's quite a bit, even though I thought I was being quite a harsh editor when I copied them down from Mini DV to VHS years ago), and maybe be able to email snippets to people. Not "Have You Been Framed", sadly. There's nothing remotely funny.
The DVDs are all DVD-R, Doing an explore on the PC says their format is UDF.
What's the best utility to get them into an editable format, and to do the kind of editing I'm after. And having done that, what's the best format to store the resulting files in? Cloud, external HD, More DVDs?
Prefer something free, but could be persuaded to buy a utility. My PC is a Toshiba Satellite laptop. 2GHz Core i3 processor and 8GB memory. 769GB free space on my hard drive.
First question is, is it a "real" DVD with a menu like you'd play in a standalone player, or just a bunch of video files for use on a computer? If it's the former you'll see folders like VIDEO_TS in Explorer.
Yup, got several VIDEO_TS files, extensions BUP, IFO, VOB. Then all the stuff seems to be in 4 1GB .VOB files. It comes up on our DVD player as having a menu, but it's all in 1 section.
Forgive my ignorance but it's been a lot of years since I put a DVD into anything. Gawd knows how old our player is, but it seems to work OK.
Ok. So first of all you'll need to rip the DVD into discrete movie files. There are many tools to do this (and a considerable amount of crapware), but [url= https://handbrake.fr ]Handbrake[/url] is excellent and has been around forever.
Thanks for that Cougar. I'll download that now and start playing with it. Any hips and tints will be welcome.
For what you need to do, rip to .mp4 using Handbrake and use Windows Movie Maker to edit.
Great. The first 3 hour one is downloaded. I'll experiment with Movie Maker later.
I don't think Movie Maker is part of Windows 10 as default (but that may have changed). When I needed it I had to download it from MS. It's worth it as it does all the basics.
Yeah. Think you need to download it separately now (not sure as I use either Shotcut or kdenlive - both free but overkill for what OP needs).