1. Put your disc into your computer

2. Open DVD Decrypter – the VOB files will be listed on the right. Select which ones you want to rip – usually the main video/film files will start with the 5th or 6th file and be 1M Kilobytes big or more. Special features such as documentaries and deleted scenes are often larger file sizes further down the list. Smaller file sizes are usually menu items (such as pictures or disc intros).

3. Select the file(s) you want, change the ‘destination’ folder if you want, and press ‘decrypt’.

You’ll get a new screen telling you the status of the rip, ETA etc, so you know how many cups of tea you can make while you wait.

4. Open VirtualDubMod (VirtualDub won’t work with ripped vob files).

File > Open Video File

then select a VOB file. You might get a dialogue box asking which audio stream you want – this is usually when you have main dialogue, and a ‘director’s commentary’ – if you only want the video files, it doesn’t matter which one you choose. Otherwise, it might be trial and error to get the right file… the top one is usually the main audio (without commentary).

5. When the video loads, you can scrub through the full VOB file, which will be up to about 40 minutes of footage.

To select a clip, scrub to the first frame of the clip you need – do this either by playing the footage through, using the arrow key or grabbing the timeline marker and dragging it to where you want.

6. You now need to make an ‘in’ point using the [mark in] button. Scrub to the end frame of your clip and choose [mark out]. You’ll get a blue bar on the timeline to show the clip you’ve chosen.

7. Now, sort out the settings for your clip.
These will be saved throughout the time you’re working on VirtualDubMod and will apply to all the files you open, though when you close the program, they will be reset. You can save the settings by choosing File > Save Processing Settings so that you can just load them the next time you come to clip a particular film or series.

As a general rule, don’t mess with the clip any more than you have to as you’ll lose quality – big time. Try to edit with the files as close to their original form as possible by setting up your editing file properly, and only downsizing when it comes to your final export.

As a golden rule, always, always export a small clip and make sure the setting are right before you do loads of clips that you can’t work with!

Here are a few basics:

7.1 To change the codec:
Video > Compression – this will give you a long list of codecs that you have installed. The best one (for me) is Cedocida DV Codec – avoid DivX as this is MPEG based and can be difficult to edit with.

7.2 To change the size:
Video > Filters > Add… > Resize > OK

7.3 To crop:
Video > Filters > Add… > null transform > OK
Then select the null transform filter and press the Cropping button at the bottom right of the dialogue box.

8. Exporting your clip:
File > Save As…
It’s as easy as that. You can tick the box that says ‘Don’t run this job now: add it to job control so I can run it in batch mode’ and it will create a queue for you to process later. If you only have one clip to do, tick this to run the job straight away.

9. When you’ve pressed save, you can choose different in/out points on the same VOB file if you need to and save all the clips separately. You can then move onto the next VOB file.

10. To run the job queue
File > Job Control > Start
You might need to choose your audio stream again for each VOB file as it’s processing, which is a pain in the behind.

11. When the jobs have processed, you can delete the VOB files (they are huge!)

12. You can either leave it at that if the clips work in your editing program, but I process them again into DV using SUPER as they just work better in Adobe Premiere, and I can strip out the audio if I don’t want it. This isn’t essential though.

You can convert VOB files in SUPER (meaning you still need DVD Decrypter but not VirtualDubMod), but you can’t clip them down. Technically, I encode my videos twice, first to Cedocida and then to DV – this isn’t ideal, but I find there is very little loss of quality and the file sizes, although still large, are MUCH better than putting uncompressed video into SUPER.

It’s all just a matter of choice, and hard drive space!