Article 205: How to Edit a DVD on Your Computer

We get a lot of questions from customers asking if our DVDs can be edited on their computer following our processing.  The short answer is YES.

Like Hollywood DVDs, our DVDs contain MPEG-2 video files that can be interpreted by your home DVD player for television viewing.  Unlike Hollywood DVDs, our DVDs can be edited on your computer or even duplicated -- because we don't employ and copy protection scheme.  We provide a service to transfer your video to DVD.  The video and audio content is yours.

Following is a short overview of how to edit DVDs on your computer.  It isn't meant to answer every aspect of every hardware platform and every software combination possible.

Step 1:
Understand what is on your movie DVD.  We will place your MPEG-2 video files, according to the industry standard in a VIDEO_TS (Video Title Set) folder located on the DVD.  Observe illustration below. This is an example of files we created, shown on a Windows XP environment.  The DVD is mounted as drive D: and you  are looking at the contents of the VIDEO_TS folder.

The highlighted files, with the VOB extension are the audio/video files.  VOB stands for "Video Object Set".   These have a specific naming convention, such as VTS_aa_yy.VOB, where aa is the title number and yy is the section within the title.  A new title occurs when a new recording/video is added to the DVD.   These titles are accessible through your DVD Main Menu.  A new section within the title occurs when a section becomes 1GB in size. 

The DVD below shows 23 titles, meaning 23 videos on the DVD -- each independent of the other.   Since none of these are over 1GB in size, there is no section shown, other than 1.

Step 2:
This is not a mandatory step, but we recommend you move all content on your DVD disc to a hard drive on your computer for performance reasons.   Your video editing software will react to the video with better (response time) if it is on your hard drive.  This is because hard drives are faster than DVD drives.

Step 3:
Open your video editor program.  There are many programs, we don't recommend a specific one.  However, an editor available within the Roxio Suite on Windows platform is shown below.   In a new production, under add content, we clicked on add photo/video.  When prompted, we pointed the program to where the DVD files are located.  Roxio automatically recognizes the VOB files on the DVD, including the titles.  Notice it found 23 titles that correspond to the files listed above?  It also shows the length of each title.  You may select one of more titles for editing.  Roxio is a copyrighted by Sonic Solutions.  We have no relationship with that company and are not authorized to speak on their behalf.  We are simply showing their product in action as an example.

Step 4:
In step3, one of the video titles was chosen.  Notice how the video now appears on the screen.  You are now ready to edit your video according to your need.  Each video editing program has common features such as the ability to cut out undesired scenes, add transitions between scenes, on-screen titles and more.

Conclusion
In short, our DVDs can be edited on your own computer.  You will need to provide the necessary hardware, software and blank media.  Once you become proficient with your video editing software, for every hour of video produced, you should budget about 3 hours of lapsed time.   Some of this is spent editing, the remainder is spent rendering the final DVD product.

You will need to ensure your video editing program of choice supports MPEG-2 video -- or be prepared to convert the DVD video to something your program recognizes.  Consult your product manuals for details.