Lotus Lada VOB file conversion & upload question

[Guy Croft]

Ha! I did not know where to post this on my own website!

All you young software wizards out there: I have unseen footage from the Lotus Lada Top Gear programme, but only as huge VOB files taken from video film.

I need to convert to MPEG or other format that my Windows Movie Maker can read and edit.

Does anyone know of a software package that I can do this with, I have wanted to do it for ages. I am wary of buying any downloads on line. Any help appreciated.

GC

[Julian]

The standard tool for video conversion and restreaming is Adobe Premier. It isn't cheap - you can pick up premier V6 for about ‚£200 on Amazon. The latest version is called Premier CS3 and retails at around ‚£700.

There are plenty of other tools out there though and probably more appropriate for what you want to achieve. Premier is massive overkill if all you ever want to do is convert ONE video file from VOB to mpeg.

Something like Alive GP3 (http://www.alivemedia.net/videoconverter.htm) would be more appropriate - it is just $35 to buy and is simply a conversion tool rather than a full video editing desk.

There are plenty of products out there that do the same job - a quick search on google turned up plenty of them and the prices are pretty consistent too.

As a regular purchases of software and services online I have no personal worries or hesitation in download software. If it is just a matter of security just let me know and I will make the purchase for you.

I'd offer to convert it for you but VOB files are notoriously large so any decent length of footage is going to cause all sorts of problems in getting it to me. That said we have an increasing volume of footage that needs sorting out at the workshop so perhaps I need to get on with this sort of thing myself...

Once you've got it converted you can host it easily enough but you have to be a little wary of publically broadcasting it. If the footage belongs to the BBC then you definitely need to be careful, hosting it for private consumption by subscribed members of your site is one thing, just having an open link that anyone can use is asking for trouble.

[Guy Croft]

Julian, hi

thank you very much for that most interesting and useful post. I shall have to study it carefully.

Re copyright, yes, thank you for rightly indicating caution in that regard. It will be most interesting. I got the 7 video footage from Rowland French at the BBC, oddly enough it took ages to find, which rather made me wonder why they do so much filming when they lose track of most of the footage they take. Rowland was a BBC researcher working with Top Gear at the time. I figure if he gave them to me I could do pretty well whatever I liked with them. I guess I will find out!

GC

[Julian]

Sadly video editing is something of a messy business. The generated video files are huge and it takes a fair bit of storage to keep them all archived. Normally it gets dumped on to tape and thats the best you can hope for is some of the edited cuts. The fact that someone managed to find the original footage is quite a feat. The sheer volume of material means you have to throw the scraps away in most circumstances. Once the editing is finished what happens to the source footage is pretty much inconsequential.