Ripping DVD to edit in Final Cut Pro for Mac

(Editor’s note: Of course, we support DRM and Intellectual Property Rights, so we only encourage you to rip DVDs to which you own the rights or have permission to rip and edit.)

This is a very misunderstood process and most people find it annoyingly cumbersome. Here is what I have found out to be the easiest solution to ripping media from a DVD and putting it into editable content for Final Cut Pro or any other Mac editing program.

1. Download Mac the Ripper (mirror) and OPEN app

2. Insert DVD into CD-ROM drive

3. It should see your DVD automatically, but if it doesn’t, then drag DVD image from desktop onto Mac the Ripper app in your dock

4. Select GO! to extract files from DVD

5. Download MPEG StreamClip

6. After ripping DVD, drag the biggest .VOB file (if it’s a movie) into StreamClip’s viewer. If it asks you to “stream” say “yes”. If it’s a series of TV shows, select the first one and allow StreamClip to “stream” them all.

7. Export to DV (for a movie that’s an hour long this will take approximately an hour, depending on your computer)

8. Open Final Cut, import media, drop clip into timeline. When asked to adjust timeline settings to match media settings select “yes”.

9. Audio will need to render. (The red bar is due to the audio being in a different format other than AIFF.)

To avoid this, unlink clip, and bring into Quicktime.

Then strip audio from clip using Quicktime Pro ($30). (You don’t need to do this step to edit the footage but it will save you render time.)

You should now have a ripped copy of your DVD in an editable format for Final Cut Pro.

If you have a different method of ripping DVDs to edit in Final Cut or any other editing Mac platform please leave a comment explaining how you do it.

[via MindBites]

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