I'm new to FCP and have a question.

I may get a gig doing what should be a simple re-edit on a corporate video, in which case the company would hand me a promotional video on dvd (i.e., a previously completed project) and ask me to insert some stock footage in 2 or 3 places, with some music over the stock footage.

I should be able to take the dvd and capture it with FCP just like any other recorded media, correct?

Then I capture the stock footage, insert it into the timeline and, voila! I've got a re-edited promotional video (dvd, actually). Yes? No?

In other words, I'll re-edit a once-completed project without using the digital master.

Any thoughts?

You cannot really caputer a DVD into FCP or any other NLE without doing one of 2 things 1) play the DVD in a player and use analog outputs to a analog/firewire converter and capture to FCP with some degradation of signal or 2) rip the DVD files to get them raw MPEG2 -> DV using something like this: http://www.alfanet.it/squared5/mpegstreamclip.html

Either way, using the original master footage will give you much better quality. In the end, once you create a DVD of the footage, you've lost some quality due to compression so you are better off going with the originals most often.

Thanks, Mark, I was afraid of that -- that degradation would be an issue. I'm not sure of which format the video was shot except that it's digital. If they shot in mini-dv or dv cam, I'm good to go.

Thanks again.

-Kevin

check out the program dvdxdv, it'll do what you want

Do you have personal experiance with this?
It seems an awesome answer to some archive, re-edit,time consuming problems I sometimes have.

yeah it works perfectly
there is a demo version out there, it puts a nice watermark right in the middle of the screen :-P

Thanks Alan. :-)