Hi folks,
It's been about two years since I needed help here. I was shooting and editing a short film at the time. Well it's long finished and run its course and I'd like to get it up on the web for download. I've gone through 15 pages here and, although there seems to be a lot of help already given, I'm actually having trouble finding the basics.

I have a dvd of the short (it's just under 15 minutes). I have a Beta too but that's no use to me with my setup. So I guess I need to rip the movie from the dvd and encode it. Everyone here seems to be using different things to encode so I'm not sure about that. I can rip a VOB using DVD Decrypter, but I'm not quite sure where that leaves me.

Can anyone talk me through an easy way to do this? By the way, the short is very dark so it won't survive too much compression. Tools currently at my disposal include DVD Decrypter, Nero, an old copy of Premiere (6.0), Quicktime Pro and I also have a thing at work called CleanerXL although I haven't really used that.

I realise I'm asking a really basic question here but the information I have found seems almost a little too technical - most people asking questions are further down the technical road than I am! Any help would be greatly appreciated.

For anyone interested in the short, the website is at www.detainedthemovie.com

TIA
Jay.

what you are asking is impossible, because doing it the right way is rather complicated.

i would not use dvd as a source for anything that you are serious about; perhaps you could find someone to bump the betacam master down to a lesser format, even dv would be preferable to a dvd source... one approach is to get it into a format that can be read by cleanerxl, which you'll have to learn how to use.

if cleanerxl is what you use, try encoding in the wmv format, always using two-pass encoding.

you can also upgrade your nero to the latest version, i think that it will recognize the ripped mpeg2 file from your dvd, so it'll encode a decent mpeg4 file from that ripped dvd source.

welcome to the world of web encoding!

Thanks Dan,
Yeah this turned out to be quite tricky and has pretty much eaten up a whole day so far. I have several DivX and XviD versions now and they all depend on pure luck to get them to work. I got Winavi to make a wmv version though - it's not good quality but watchable and it came out just under 70megs. CleanerXL seems utterly bizarre...

Anyway, this one I have will probably do me for now. Cheers.