ARCHIVED videos to .cdr - how do i get this back into FCP ?

[Tim Kay]

So I finished my project in FCP, sent it to DVD studio and for some reason I ended up with an apple archive of .cdr. I believe i made an archive of this in disk utility.
Now i'm finding that no program likes this (and mind you it's a completed DVD video) and I need to pull some footage from it. The file is big (like 2 gigs so I know its there)

Thanks in advanced

[Dan Foster]

.cdr sounds like a CD disk image. Try double-clicking on it in the Finder to mount it as a volume. Then open the mounted disk and explore it -- does that contain what you seek?

You might have to also use an additional tool such as Handbrake (free, great app) to 'rip' the mounted DVD disk -- which basically extracts the video and audio and saves to files you can then import for editing. Note that they will likely be compressed files, so the edit quality may not be good and you may see generational loss due to recompression if you need to re-edit.

I hope you still have the original FCP project file and original asset files somewhere to re-export as new assets for your new project? That will avoid the further loss in quality due to earlier compression from your last go with DVDSP.

[Shaun Roemich]

A .cdr file is a Corel Draw Vector File. Are you sure it's a .cdr?

[Craig Parkes]

a .cdr is a disk image. You have likely created a .cdr of a compressed DVD project so you will need to mount that and extract the video. My advice is MPEG STREAMCLIP over handbrake, as handbrake will recompress to MP4 automatically whereas MPEG STREAMCLIP will let you choose to recompress to any format your Quicktime Codec can.

[Tim Kay]

yea it was a .cdr for sure...
but for some reason i chould just change it to a .iso file no problems. maybe the extentions don't even matter ?

Inside are two folders, audio_ts and video_ts. Audio folder is empty. Now I played the largest file from the video and it played back, it's a .vob file. Audio/video worked perfect. Majority of project is on that file.

I'm trying to take your advice and use handbreak but making it an mp4 didn't have any audio. So i tried a .avi file and FCP says codec cann't be opened. Hmmm

I also have compressor if I need to use more codecs.

Does this help with the mystery ?

[Shaun Roemich]

I learn something new every day but I'm surprised that the .cdr extension can be used for more than one type of file... weird.

[Don Bloom]

talk about dejavu. a friend of mine jsut had the very same thing. someone needed a copy of a DVD of his wedding so my friend said yeah I'll help you out. Now it's a DVD-R mind you but it won't play on anything except the iMac DVD player. When you open up the files it's audio and video TS folders which can be opened. You cannot put it into any time line or copy it. I tried it in my pcs 4 different ones, WMP doesn't even see it, no program see's the disc, I can't do anything with it either.
BTW, the volume extension is .cd-r but the file extensions are what you would expect in a video TS folder, Inf, Vob, etc.
Sometimes things just aren't what they seem.

[Tim Kay]

uh oh, so how did you manage to get it back into the timeline ?

[Dan Foster]

Originally Posted by Don Bloom

talk about dejavu. a friend of mine jsut had the very same thing. someone needed a copy of a DVD of his wedding so my friend said yeah I'll help you out. Now it's a DVD-R mind you but it won't play on anything except the iMac DVD player. When you open up the files it's audio and video TS folders which can be opened. You cannot put it into any time line or copy it. I tried it in my pcs 4 different ones, WMP doesn't even see it, no program see's the disc, I can't do anything with it either.

Hi Don (and Andy):

When you originally build a project in DVDSP (or another DVD authoring tool) after organizing all your assets and menus, it will then compile it into a DVD format disk image. Basically, it will 'encode' the assets into a particular video and audio format (the VOB files that you saw). Afterwards, the DVD image (.cdr filename) is ready to be stored on a hard drive or to be burned to a disc.

The built VOB files are "baked" (a cooking analogy); they can not be directly reimported back into a DVDSP timeline again. You would have to extract the video and audio from these files back into a file format that DVDSP can recognize as asset files. Today's kids calls this extraction process 'ripping'. :-)

To do that, you would use a third party tool. I suggested Handbrake earlier but someone had the much better suggestion: MPEG Streamclip (also free), which I'd forgotten about since I don't do DVD video/audio extraction very often. Once you've used MPEG Streamclip to extract the video and audio and saved in file(s) utilizing a QT codec, DVDSP will then be able to import them as assets and be available to put in the timeline.

All this is only if you do not still have access to the original asset source media files, but only the finished DVD (whether as a physical disc or a disk image file). If this information doesn't help either of you gents, holler and I'll see if I can put together a quick walkthrough showing how the extraction process works.

[Tim Kay]

Now i'm interested in taking the footage and importing to FCP, not DVDSP. I'm looking to use certain shoots to make a demo reel ( finally ). I tried this method and it doesn't seem to work, is there another way getting it into FCP ?

Thanks

[Shaun Roemich]

Download MPEG Streamclip, point it to the VOB, tell it to convert the VOB to whatever QT format you want to edit (there are a number in the menu) and VOILA!

[Tim Kay]

OK finally got it back into FCP !

Once open streamclip was still giving me problems so after going through a bunch of different options (and they give you a lot) and changing where I saved to, it finally work.

Thanks guys