My pal Earl Kress and I have been playing around with video editing on our respective PCs and I think I need to solicit some counsel here. As I said, we have Windows-based PCs and we're looking for the perfect piece of software. We have some DVDs full of clips (not copy-protected) and we want to import them into an editing program, do some edits, add some simple wipes and dissolves and maybe dub in music and add titles, then build a menu and export to a new DVD. Sounds simple? Well, it oughta be. Earl has been fiddling with Pinnacle Studio 8 and it seems to do most of the things we want except that there doesn't seem to be an efficient way to get files off the DVD and into the program. I've had the same problem with Adobe Premiere Pro. This is above and beyond the obvious problem that all forms of video will be obsolete by the time I could possibly learn Adobe Premiere Pro.
We've tried a number of programs that claim to convert VOB files to MPEG-2 but they all seem to either truncate the clip, get the sound off-sync or fuzz up the video. Shouldn't one be able to take clips off a DVD and edit them without any of these things happening?
Of course. So I'm hereby asking if anyone here has stumbled across the perfect program(s) to do what we want. And are you converting files to MPEG-2 or AVI or what?