Help With Inserting Movie Clips Into iMovie

Cafe Society
#1

Hi all- I want to add some movie clips to a family slideshow that I will be presenting to the family after Christmas dinner. The clips I’m adding come from my DVD collection- and they’re all from the standard “classic” Christmas movies.

So, I can rip the clips to my hard disc in .vob format with no problems. I am using iMovie 8.0 for the slidehow. As far as I know, it accepts clips in the .mov format only.

How can I insert my movie clips into iMovie with the least amount of quality degradation? Is converting my .vob clip to .mov a lossy transfer or a lossless transfer? What software apps do you recommend? The attempts I’ve made make the movie clip look rather pixellated when I preview in ‘full screen’ mode within iMovie.

Thanks for your help!!
Greg

#2

For converting .vob to .mov, grab MPEG Streamclip. It’s an excellent, free app that does a great job of converting most formats you can think of to most other formats you can think of. I do a fair amount of professional editing, and it’s my go-to application for format conversion.

http://www.squared5.com/svideo/mpeg-streamclip-mac.html

I believe going from .vob to .mov should be lossless. .vob is obviously already a fairly compressed format. You shouldn’t see much if any loss of quality going to .mov.