The situation today was that I was presented with a DVD with files to add to the timeline of the production. I had shot original footage on a Sony V1 at 1080i (25fps PAL) and had decided to stay at in this HD format for editing even though I knew older DV footage in DVD format would be added.

So, as time was short, I opened the DVD in explorer and copied the VOB file from the TS_VIDEO folder over to the project folder on my external hard drive. Once there I made a copy, then changed the file extension to .mpg. Premier will not import VOB files directly but will import mpg. And this method does allow VOB files to be played with Windows Media Player, for example. (VLC Media Player is much better as it will play VOB files directly)

This proved a bit of a problem as Premier wanted to conform the file and this seemed to take forever. I decided to delete the file and do the job properly by transcoding the file first to a more Premier friendly format.

There are numerous ways to do this, mostly centred around ripping commercial DVD movies. However, the material I needed to use from my client was his own creation so no problems with copyright protection.

The tool I used was VirtualDubMod as it allows the use of the MPEG 2 stream that is a VOB file. VirtualDubMod has many settings but for a quick and easy transcode I just loaded the file, went to save as, choosing AVI, no recompression and simply saved the file. The process is quite quick and the resulting file loaded into Premiere with no conforming. I had to stretch it up to 1080 and crop it to the 16:9 format but the results were fine for the short presentation video.

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