“I am a choreographer. I have videos of different dances I’ve made on two different DVDs. I want to make one DVD from these two. I also need the DVD to be able to be read by Mac, PC, and tabletop DVD player. I just bought a Dell Studio Laptop that came with Windows Movie Maker and Windows DVD Maker. Can you recommend a program that can extract the DVD files for me and then help me burn cross-platform DVDs?”
Windows DVD Maker can burn a DVD that will play on Mac, PC and set top DVD players. Unfortunately, Windows Movie Maker isn’t a very good solution for combining videos from multiple DVDs with any kind of ease. I typically recommend using Roxio Creator to rip video clips from each of the DVDs and then recombine them. Here’s how to do it:
The first thing you need to do is download Roxio Creator. You’ll use Roxio to import each of the videos by repeating the steps below for each video. Start by inserting the first DVD containing a video you want to extract into your computer’s DVD drive. In the video editing portion of Roxio Creator, click on Capture/Import.
Follow these steps for each DVD
1) Choose your DVD drive as the capture/import source
2) Select the DVD chapter or movie you want to copy to your hard drive
3) Choose one of the video import settings (I recommend sticking with the MPEG default, which is compatible with the video on your DVD).
4) Choose a folder on your hard drive to save the extracted video.
5) Click Import Now to start importing video from the DVD.
Depending on how long the video is, you may have to wait anywhere from about 60 seconds to several minutes.
After you finish importing the video from the first DVD, remove it and repeat the five steps above with the second DVD.. When you finish importing all the video you need, add the clips to the video editing timeline in the order you want them to play back. Export the whole project as a DVD so that you can burn it to a new disk.
