Getting around VOB sizes: alternatives to a new hard drive?

[Tsunami Jones]

You said you have what? 28 gigs of free space? That's more than I have. Instead of putting the VOB files of an entire series on you hardrive at once, why not instead go 1 DVD at a time? I just go through each VOB file and get the clips that I might need or I think are cool, and then once I'm done I delete the VOB files from that DVD and go on to the next one.

[madbunny]

And so we've come full circle to the whole concept of "plan it out".

When you see one of those mega projects from say, dokidoki, or Absolute Destiny, or whoever, that use 15 different anime you can be pretty sure that they didn't waste time ripping 15 entire series, or 60 disks onto the HD just to make sure they have everything. (probably)

Do this: Rip the whole dvd onto your hard drive in small segments, say 50 meg chunks. go through all of them and delete the stuff you don't need. This will unsurprisingly be MOST of the disk. This will likely leave you with a couple hundred meg of pertinent footage. Repeat this process with each and every disk that you are using.

If you have a burner, you can burn them to the cd, and have 600meg chunks of .vob files. That way you can delete the stuff on your hard drive and replace it easily when you are done.

Use the bait and switch method. I personally like to use Mjpeg, at a high quality, as it gives a very good representation of what your final project will look like when you are done. You could also theoritically just use the Mjpeg as your final if you have it clean enough. Xvid compression is going to degrade your final output slightly enyway, so you may never even notice.

Just remember this maxim: Your video can only be 7 minutes long. (as a general rule) so you REALLY only need about 7 minutes of footage right? Right. In reality it's not that simple, but think about it.

Work with what you got. People have been making awesome videos on computers slower and with less space than you have for a long time.

[dokidoki]

When you see one of those mega projects from say, dokidoki, or Absolute Destiny, or whoever, that use 15 different anime you can be pretty sure that they didn't waste time ripping 15 entire series, or 60 disks onto the HD just to make sure they have everything. (probably)

For my CCS video (CCS is over a dozen DVDs), I ripped a bunch of DVDs to my HD, used MPEG2Cut (perhaps there's a better tool by now) to cut out the parts that looked interesting, deleted the original DVD VOBs, and repeated until I gone through all the DVDs. The thing is, though, making D2Vs and AVSs for several hundred files is really cumbersome, so I automated it.

http://www.doki.ca/misc/avsthing/

Description of files:
DVD2AVI176CommandLine105.zip: A commandline version of DVD2AVI. Note, however that this version drops a few frames from the beginning and/or end of the file. You may prefer to use Donald Graft's newer version with fixes. (but be consistent!)
avs.exe: AVS/D2V generation program.
avs.c: Code for the AVS/D2V generation program.
sleep.exe: Program that lets a script sleep/pause for a while.
cygwin1.zip: Needed by sleep.exe. You can get a whole batch of UNIX utilities that run in Windows from Cygwin.

How to use:
Generate a list of your VOB files. I stick them all, and the tools above, in a directory (say C:\video) and in the directory do this:

dir /on /b *.vob >list.txt
(create the list of VOB files)

avs C:\video <list.txt >d2v.bat
(create an AVS file for each VOB file, and a batch file to create the D2V files)

d2v
(create the D2V files)

Note: It's designed for small VOB files. The sleep commands in the batch file prevent dvd2avi from running again immediately and taking up resources. (I brought my machine down the first time, not realising that DVD2AVI returned control to the commandline right away)
You may want to change the AVS file generated. Simply change the source and recompile.

[the Black Monarch]

Of course, with hard drive space often going for less than a dollar per gig, you're probably better off just getting a new hard drive.

[bum]

this topic is good. i say it should be stickied

[AMVfreak]

sneak out of the house in the middle of the night, go to the nearest computer store and buy a hard drive with your birthday money.
install it in the computer during the night and convince your parents your birthday money got 'stolen' in the morning

[jasper-isis]

I definitely feel ya. I'm on a 300-something mHz CPU with 7.5 gigs of space on my biggest hard drive. A two-minute project takes me over half an hour to export. Good thing I have some sort of patience.

Planning is definitely the key. You're probably already familiar with the bait-and-switch method. If your project isn't too complicated, then you can export the timeline one track at a time (with each track being devoted to a DVD). Export to Huffyuv, delete all extraneous files, then load all the Huffyuv files back into your editing program. You can then edit these to regain your transitions and such.

If you really think about it though, this method can get pretty tricky, so make sure you know what you're doing...

[LightningCountX]

Sir Lagsalot has a codec in Software that's significantly smaller than Huffy. It's just slower.

i used that codec and the files were bigger than huffyuv's =\

[RichLather]

Western Digital 80GB hard drvies are only $62 nowadays, and bound to get lower in price with time. Mow a few lawns or something. Start saving up!

[klinky]

Yeah I dun think this is a sticky worthy thread. AMVs cost money to produce, buy a bigger hard drive or plan your AMV and be prepared for a lot of disc swaping...