How do you import off of a DVD???

Question

If you already have a DVD, how do you import this into Premire CS3? We have a dozen football games that were recorded on a DVD camcorder and immediately put into the share station to finalize. We want to make a skills video for college coaches from these.

Answer 1

> Hook a DVD player to the "in" of your mini DV camera and capture through firewire as usual. Very simple.
Simple and crappy and slow. In addition to the unnecessary D->A->D conversion (the quality of which will vary greatly depending on your DVD player, cables, and DV camera) and the fact that "real-time" (+ the setup time of cabling and hitting the play and recond buttons and all that) is the best performance you'll ever achieve ... there is the difference in chroma subsampling between the two formats:
1.) NTSC DV uses 4:1:1 subsampling, while DVD is 4:2:0. To look at this another way, NTSC DV has oblong 4x1 blocks of color while DVD uses 2x2 squares. By converting from one to the other, you will end up with 4x2 blocks -- a serious degradation of the color information.
2.) PAL DV, like DVD, uses 4:2:0 chroma -- but it sampled differently. I'm not exactly certain of what would occur during an analog transfer, but it is likely that the vertical color resolution would be further degraded. This is certainly true (or truer) when the DVD source is Upper Field First (DV being "lower", always). This would result in 2x4 chroma blocks.
Also, should the alignment of the video in the analog signal be slightly shifted (very likely) the resulting chroma information can be further screwed up.
DV is really not the nicest compression in the world and it should be avoided whenever possible -- especially for re-compression of another digital format.
When dealing with digital formats (whether it's audio, video or photos) it is always best to work with the original material and to sacrifice quality (when it must be sacrificed) at the latest possible stage.