Welcome to the free FCE (Final Cut Express) guide on how to import DVD to FCE (Final Cut Express) .
Need to import a burned DVD of your favorite home videos or client videos into FCE (Final Cut Express) to edit it? You may need to edit some ˇ®bad' parts or to incorporate into some new videos. But in some respects the experience to
import DVD into FCE can be painful and frustrating. DVD movies can be home made or commercial DVD files, and most commercial ones are copy-right protected, others are not. The article I am going to post here will mainly talk about 'How to import DVD to FCE', and hopefully, people with this kind of question will find their answer here.
Working with DVD
Most consumer DVD ¨Cvideo disc is encrypted in MPEG-2 format. This serves to reduce the size of the raw video to the point where it will fit onto a DVD while still preserving most of the image quality of the master copy. Your home DVD player is equipped with the necessary hardware to uncompress these MPEG-2 video files in real time in order to display the image on your screen.
While commerical DVD movies are DRM protected and have region protection, which makes them impossible to be copied using applications. If you need to
import DVD to FCE, especially commerical ones, you'd better keep it in mind that any copy of DVD for commerical purpose shall incur lawsuit and large fine punishments.
FCE knowledge base
Final Cut Express allows you to edit footage captured in nowadays popular video formats off of digital video qualified camcorder as DV, HDV, and AVCHD. It also can export your iMovie '08 projects, putting professional polish on them in Final Cut Express. Hopefully, someday it allows video grapher to directly import DVD to FCE for editing purpose.
Import DVD to FCE (Final Cut Express)
You will have to rip the contents from DVD to files for Mac, and use Mac friendly program to take the files and turn them into format compatible with FCE like MPEG-4, DV, MOV or MPEG-2. Some programs can convert non-commercial DVD discs without trouble, but just are unable to rip video out of commercial DVD, not no mention import DVD to FCE to edit.
What's the most ideal program to use to import DVD into FCE?
You can either use freeware Handbrake to import DVD to FCE or use shareware DVD ripper for Mac to rip, convert/compress and import DVD to FCE.
Freeware Handbrake:
The latest edition Handbrake can rip DVD on Mac and convert between videos. It might be useful for consumer DVD disc, but it's not applicable for commercial DVD movies. The upside: free to use, can be used on Windows and Mac; the downside: it just takes long time to rip DVD and generates large files than the original one, the quality is also reduced dramatically. What's worse, you are not allowed to edit DVD video. If you want to import DVD to FCE while not care about quality, this could be your choice.
DVD converter for Mac:
It is able to rip both consumer DVD and commercial DVDs and convert DVD to almost all video formats like DV, MPEG-4, MOV, FLV, AVI, MPG,WMV and M4V,etc. it also can remove both RCE protection and regional code protection. The simple yet powerful video editing capacity like trim, crop, merge, further fine video setting makes it a second to none DVD ripper expert.
See also: 
Linear Mode
