Can I turn a DVD Video file into a Regular Video file?

Can you save a video from a mini DV tape as a .avi file with Final Cut Express (similar to Pro)?

• I have over an hour of footage to sort through, an extremely limited understanding of how to operate Final Cut, and a video project due tomorrow...I'm not getting to work on it until now because my school's had all kinds of issues getting their student worker who rents out the equipment to actually be in the equipment room at the scheduled hours, but anyway that's not the point... I know that with the number of cuts, voice overs, etc I want to use, there's no way I'll be able to get this project edited tonight on Final Cut, so I was wondering if it would be possible for me to tranfer the footage from the camcorder/DV tape into Final Cut on my school's Mac computer (I have a FireWire and all of that), save all of it as one long .avi file, upload it to megaupload.com, and then open it at home in Windows Movie Maker and edit it the best I can with the limited features that program offers. I wanted to attempt this last night, but my laptop has no FireWire port, and I don't have the software to put the data from the DV tape onto a DVD. I basically just need the footage out of my DV tape and into .avi format so I can open it on my PC laptop. I'm going to explain to my teacher that I did what I could in the limited time I had and will go back and properly edit with Final Cut if she's willing to give me more time, but right now this is better than turning in nothing at all...she's already had students e-mail her saying they give up and just aren't doing the project, so I figured it's best to at least attempt to turn something in..a 50% is better than a 0%. :/ Also, if I can do all of that, would I be able to open up the video I create in Movie Maker on a Mac at school the following morning and upload it into iDVD? Thank you! I hope I just made sense...I can see how what I'm asking may be confusing.

• Answer:

  After "Capturing" MiniDV format video from the camcorder to the Mac, you can export the video as an AVI file. I think you want to consider a different file type - but more on that later... You did not tell us if you are importing standard definition or high definition video. Since you want to keep the video in a low compression state, then you should know that 60 minutes of decompressed DV format video will use about 14 gig of computer hard drive space and 60 minutes of decompressed HDV video will use about 43 gig of computer hard drive space. That will take a lot of time to upload and download. If you have a portable external drive, it may be easier to copy the files to it at school, then bring the drive home for connection to your home computer. If that is not possible, break the video file into a few different files and burn some DVDs (single layer DVDs can store about 4 gig; double layer can store about 8.5 gig) as data DVDs (not playable in a regular DVD player). You did not tell us what sort of internet connection the school or your home has - and you did not tell us how much video you need to upload/download. If you reduce the video quality to make the video files smaller, that will compress the video - when imported at home, the resulting decompressed video file will produce poor video quality. You did not tell us which version of Windows or MovieMaker. Typically, MovieMaker's pre-Windows7 cannot deal with AVI files. WMV files... DV files... but not AVI, unless you transcode them. MPEG StreamClip from www.squared5.com is a useful transcoder - there are many others. If you are dealing with HDV, there's a whole different set of steps, so I hope this is standard def video. After editing in MovieMaker, you will need to export/share that video project (the possibly proprietary MovieMaker files can only be used by MovieMaker). Low compression/large file size is best. It is likely you will end up with a WMV or AVI file. Upload/download that to the Mac (or burn data DVDs), transcode that using the Macintosh version of MPEG StreamClip available at the same link, above. A MOV or MP4 file is fine - but again, low compression/large file size. When that is done, you can launch iDVD and drag the converted file to iDVD to make the DVD playable disc.