AAUG Reviews

by Ron Schoedel, AAUG Member

There are many reasons why one would want to take content from a DVD and edit it. Some camcorders now burn straight to DVD, producing what would otherwise be uneditable footage. Perhaps you’ve built a bunch of home movies and slideshows in iDVD and would like to take material from previous DVDs and repurpose it. Maybe you’d like to extract a clip from a commercial DVD (for strictly private, non-commercial, non-offending usage, of course). Cinematize makes all this possible. Now, having a DVD is no longer synonymous with content that is locked up and unavailable for future use.

Cinematize is billed by its publisher, Miraizon, as a DVD clip extractor that is used by tens of thousands of users, from professionals to home users, including in top studios, government offices, and anywhere else DVDs are made. I believe them. This is a tool that unlocks your DVDs and it does so with a minimum of fuss and confusion. There are other tools out there that offer some of the functionality of Cinematize Pro, but they are clunky, hard to use, and don’t come anywhere near Cinematize’s feature set.

Allow me to illustrate one problem this software solves. If you’ve ever built a home DVD in iDVD, you probably know that the “assetts” used in your movie can often take up a good 8 or 10 GB of hard drive space before they are compressed into the 4.7 GB of space on a DVD-R. Keeping all 10 GB of every project you make can quickly consume all your hard drive space, so you are faced with a choice of tossing these unencoded assetts, to keep free space, or buying a big external drive to store these materials that you may–or may not–ever have need for again in their raw state. I would bet if you are an iDVD fan you may have been through this debate with yourself at least a few times.

With Cinematize, you need not worry about your encoded DVD content being locked in anymore. Feel free to delete those huge iDVD project files and rest knowing that Cinematize will let you snag anything you want from your finalized, burned DVDs: anything from clips, soundtracks, menus, and even subtitles. Multiple output options are available, allowing you to repurpose any DVD content, for editing in Movie or Final Cut, placement onto your iPod, iTunes, and Apple TV, reusing a soundtrack for another DVD…you name it.

Let’s look at a sample workflow with Cinematize. It has an easy learning curve, but its value may not be instantly recognizable. First, I should mention that Cinematize comes in a Pro Version and a regular version. I was given a Pro version to review, which unlocks some niche features that some home or casual users may not need. If what I describe sounds interesting, visit the Cinematize website and compare the features of the two versions to see which one meets your needs.

Step 1, I have a DVD, and I want to take one chapter, or one feature item off of it, and turn it into a movie my children can watch on a video iPod while on long car trips. Cinematize will work with any DVD the contents of which are not encumbered by DRM schemes, or with Video_TS folders on your hard drive which are produced by popular DVD rippers. The common consensus is that movies ripped for your own personal use, like CDs being placed on an iPod, are within your legal rights, but as most DVD software publishers advise, you should contact your legal advisor for insight with respect to these matters, for peace of mind. So with that said, pop in a DVD or navigate Cinematize to your Video_TS folder and wait a moment while it loads up the structure. Another useful feature is that Cinematize will load and extract content from MPEG-2 files produced by TiVo boxes, for example, which are otherwise uneditable in that state.

Now, this is arguably the trickiest part of extraction: figuring out what, from this list, you want to extract. The Video Title Sets will correspond with the various items on your disk: the main feature, special additions, etc. The main feature will usually be the longest (and thus largest) set of files, as an example. It may take some trial and error before you find the set you want, but no fear: choosing a title set, then clicking the select file group button, takes you to a preview window where you can see what you have selected.

If this is not what you wanted, just go back and try again. Once we have the general title set we want, we can choose a start and end point for our extraction, with very clearly labeled, very intuitive selectors. “Easy as cake”, as my three year might say.

You can play around a bit on this screen, and add multiple segments to the list, of any length you choose, and it will batch-export them all at once, to individual files of your choice in formats, as will be described below.

Now, before we extract, we have to decide if we want video, audio, or both, and which stream we want. Many DVDs have multiple video streams and multiple audio streams, such as foreign language tracks, commentaries, and such. If you have a DVD from which you just want to extract the audio and no video, Cinematize will quickly let you capture that audio to an iTunes-compatible file.

Likewise, perhaps you want to lay new audio under the video you are extracting, so Cinematize will let you make a video-only extraction to an iMovie or Final Cut-compatible file. In the Output tab, our choices are many:

After extraction, we are given a clip that we can import into iTunes and iMovie, or Final Cut, or any other audio/video studio application. It really is that easy.

I came up with a few other applications for Cinematize: I extract several favorite chapters from my kids’ movies to make a compilation DVD (much like a mix tape or a CD of your favorite playlist); I extracted selected highlights from programs I had TiVo’d and later burned to disk (these disks don’t have chapter markers, so being able to select and extract the highlights solves that shortcoming of the TiVo disks for me), and I grabbed an audio track from one of the children’s favorite sing-along DVDs and put it onto their iPod.

Cinematize takes all this power and puts it into your hands. I had no problems with the software whatsoever. It is very easy to use, quite intuitive, and non-destructive, so it can’t ruin your original material. For that reason, there is no excuse not to experiment and find the many different ways of getting your favorite video content here and how you need it.

The non-pro version is a bargain at $59.95 (download; CD $10 extra), the Pro version is priced quite fairly for the capabilities it provides. If you need to decode subtitles to image files, or as overlays (not burned in), the Pro version will do that. The pro version also offers the batch extraction as I alluded to previously, whereas the non-pro version does not. The separae video and audio extractions are also an excusively Pro function, as is creating chapter markers for QuickTime. At $129.95 (download; CD $10 extra), Cinematize Pro is worth its weight in time-saving gold. You may be able to find other ways to accomplish some of what it does (like recording the audio stream in real-time, or the like), but if you work with DVD content on a frequent basis, or would like to work with it more frequently if only you could, get Cinematize Pro, as it will quickly pay for itself.

My only con, if any, is that getting at the data you want can be tricky, as described above. But that is not a fault of Cinematize as much as it is of the DVD specification, which was obviously not designed with re-editing in mind.

Cinematize gets a solid 5 moose rating and has become an indispensable tool in my video toolbox.