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. (more…)