iMovie - iDVD - I lost the original....

[Welshbird]

I took some photos of a friends hen party and made her a DVD with some music in the background and stuff.

I didn't make a back-up of the original media, neither did I include the images on the CD - it was just a daft evening so I didn't think we would want the photos.

However, with the benefit of 20-20 hindsight, there are some photos she'd really like to have, mainly as one friend has moved away.

Now, I took these photos with permission from all concerned, so I know copyright is not an issue. What I'd like to do is rip the images back from the DVD.

I've tried ffmeg and importing the resulting MPEG-4 into iMovie with the plan that I would pick frames and then convert them into stills - and they do work, but the quality is awful.

I'd really appreciate any ideas - bad quality will do if that is all I can get, but it would be nice to get as close to the originals as possible.

(And I've fibbed a little. I've told her I must still have the photos somewhere. Big mistake.)

Fee

The question should be [red]Is it worth trying to do?[/red] not [blue] Can it be done?[/blue]

 

[jimoblak]

The best grabs will be if the images are static and not moving around with the 'Ken Burns effect'. This motion makes it difficult to recover a good photo without interlace issues.

Avoid ffmpeg, iMovie and any other video conversion. That just muddies things further. You are likely trying ffmpeg because you think that you cannot get a screen capture while DVD player is running. There is a trick around this:

http://library.rice.edu/services/di...guides/digital-imaging/screen-capture-on-os-x

Running VLC (freeware) to grab screenshots instead of the Terminal trick to Apple's DVD player seems like the easier route.

 

[Welshbird]

Thanks Jim - I'll give that a try later.

Fee

The question should be [red]Is it worth trying to do?[/red] not [blue] Can it be done?[/blue]