I recommend as a first time video editor that you use a consumer based capture card as professional capture cards and boxes can be a little complex and sometimes a pain in the ass to make work properly unless you have the right equipment such as a mother board or other hardware.
The first thing you'll need is this >
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage....type=pr oduct
With that you can plug any DVD player (or VCR) into the AV box and capture the video file on your computer, in AVI format.
It takes the same amount of time to capture as it does to play.
Keep in mind you'll want 1 (120GB) HD per 3 DVD's. It leaves you with enough room to capture, encode and store the source files. 7200RPM drives are fine they do the job.
Once you capture the AVI file you want to run it through a program like Adobe Premiere.
That's the software package you're going to use to take that full-length AVI file and cut it up into pieces, or whatever you want to do. This is simply going to chop up the big AVI into little AVI's (still RAW format) based on the time frames you specified in the time line. It's very simple.
What you really need to do is this. Once you load the full-length AVI into the timeline in Premiere you want to drag the start/end points to the location you want, let's say your first 5 minute clip in scene one. Once you do that you will have to save the PPJ file (project file). Then you repeat for all of your other scenes.
Once you have all of the PPJ files you want to batch encode them. You will then import all of those PPJ files back into Premiere and batch them out. It will then produce the 5-minute AVI files or whatever you specified in the timeline.
Now once you have your source (AVI) files you will then use a program like Cleaner to encode all of your WMV or MPG files. I think it also supports QuickTime and real but I never messed with those two file types.
All of the above is really only like 20 minutes of actual hands-on work, which comes from Premiere and saving the source PPJ files for your clips and then importing them.
For some odd reason Premiere does not allow you to select more than one PPJ file to import into the batch. So if you have 40 PPJ files per DVD you have to add them one by one. That's how it was in Premiere 6, I'm not sure if the latest versions are limited that way.
Either way, importing 40 files only takes a minute or two.
All of the other hours in this process come from the capture time, encode time and upload time. It would be a very good idea to have a second machine running because I would not recommend running any other applications while capture/encodes are going as you could drop frames.
Of course there are other options. You could "rip" the DVD as you said, which I find to be a pain in the ass but the process can be much simpler then it was back in the day when I was doing this about 2.5 years ago.
And there are also other software packages to encode files, which might possibly be better, but I went with what I knew.
Post your ICQ if you need help.
--
Michele