If you have a burned DVD of your heart content like home video or movie collections of your favorites, then you have a bunch of files including VOB files, these are the files directly from a DVD movie. Just do a simple search, you will see many people ask the same question as how to import VOB files to FCE and what format it should be converted to in order to edit some thing in FCE. If you are one of the Mac users fall into this problem, then please read on, you'll get your answer from here.



Working with VOB Files and Mac program FCE

VOB stands for DVD Video Object. It is basically one of the core files found on DVD-Video discs and contains the actual movie data, including an MPEG-2 video stream and support audio (MP2, AC3, DTS etc.)

While FCE is a non-linear video editing program by Apple, It is the consumer version of Final Cut Pro and is designed for advanced editing of digital video and high-definition video like DV, HDV, AVCHD, and it is compatible with movies from iMovie 08 as well. To directly import VOB to FCE just can't work out either because FCE naturally doesn't have the codec needed to load VOB, which is the main reason, or because you don't have a program that transcode/convert VOB to a editing format recognizable by FCE.


Types of VOB files

VOB with chapters: DVD authors often divide the content into chapters.? The chapters can be individual episodes of a TV show, scenes in a movie, cut scenes, or trailers.? By dividing the DVD into chapters, it becomes possible to create the navigation menus and let the viewer jump directly to a desired part of the DVD.

VOB without chapters: These VOB files are undivided¡ªthey contain only one video stream.?

You may ask if there is any difference to import a VOB file to FCE and to import a bunch of VOB files to FCE. Well, basically it is the same thing if the codec is installed correct, the feature of Open Format Timeline within FCE supports to load many files in different formats.



What format it should be converted to

As mentioned above, FCE doesn't naturally include the codec needed so that can import VOB to FCE. We need to install a codec on the system or convert VOB to an editing format workable with FCE like DV, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 or MOV.



The program needed

Video converter for Mac is a Mac friendly software that work well with iMovie, iTunes and FCE, with the program installed, you will be able to acquire a powerful codec pack that includes all codec needed to read, compress and transcode almost all video/audio files, and you can import VOB to FCE by converting VOB files from a DVD into any of the video and audio formats that Final Cut Express supports.

VOB files can contain multiple chapters.?Video converter for Mac can either extract the chapters (so that each becomes a separate file) or convert the entire VOB file (all the chapters) into a single new file. Meaning you can open the whole DVD, choose which chapter or part in the chapter to convert, then merge all the small parts into one video files. Just free to download the trial and try it yourself.