Family Edited Movies – contd.
Well, I finally finished. I actually finished it twice, but my lack of familiarity with the software led me to close it without saving the changes. Live and learn, I guess.
The results met with my wife’s approval, and the kids really enjoyed the movie. I hadn’t remembered the nude scene, or the really harsh profanity. Without removing the sections that I did, there is NO way that they would have been able to watch it.
It took me about two hours total to edit the movie the second time – it went much quicker because I already knew what I was looking for. Removing entire scenes with this software is very easy. Removing individual words – not so much. There is a lot of trial & error that goes on to remove a single word, fortunately VirtualDub comes with a really handy ‘undo’ feature. I used it quite a bit.
If you are going to attempt this, I recommend that you have a relatively fast computer – 1Ghz or better, with 10+Gig free drive space and at least 1 Gig of ram. With that system, the editing was done in real time, and exporting the movie after the edits took about 45 minutes.
To remove a scene or section, you simply mark the start and end points, and tell it to delete the selection. There is a handy ‘key frame’ feature that helps take you to the next or previous frame that has major changes. Don’t forget to select ‘compress’ when you export the AVI, otherwise an hour and a half movie will take upwards of 10Gig. With compression it was under 700Meg.
If you are trying it and want some tips, just let me know.
Now, what movie to pick next…..
Family Edited Movies
A recent court ruling has said that companies can no longer ‘family edit’ DVDs. While there is an attempt to work around this ruling by using a special player that edits the movies in real time, it will require a special DVD player, as well as a subscription to their service that tells the player what parts to skip.
I personally haven’t purchased or seen any of the edited movies, so I really can’t comment on the effectiveness of their work. I was intrigued by the idea, as there are a lot of movies that I have seen that would be fine for the kids were it not for a few scenes or some language.
So, I decided that I’m going to try my hand at editing on my own, just to see how it goes. I’ve collected the software that I think I will need, and will explain the process as it progresses.
First, the software.
Some DVDs employ a software scheme that will corrupt attempts to read them in a non-standard way. For this, you will need something that can unlock it. My choice for this was DVD43, which installs and runs completely in the background. While I haven’t had problems with it, some have. An alternate program would be DVDFab (which has a free version). It will remove the copy protection and copy the DVD files to your hard drive, instead of using them directly from the DVD.
You will need software that can ‘rip’ a movie from DVD to your computer in AVI format. My choice was based on price (free), and reviews and comments by some of the users. For this task, I selected DVDx. There is a paid version that includes decryption, but that will be handled by DVD43 of DVDFab. With DVDFab, the files are already on your drive, so you will select them from there, otherwise you will pull them off of the DVD and dynamically convert them to AVI.
Once the movie is in AVI format, you will need editing software. For this, I chose VirtualDub. Again, it is free software and should do what I need it to. I’m sure that there are others available, but the comments about this were good.
So, now that I have a plan, I just need to chose a movie….
Fred Thompson has left the race
Press release is here.
McLean, VA – Senator Fred Thompson today issued the following statement about his campaign for President:
“Today I have withdrawn my candidacy for President of the United States. I hope that my country and my party have benefited from our having made this effort. Jeri and I will always be grateful for the encouragement and friendship of so many wonderful people.”
And now I have a difficult choice, since the Republican party seems to have been sucked into the vacuum created by the hard left shift of the democratic party.
The Problem with Pornography
As I have been dealing with this recently in a friend’s child, I felt compelled to post on it. There is NO explicit language or images here, but the content deals with mature (and maturing) subjects that not all are comfortable with.
Another Infestation and Internet Safety
Another friend asked me to debug their computer – this after about an hour of phone support which didn’t help much. Their problem was fairly straight forward. They had gotten infected with a trojan that would frequently pop up a message that their computer was infected, and clicking on the message took them to the site www(dot)virprotect(dot)com. Don’t go there, they aren’t a legitimate company. It took some doing, but I was finally able to remove all traces of that relatively new and nasty little app. You can find more info about that and others like it at http://www.spyware-techie.com/virprotect-removal-guide/
Basically, these trojans (named after the trojan horse) work by convincing the unsuspecting user to purchase a ‘anti-spyware’ application sold by them, which removes the popup. Sometimes it also includes other nasty things as well. Extortion, pure and simple. Immunizing your PC with Spybot after each update will prevent ’some’ of them. Safe browsing habits will help with the rest. In a nutshell, don’t download or install ANYTHING that you don’t know exactly what it is and who created it. Search for the name of the app, site name, and download file name with the term ’spyware’ or ‘adware’ and see if it comes up with anything. If not, and you really must have the trinket, scan the download with your virus scanner and spyware/adware scanners before running it. READ the license agreement when it installs to see if it says anything about displaying ads or reporting data and cancel the install if anything looks funny.
This friend also has teenagers, and asked me to retrieve the browser history. They will NOT be happy when they look at it. The only way to guarantee that nothing inappropriate appears on the computer is to have it disconnected from the internet, which I strongly recommend if the computer is in a bedroom. If they need to be online, the PC should be in a public area of the house, where privacy doesn’t exist.
They will be equally upset because they had purchased filtering software for the purpose of keeping the kids off of those type of sites. There is NO application that is capable of filtering everything on the internet. It just doesn’t happen. Some may be better than others, but none are foolproof. Especially if the action is intentional. Teens can be persistent when they want to. They were trying to be good parents, but believed the hype of the filter software which told them that all they needed to do was use it and their worries would be over. Rubbish. You don’t believe 100% of anything else advertised, don’t believe it about software either. If you are going to rely on a filter, make sure that the filter ONLY uses a ‘whitelist’ – a list of sites that are permitted, and blocks everything else.
