Here is a trick I was taught by the greatest editor I ever had the pleasure of working with.

 NOTE:  Please understand and respect the copyright issues, if any, for any DVD that you are going to use this process on.  In some cases, there may be legal issues that you may need to address with making a copy of a DVD even for personal use.  We at OCSWA do not in any way condone the practice of abridging the rights of a copyright holder on his or her material and hope that no one will use this process to do anything illegal.

So have you ever tried to load DVD footage into Final Cut Pro and realized that it doesn't work that way?  The reason why is because the footage is still encrypted and compressed.

Here is how you solve that problem.  Make sure you have a lot of hard drive space before you attempt this.  A decrypted full resolution movie file is huge.  I did this to Hellboy and it turned out to be 90 GB.

Enjoy!

  There are two dependable ways to import footage from DVD using only  software.  The more reliable way is to use a free program called MPEG  Streamclip.  IT has a lot of customizable export options for DVDs.   

It's fairly simple:

 - Go to versiontracker.com and search for the program. Download it,  and load a DVD in the comp.

- Go to File in the program, and select Open DVD - just select the DVD drive, it should have a VIDEO TS and AUDIO folder, you don't have to select either of these, just make sure MPEG Streamclip is looking at them.

- Select open

- If a pop up window occurs saying it has broken timecode, allow it to  fixit.  If another popup window occurs asking you to select which video to load, you'll have to play the trial and error game to see the  right vid you want (The program has no way of naming the files itself  since writing to DVD is an encoded process)

- Select the part of the DVD you want to export via the "I" and "O"  shortcuts (for In and Out)

- Go to File, Export, and do whatever settings you'd like.  I always use an Uncompressed 4:2:2 for broadcast quality, 100% quality, and use "Unscaled" for the size dimensions. One thing you want to be careful though, is to make sure to deselect the "Reinterlace" footage options in the middle of the page.

 After that, it'll encode it and you'll have a nice Quicktime version of your  movie.