I have a DVD of The Horror Express, starring Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, and Telly Savalas. There’s a short clip of a conversation I’d like to extract as an mpeg or quicktime movie—even extracting just the audio would be nice.
It’s a classic. Christopher Lee is explaining his discovery of an ancient fossil to a beautiful woman:
Lee: That box of bones, madam, could have solved many of the riddles of science. If the theory of evolution is confirmed, if the science of biology is revolutionized, if the very origin of man is determined…
Beautiful woman: I have heard of evolution. It is immoral.
Lee: It is a fact. And there is no morality in a fact.
It’s intercut, by the way, with scenes of Peter Cushing doing an autopsy on one of the victims of the fossil (it’s a horror movie, of course—the fossil comes to life and wanders about a train in pre-revolution Siberia, sucking the minds out of people with its red glowing eyes. There are also zombie cossacks), sawing open a dead guy’s skull to expose his brain.
They just don’t make movies like that anymore.
Anyway, if anyone can tell me how to pull out this very short (less than a minute) segment on a Mac OS X machine, I’ll put it on the web. You know you all want to hear Saruman/Count Dooku/Dracula endorsing evolution.
Your suggestions worked, and I’ve now got the movie converted and edited out the part I wanted. It did take hours for the decoding to finish, but I just let it run in the background, so it wasn’t too painful.
Now, if you want, you can listen to Christopher Lee declare that evolution is a fact, and there is no morality in a fact (250K .mov audio file).
It’s a bit of a pain, and perhaps someone knows a better way, but here goes.
1. Use the open source application Handbrake to rip the movie from the DVD to a .mov or .mp4 file. The contents of the DVD will appear as a bunch of cryptic sounding file names, but the movie will be obvious because it will be the longest. Handbrake will actually let you choose which chapters you want to extract from the main movie and settings as to the video quality of the extracted clip. Fiddle with them to get the smallest file size you can without sacrificing quality too much.
2. Edit the movie in iMovie to clip out everything but the bit you want.
3. If you want to extract the sound as a clip, use the shareware application Amadeus II to extract the soundtrack of your movie clip and then save it as an MP3 or AAC file. Amadeus is a spiffy sound editor that will let you do whatever you want with.
I LOVE “Horror Express’!! I’ve had the movie on tape for over ten years.
My favorite line – When the police are talking about the “monster” possibly being one of their own, Peter Cushing looks at him and says “Monsters? We’re British, you know.”
Telly Savalas as a Cossack was priceless.
I’ll check to see if The Count can pull the sound from the DVD for you. i found it on Netflix, and I just rented it.
There’s about a hundred easy to use programs that’ll do this for you. I’ve tried several. Here’s the one I use
http://www.imtoo.com/dvd-audio-ripper.html
It’s just a trial version, but I think It ought to have enough functionality to snatch the piece you want.
Kind of tangential but I live near Whitby (Yorkshire) where, according to the book, Dracula landed. The beaches and cliffs are Jurassic shale and hotching with marine fossils but it’s on the beaches that the real action is happening: according to Dr John Graeame of Leeds University, Yorkshire winkles (Littorina) are specifying before our very eyes.
http://www.wildbard.com/2004/07/appen-evolution-is-appenin-in.html
According to local legend the ammonite fossils got there because 7th century uber saint (Hilda) cursed the local serpents, which coiled up, died and somehow burrowed their way into 170 million year old shale. She also presided over the synod of Whitby which decided on the formula that makes easter a moveable feast and had Something Important to say about priest’s haircuts. No mullets, I think.
Mr. Lee, as the pagan Lord Summerisle, has several priceless quotes in “The Wicker Man” along the same lines, the best of which is:
“I think I could turn and live with animals. They are so placid and self-contained. They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins. They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God. Not one of them kneels to another or to his own kind that lived thousands of years ago. Not one of them is respectable or unhappy, all over the earth.”
“Anyway, if anyone can tell me how to pull out this very short (less than a minute) segment on a Mac OS X machine, I’ll put it on the web”
Haven’t you seen their snooty commercials? You obviously should simply know how to do it, because it’s -that- easy.
FYI, the Summerisle character Will Error mentions above is quoting Whitman in the excerpt.
Your Wicker Man quote is from Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself (you can find it at UIUC’s Poetry Site – the full passage is:
I think I could turn and live with animals, they’re so placid
and self-contain’d,
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of
owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands
of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.
The Beautiful Woman will do. Endorsements of evolution are not in short supply :)
I personally really like MPEG Streamclip. It is completely free and works like a charm. It will take any segment and convert it to just about any format you need including all of the QuickTime codecs.
You will also need MacTheRipper to rip the disk first to remove the encryption and copy protection so that MPEG Streamclip can do its thing.
MPEG Streamclip – http://www.squared5.com/
MacTheRipper – http://www.mactheripper.org/
Of course it is hard, because it is tehnically illegal. Hollywood feels that fair use *does not* exist for DVD’s.
Here is my admittedly analog solution:
Get a digital camcorder that has analog pass-through. Hook up the analog outputs of the DVD to the inputs of the camcorder. Some will require you to actually dub it to the tape.
Once it is on tape, you can use iMovie and Quicktime at your leisure.
I have no advice to provide on the technical side of this, but this movie is now on the way here via Amazon. What could possibly be better? The “Murder on the Orient Express” theme (more or less…), with a monster and zombies! Well…perhaps some things could be better…
This sounds as thought it might make an interesting double feature with Tarkovsky’s “Solaris”.
PZ, you could try a program called Handbrake: it will allow you to take the video off the DVD, and I think it will allow you to then excerpt the bit you want.
They don’t need to make movies like that anymore. The zombie cossacks all went pro and can now be seen nightly on Fox News.
Off topic..
Hey PZ I saw a slide with a zebra fish in this.
I don’t know if you’ve already seen these, but Science is publishing every-other-week (is that bi-weekly, or semi-weekly?) flash video seminars. This (first) one is natural selection in humans.
How in the world did that Whitman quote get by me? It’s been years since I read him–anyway, there are other good, relevant lines in the film as well. Or, of course, we could just wait for the Nic Cage remake.
If Handbrake doesn’t work for you, I’d suggest trying mencoder OSX – it’ll rip to DivX straight from the DVD. Available at the attached URL.
… with the added bonus that you should be able to rip from arbitrary timepoints, rather than having to rip the whole title or disc.
Yes, that’s the other program besides Handbrake that’ll rip video from a commercial DVD with encryption whose name escaped me at the time. Commercial DVDs have two restrictions that prevent almost any fair use without breaking the Digital Millennium Act. First, there’s the encryption, which is fairly easily disposed with. There are lots more Windows programs that’ll deal with that than there are for the Mac. Second, there’s the Region encoding, which makes DVDs sold in Europe unplayable on U.S DVD players and vice-versa, unless you get a region-free DVD player.
One word of warning: Ripping video is extremely processor-intensive. Ripping a whole movie can take hours. Even ripping relatively short snippets of video can take longer than you think it should.
In any case, Handbrake will let you choose the chapter that you want to rip. After that, you can edit it down to the part you want using iMovie or whatever tool you’d like.
Another option is to do screen capture using SnapzPro (from http://www.ambrosiasw.com).
It can record DVD screens with sound.
Not a free option (although you can use the demo version, it will place a watermark on it), and only for PPC machines.
Or you could do it on a PC….
(Sorry, couldn’t resist)
(Well, yes I could, but I didn’t)
Looks like you’ve got plenty of suggestions to get both the video and audio, but I’ll still throw in a plug for one of my favorite apps, Audio Hijack Pro, which will let you save the audio output of any application to the format of your choice, including bookmarkable formats so that an iPod will remember where you left off. I’ve found it very useful in particular for capturing RealAudio streams.
Just for the record, if it takes you hours to rip a DVD to a computer, there’s something wrong with either the software you’re using, or the computer. It generally takes me about 10 to 20 minutes to rip a DVD onto a PC.
Great quote! If it hasn’t been used in the intro to a Rob Zombie song, it should be.
I feel compelled to mention Versiontracker, as I always do when people ask about MacOS software …
Using Handbrake, it takes approximately one hour on my dual processor G5 to rip a two hour movie, considerably longer on my G4 at home, and longer still on my laptop. Going the other way and rendering the same length MPEG or AVI movie to burn to a DVD takes a lot longer, close to three hours on my G5, using iDVD, and as long as eight hours on my laptop. This is all, of course, at full resolution.
I too am a Cushing/Lee/Price movie fan and as expected Lee doesn’t disappoint in this one.
But I always cringed when I heard Christopher Lee pronounce evolution.
It’s the correct pronunciation and that’s the problem.
When pronounced corrected it sounds almost like Evil-lution, and I’ve heard a great many fundies use this as some sort of extra weight in throwing around the ‘evil’ of evolution to the older folks in their congregations and hte religious leaning public. Many of whom are more than easily duped by the emotional, gut reaction to simply hearing the name as compared to a detailed examination of what evolution really is.
It has been my hope that everyone would pronounce it without a stronge ‘E’ at the beginning. Most of the dummies already pronounce it that way and it’s probably one of the only ways they are ever going to inadvertantly promote or aid the cause of understanding evolution.
So yes, I pronounce evolution as ‘ehv-o-lute-shun’
MYOB’
.
That’s because Handbreak is doing more than ripping; it is also reencoding the data to MPEG-4 (which can aid its use by other tools). I merely bring this up to explain the time difference seen by Darius. A simple ripping tool like Mac the Ripper will rip a DVD in 20 minutes or so on a Mac, just as similar tools will for the PC.
Well, gee, if Christopher Lee said it in a 70s horror B-movie, why, it must be true!
“Well, gee, if Christopher Lee said it in a 70s horror B-movie, why, it must be true!”
I wholeheartedly agree. Chris Lee rules.
Dear Mr. Myer,
It’s a classic. –It is, I’m sure. Nevertheless:
”Lee: That box of bones, madam, could have solved many of the riddles of science. If the theory of evolution is confirmed, if the science of biology is revolutionized, if the very origin of man is determined…
Beautiful woman: I have heard of evolution. It is immoral.
Lee: It is a fact. And there is no morality in a fact.”
Why does the character call it the theory of evolution first; and then a fact? If it is yet to be confirmed, (and it should be, by your judgment) I would neither call it immoral nor fact. If having exhausted all means of confirmation except demanding it so, I’d even say it’s immoral to teach it without a disclaimer.
Evolution is both a fact and theory. Those are not contradictory concepts, unless you happen to have a false understanding of the scientific meaning of the word “theory.”
You don’t, do you?
Now we’re supposed to take Lord Sauron’s (and Darth Tyrannus’) word for it? I won’t follow the words of such an evil man! ;)
–”you happen to have a false understanding of the scientific meaning of the word “theory.”
There’s an accepted meaning to every word, or meanings. But when your character says plainly, ”IF the theory of evolution is confirmed,” it has to mean there was never any confirmation, whatever your personal convictions might be. Mind you; I haven’t meant to diss you. It’s just an inconsistency. But then; what does a screenwriter know? They aren’t scientists, you know. This duck does not merit a place in your duck-row.
There is an accepted meaning of words in particular contexts. You clearly do not understand the meaning of “theory” in a scientific context.
Also, this video clip is not any kind of evidence for evolution, and you are misinterpreting it. It’s an amusing light anecdote that I might be using in a talk — I also happen to like Christopher Lee’s voice, and his final point in the quote, that there is no morality in a fact, is actually a useful launching point for a discussion.
If you’re going to take it so seriously that you’re going to analyze the use of conditionals in his words, though, I will add that the movie is set in 1909, when the debate over the applicability of genetics to evolution was going strong. How’s that for context?
Excellent!
You ought to thank me, PZ; because I’ve acted as a good foil for you. You’re now responding in a less aggressive voice, without rancor. I still disagree there can be a ”scientific” definition of theory which doesn’t deny it could be off. I think you’d be safer just saying, this theory is a beautiful one, not far from the truth. If it’s not impossible, we’ll eventually clinch it as fact. (It’s not possible.) I liked Vincent Price in the matter of horror films.
No, I don’t thank annoying babblers with condescending manners, or lack thereof.
Dear PZ:
I’ve tolerated a few of your lofty answers to my legit challenges. Why do you dismiss my words as just babble? I took you for educated; a defender of the truth. You’re only a friend then, to those who come in obeisance? Have you determined somehow, you are the last beer left to buy in the stadium, and all others are just empty cups? Elitist!