I recently had the brain storm to transfer the VOB file I needed to convert to a Quicktime over to the internal hard drive of my Mac, before initiating the conversion. Why I hadn't come up with this before is beyond me. The process goes much faster than reading the VOB off of the DVD. The reason I decided to try this was because after two attempts of doing the conversion directly off of the DVD, Mpeg Streamclip gave me a disc reading error message, and had only converted 23 of the 29 minutes. As soon as I thought of moving the VOB to the harddrive, a giant lightbulb went off, and i asked myself why hadn't I been doing this all along. Bottom line the conversion directly from the hard drive went flawlessly, and I was able to convert the entire 29 minutes.

This same mentality works great when dealing with the tapeless video formats. I have been transfering the contents of my AVCHD camers hard drive to an internal hard drive instead of ingesting directly from the camera. This has proven to be a grea workflow as well for a couple reasons. First of all it is a great archive of the footage, and second, the Final Cut Log and Transfer is much more responsive to the files on the internal hard drive than the cameras hard drive.