I've recently been given a few cds of camcorder footage taken over a number of years. I wanted to edit these in Premiere so I ripped the video into avi using a programme I downloaded (ImToo Dvd Ripper). It seemed to work fine and the videos play perfectly in media player and winamp. However when I try to import them into Premiere the videos show up but there is no sound track, so the videos play silently. Anyone know what I can do about this? Thanks.

The audio is 'probably' in a format that Premier doesn't recognize. Check the formats that Premier does recognize. Then when you do the rip, check to see if ImToo can output the audio in a format that Premier will recognize.

The AVI file format is just a container for a number of possible codecs. Some codecs record video and audio to a shared track, which Premiere can't separate, thereby losing the audio. You'll need to convert to a codec that uses separate tracks for video and audio. OR If you have Adobe Audition, you can import the audio from the video and save as a WAV file, then bringing this into Premiere to be placed onto an audio track. Please let us know if you found someone's advice to be helpful.

I use Adobe Premiere Elements 3.0 and it will rip straight from DVD or you can go to http://www.any-video-converter.com/ for their freeware video converter software( I use it all the time) and convert .avi to mpeg. I have had avi files Adobe would not handle(from the web) but Any Video Converter did the job and speedily I might add

Thanks to all. The Any Video Converter worked like a dream.