Adding a sine generated audio track to a video stream with ffmepg I'm generating an MPEG transport stream from a PNG file with ffmpeg succesfully with the following command:

ffmpeg -re -loop 1 -i smpte-color-bars-1080p.png -r 25 -vcodec libx264 -tune zerolatency -f mpegts udp://0.0.0.0:1234

I'd like to add an audio track to this usingthe sine function but am falling at the first hurdle.

I've tried:

ffmpeg -re -loop 1 -i smpte-color-bars-1080p.png -r 25 -vcodec libx264 -tune zerolatency -i sine=frequency=1000 -f mpegts udp://0.0.0.0:1234

and get the error:

Unknown decoder 'libx264'

Which implies that my arguments order is wrong.

So I then tried:

ffmpeg -re -loop 1 -i sine=frequency=1000 -i smpte-color-bars-1080p.png -r 25 -vcodec libx264 -tune zerolatency -f mpegts udp://0.0.0.0:1234

and get the error:

sine=frequency=1000: No such file or directory

What is the correct syntax for adding a sine generated audio in this case?

sine is a source filter, so the input format needs to be set as a filter using -f lavfi.

Use

ffmpeg -re -loop 1 -i smpte-color-bars-1080p.png -re -f lavfi -i sine=frequency=1000 -r 25 -vcodec libx264 -tune zerolatency -acodec aac -f mpegts udp://0.0.0.0:1234


Is low-framerate video recording possible on the D7100 without miniature effect? The D7100, D5200 and D5100 have a "miniature effect".  Videos recorded in this mode play back at high speed:

  "Miniature effect movies play back at high speed, compressing 30 to 45
  minutes of footage shot at 1920 × 1080/30p into a movie that plays
  back in about 3 minutes."

The effect also blurs the edges of the picture to create the illusion of a shallow depth of field.

Question: Is it possible to record a low framerate movie, in the same way as the miniature effect does, but without the blurring or any other processing?

Most websites about shooting time lapse sequences warn about limited shutter life.  I was hoping that the low framerate movie recording that the camera does in miniature effect mode could be an alternative that does not stress the mechanical shutter.

No.

The miniature effect is the only creative mode that also allows movie creation. It suffers from performance "issues" giving it's unique time lapse like feel.


Select every second clip in Premiere Pro After setting the cuts in a sequence, is there an easy way to select every second clip to delete them all at once.

When I'm editing my YouTube videos, my footage comprises silence, then a shot I want, then silence, then a shot I want, etc.  I do this as follows:

Select the whole clip.
Click on the timeline where I want to cut.
Press Ctrl-K to cut there.
Press Shit-Delete to delete the first part of clip.
Click on the clip again to select it.
Click on the timeline where I want to cut.
Press Ctrl-K to cut there.
Click on the clip to the right.
Click on the timeline where I want to cut.
Press Ctrl-K to cut there.
Press Shift-Delete to delete the clip to the left (the currently-selected clip).
Repeat.

This isn't exactly what you want, but it sounds as though our workflows are similar.  I just delete the clips I don't want as I'm making my cuts, by using Shift-Delete.


Video compression- how to prioritize one area over another? I'm not sure if what I'm asking is possible, but here's the situation.

I have a video I have made for distribution on the Internet (YouTube, Vimeo, etc.)

The video clip is a composite of the following:

a person talking (shot against a green screen)
a city scene in a harbor at night; the bottom half of the frame is filled with moving water (the ocean)

So, when I compress this using standard settings, the waves are given the most detail (because they move the most?), and the person shows more compression artifacts.

However, ideally, I want the person to be kept in the highest possible detail, and the water to be compressed more.

The compressor itself doesn't have any settings for something like this, but since the clip is a composite, I was thinking there might be a way to compress the layers separately...  Can this kind of thing be done?

I'm using Davinci Resolve but I also have access to FCPX.

This is an interesting question, but I don't think that you will find a good solution without changing your inputs (the video elements you are using). I'm not aware of any software that allows you to prioritize compression by area. The compressor itself usually makes all these kinds of decisions for you.

Aside from that, you said the magic (not good) word for compression: Youtube. Even if you could find a way to do the above, you basically give it all up when you upload it to Youtube, where they will run their own fixed compression algorithms that will ruin all your work.

I think there are a couple of things you can do (perhaps all of them in combination):

If you haven't already, try doing 2-pass compression, instead of one-pass. This will take longer, but the compressor will have a chance to analyze the video on the first pass, and that may possibly help improve your output a little.
Massage that water footage. If you can get rid of it completely and replace it with something else that causes less trouble, do it. If not, you can try things like:

Apply some blur (either chroma [color portion of the signal], luma [monochrome portion of the signal] or both) to the footage.
It would also help to run the water footage through a denoiser first.

Both denoising and slight blurring should help reduce the amount of bandwidth that your compressor needs to dedicate to that area of your video.


After Effects: How do I achieve collapsing transform using nested CC Cylinder Effect? I am just preparing for a new project where I am going to need a lot of cylinder-shapish layers reacting to my 3d moving camera. In order to have eveerything organised I am using precomps to nest seperate elements.

Usually by activating "collapsing transforms" (further explained here: http://www.digitalsandwich.net/portfolio/ae-quicktip-collapse-transformations/) I can have one master Camera in my outer composition and have all elements reacting to it accordingly. But somehow, using the cc cylinder effect in precomps, it messes up.

Does anyone know why? Or have a workarround?

Thanks in Advance
Marten

I don't think CC cylinder create true 3D objects, they are really just flat 2D planes with 3D shaded shapes on them.  I think Hans' suggestion of creating 3D shapes in Cinema4D (a basic version ships with AE CC 2015) is probably the way to go.


Cheap solution for shooting with multiple (>2) cameras in sync (genlock or LANC?) I'm doing research into natural phenomena in computer vision, and I'm looking for a method of shooting video from multiple camera angles. It's likely that the subject will move very erratically, therefore any synchronization issues between the cameras will be a problem. Imagine a flame or flowing water, it's hard to say exactly but it's going to need to be microseconds rather than milliseconds. I will want to use as many as 8 cameras, ideally constrained by budget rather than the ability to keep them in sync.

The cameras the department owns are Canon DSLRs, however after much searching it seems infeasible to synchronize them, especially with this level of accuracy. Therefore if I can find affordable cameras that can be synchronized easily, we might be able to buy some.

The two options available to me seem to be genlock and LANC. From what I can tell, I'm not going to get hold of a single genlock-able camera for under, say, £5000. Even forgetting the genlock signal, that's too much for us to be able to afford one, let alone 8. The Sony/Canon LANC thing seems more feasible, however I can't find any reliable information about how to go about setting this up or what cameras actually support it which are available now. I keep hitting dead-ends trying to look into this, and it doesn't help that mostly everyone doing this is trying to shoot in just stereo. Can anyone advise me on what set up we'd need and how much it would roughly cost? Or if there's some other synchronization solution that someone would like to recommend? Ease and cost are the biggest factors! Quality of video would of course be nice, but something is better than nothing.

Thanks! And I hope this doesn't sound like a shopping recommendation question. While I do want to go shopping, I really just need help understanding the synchronization techniques, and I'll work out what to buy after that!

A year after posting this question, I'm getting a few extra comments and answers, which is really great. It is technically still a problem, but let me share what I've learned in the last year, in case anyone else stumbles on this page with a similar problem.

We came up with two inexpensive solutions to the problem which I think will work, in the right conditions.

Use a high speed strobe light. This only works if the subject does not emit light (unfortunately not the case for me) and can be placed in a very dark room. Get hold of a very fast very accurate strobe light, then set it to go off at the same frequency as the cameras, say 50fps/50hz. Then set the shutter speed of all the cameras to 1/50th of a second, i.e. the shutter is always open. Place the subject in a very dark room, and set the aperture such that the video appears black without the light. Then illuminate with the strobe light. The videos will naturally be synchronised, because the only light they get is from the strobe, and it happens once per frame. Difficulty is getting a precise enough strobe. But I hear that they are used in heavy manufacturing operations to inspect blades/wheels/belts etc, which can't be turned off. You light the tool only with a strobe that has analogue control, and slowly increase the speed of the strobe, and as you reach the frequency of the tool it will appear to slow down, and eventually stop. Now you can inspect for problems. Just don't touch it ;).
Use the vsync signal on the composite video out of the cameras. This is inspired by http://samj.snappages.com/. This signal is sent out regularly every frame, and with some electronics you can measure the difference between the signal on two (or more) different cameras. You can then power cycle the camera (or on some cameras, take a picture. More on that later...) and measure it again, and so on. If you are clever with the timing on the power cycling you can bring them closer and closer together to within a threshold. We didn't end up trying this just because we didn't end up building the circuit, and we figured this would just be too fiddly to work with, especially with more than 2 cameras.

As I said, we didn't end up doing either of these. We ended up putting in a bid for funding for a not-inexpensive system, one that is designed for this exact purpose, from a company such as NorPix. These are synchronised over ethernet and come set up. I was never able to find out how exactly (protocol etc) they use ethernet to synchronise, so if someone wants to explain that I'd be very interested. Last time I was updated, I was told we did find some money, but of course, if you know anything about academic bureaucracy you won't be surprised to find out that I'm still waiting for the equipment!

If anyone does have a magic idea that achieves true synchronisation inexpensively, I'm still open to suggestions.

To close, I will mention a strategy that did not work, in my tests. And that is the one on this website: http://3dfilmfactory.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=93:gen-lock-canon-5d-mark-ii-cameras-and-shoot-3d

Granted, we have different hardware, Canon 60Ds, and we had very cheap off-brand wireless shutter releases. However I have no reason to think they caused any noticeable difference to the setup in the link. I set up tests using an LED device, like Bokan suggested in his answer, and the average difference in synchronisation only dropped by about 1ms after using the wireless shutter release compared to the control tests, and sometimes it made it worse. I didn't do any statistical analysis, but I suspect it would not be significant compared to chance. I think it's very likely that 3D Film Factory either weren't shooting material in which they'd notice the synchronisation problem, or their more expensive hardware gave a slightly more reliable result which still isn't measurably that different. Scaling to more than 2 cameras, I'm confident that it's not a reliable method.

However, using the remote shutter release does reset the video. If you use the 'record' button on the cameras (or a remote), then it simply starts saving the footage that is already being processed. In other words, if you measure the synchronisation in several different tests without turning the camera off, taking a picture, or letting it go into power save mode, then the synchronisation will be the same. You could incorporate this mechanism into approach number (2) above: rather than power cycling the cameras it could take pictures until the vsync signals were in line. It would be a cool device, we just never got round to actually building it.

Thanks again for any suggestions. I hope someday someone will find this useful, and the months I wasted trying to solve it will save someone a bit of time!


Combine audio from one video file with video from another I would like to combine high-resolution video in English with a foreign-language audio track from a low-resolution version of the same movie.

What is good software (for Windows 7) to combine audio from one video file with video (same video content) from another?

Ideally, it would also automatically correct for time offset based on the video content (frame similarity).

IF you have Win7, Movie Maker will do it.

If not, almost every video editing software where you can have more than 1 clip will do it.
If you thinking about doing some more stuff, you could use Hitfilm or Davinci Resolve.


Difference Blending Option I saw this cool effect that blends bubbles into each other, and the space that they are overlapping is transparent.

How can I achieve this effect in after effects?

You are interested in blending mode "Difference"

You can use it in "Blending mode" of layer, or on masks.

UPD: Adding screenshot, as asked

Red — Mask Blending

Blue — Layer Blending


Fixing flickring old video I have a bunch video that looks like it's flickering. The video started as Super8 (70s), was converted to VHS some years ago (90s?), and was recently converted to AVI. It looks something like this

Hover the mouse over the yellow area. Hidden because the flickering would probably drive you crazy.

Are there any tools or filters to fix this semi automatically. I thought about trying to write something that extracts all the frames and tries to figure out what level they should be. That sounds like a big project but it got me wondering if this is already a solved problem.

You can use Premiere Pro or similar video editing software and plugin Flicker Free from Digital Anarchy with one of the preset.

Result of plugin work

Settings of the plugin in my case

Also I know some other methods but they are poorer and harder.


What causes a loud tone/noise in Blackmagic ATEM talkback? Setup
I have a Blackmagic ATEM 4 M/E and one of their studio cameras. I have a headphone on the camera and an active speaker on the ATEM so I can hear talkback.
Problem
There is a super loud whine/tone/whistle/noise. It is similar to a 1kHz square tone. Even if I set volume to minimum it is hearable.
What I tried
I tried to disconnect the cable going into "SDI in" from the camera. The tone is still there but only in the ATEM so the source has to be the mixer. I added a mic to the talkback XLR input but it can't be heard. I also tried to add a sound mixer to this same XLR input and even if I set volume to the max it can be barely heard but the tone is still super loud compared to it. What is the problem?

tl;dr
Make sure none of the SDI outputs of the ATEM are routed back to its inputs.
Talkback feedback loop
The ATEM uses SDI channel 15 and 16 for talkback. If you route one of your SDI outputs to the SDI inputs (either directly via a simple SDI cable or trough a system of devices like record/playback devices) you will get a feedback loop that causes this high tone.
Possible solutions
The simplest solution is to break the loop by removing the cable/devices causing it. Obviously this way you will loose the functionality you tried to add trough it, like having M/E 1 PGM as one of your inputs so you can use it as an input on M/E 2, 3 or 4, so if you would like to keep the loop without the noise you have to deembed or redirect the audio from channel 15 and 16. You can use something like the Decimator MD-HX Cross Converter that can reroute SDI audio channels.


Converting video with different resolutions slightly affects in file size, why? I'm converting a video with resolution 960x720p using HandBrake on Mac. When I convert two videos with exactly the same settings but with different resolutions, the file size is almost the same. Actually, the video with larger resolution (960x720p) is slightly smaller than the video with smaller resolution (720x540p). File size of the larger resolution video is 18,7 MB and the file size of the smaller resolution video is 19,1 MB. Like I said, the conversion settings are exactly the same, only resolution is different. I'm using H.264 codec with variable bitrate. Please check the settings from the attached screenshot.

Why the file size isn't smaller on the lower resolution video?

You are using the same bitrate for each video.  The bitrate determines how much data is used per second.  The resolution has nothing to do with how much data is used, it only impacts the number of points of data which are encoded (and thus determines part of the quality of the video output for a given bitrate).

What you end up with is a lower resolution file that more faithfully reproduces the original format since it has more data storage allocated per pixel where as the higher resolution file produces more pixels in the output, but as it has less data available per pixel, it is a less faithful reproduction.

It is a fluid question as to whether you lose more quality from the downscale or bitrate being used, so there is no preferred value to change.  In some situations the best overall quality will be to reduce the resolution and bitrate and in other cases the best result will be to keep the resolution the same but only reduce the bitrate.

If you intend to make different resolutions for different connection speeds, you should decrease both the resolution and the bitrate.  This will result in a smaller file with similar relative quality, so long as you use similar compression ratios (the relationship between the size of the input and the file size).

For example, as a rough guideline, if a video is 1080p and takes 225MB in total, then you would want the 720p version to take around 100MB because there is a little under half the pixels in a 720p video than there is in the 1080p video.  The amount of data used to store each pixel is thus the same, so the amount of artifacts should be pretty similar.  (Though the loss of detail will make it slightly unpredictable, so it doesn't hold exactly.  I'm oversimplifying a bit since compression is actually a pretty complicated field.)


After Effects Layer Properties Interaction Just new here :)
I want to be able to do 2(-ish) things on my layers on After Effects.
(Layer 1 = l1; Layer 2 = L2; Blur amount = BA)
Increase L2’s BA whenever I increase L1’s BA. (Or the opposite, decrease BAs)
Change L2’s opacity to 0% if L2’s BA is 0 and it’s opacity to 100% if L2’s BA is >1 or <1.

Essentially I’m trying to make these individual properties interact with each other without using too much slider controls.

For the blur, just use the pick-whip to link the properties. you might want to read up on how to link properties with expressions using the pick whip.
For the opacity, you'll need some javascript. what you want to do is set the opacity of L1 to if L2 blur is 0 then 0, or else if it's not  equal to 1 then 100%.

let L2 = thisComp.layer("layer 2 name");
//use the pick whip to get the actual property name here
let blurAmt = l2.effect("Blur effect name")("Blurriness or whatever");
//set the opacity to 0 if bluriness is 0 '===' means 'exactly equal to'
if (blurAmt === 0){
    0
} else if (blurAmt != 1) { //'!=' means 'not equal to'
    100
} else {
    ???? // you haven't specified what you want the opacity to be if L2's blur is 1
}


How can I make pseudo 3D movements to static PNG in AE? I know about CC Mesh Warp and I use it to move static pictures in simple cartoon scenes, but is there anything more convenient?

Like for example I need this pony to slowly sway left and right while staying on the same spot. What is the best way to do it?

Thank you!

Use Puppet Tools.

⌘/ctrlp will switch to the puppet-pin tool. Click on the layer where you want to be able to drag it, say on the head, then click any other areas that you want to have control over - so, if you want the feet to stay still, put a pin on the three visible feet, and maybe the tail.

Now move the playhead down the timeline, and select one of the little yellow dots and drag it. This will deform the layer like it was stretchy. By default when you put a pin on a layer it is already animated, so if you wind the playhead back to the original point you'll see the pony moving. The other puppet tools let you adjust the stiffness of parts of the mesh, and control which parts overlap.

To get really hardcore you can rig the layer, as you would a 3D character. One of the best tools for rigging IMHO is DUIK, and not only because it's free.


Camera features useful when recording a live high school basketball game? What features should I be looking for in a camera (typically found in cameras less than $1000) for shooting a high school basketball game?  The intent is to use the video for "Game Film" type analysis (so picture quality for rebroadcasting purposes is not as important).

Some things I have noticed already (borrowing cameras from friends)

Tripod is very helpful
Most cameras wont cover the whole court (from top bleacher position) in a single shot. (Is there a feature of the camera or tripod that would make this less painful, wide angle?)
Long battery life (1.5 hours)

You may want to look at an action camera like the GoPro.  They are extremely limited in terms of versatility, but they are small, cheap (relatively speaking) and capture a wide field of view.  They wouldn't be suitable for broadcast use or making videos for fans, but they would be terrific at unattended capturing all the action from multiple angles to be able to review after the game to see what happened.


Two video sources framerates vary by .01 FPS. Will this cause problems? I'm just getting started and have some user-level equipment, not professional grade.

My Sony Handycam outputs MTS and MP4 at 29.97 FPS.

My LG K30 smartphone outputs MP4 at 29.98FPS

Using Davinci Resolve, I notice a slight stutter in my rendered files. Is this .01 FPS difference the cause? If so, how can I get them to match before I import them into the project?

I'm working on a fairly modest laptop with an intel core i5 processor 1.7GHz - 2.4Ghz and 8GB Ram. Video controller just says "Intel(R) HD Graphics Family". I'd assume it uses part of that 8G of ram.

This shouldn't really be a problem and probablly is just a rounding error.
The shutter may come from somewhere else, are the export settings matching the 29.97FPS?


Camera problems in After Effects I have this problem where when I add a camera layer, my composition disappears (but only when the view mode is set to Active Camera). How can I fix it?

I also have problems zooming in on just a part of the composition. Like from wide view to a specific layer.

It seems I was a complete noob ( for I am new with After Effects ). I couldn't see my composition because the blur on the camera was turned to 100% and everything was completely out of focus. Also, I couldn't zoom in on a specific layer because the camera was underneath them. This video helped me a lot to understand the way camera works in Adobe After Effects, and I wish I had found it earlier because I am dealing with this problem for a while now.
Thank you @JasonConrad for trying to help!


Improving frame/image quality on Handbrake? I created a .cdr file from a DVD and converted it to an .mp4 with Handbrake. My only issue is Handbrake's default settings create a somewhat grainy picture. The file size went from 1.24Gb to ~100Mb so I assume that explains it.

I'm unfamiliar with the determinants of frame image quality. Here's a screenshot of Handbrake's interface, might someone point me in the direction of the thing to toggle that might improve the .mp4 quality?

Under the video tab, you'll see two options. Video Codec, which is how the video is encoded (h.264 is the standard for .mp4 files), and Quality, which controls the level of video compression that occurs.

It's the Quality slider that you're mostly worried about if you want to keep it an mp4. Drag that slider to the right to improve the quality (this will also increase the file size) or to the left to decrease the file size (this will also decrease the quality). Or if you know exactly the size of file you want, divide the desired file size by the number of seconds and you can input the kb/s that you want the video to be compressed to (smaller file sizes means higher compression and lower quality, higher file sizes equals less compression and higher quality).

In order to test to make sure that you like your quality selection and file size, you can choose a single chapter of the film (if your cdr has that stored) and run that through the encoder and test the quality.

Another thing that is available to choose is the video resolution, but in my experience with handbrake, it's quite temperamental, so I only recommend messing with that if you really need to.


Can this be created in a free animation software like Synfig or OpenToonz? This animation is made in After Effects but can this be made in a free software??

I think you can use Krita 4.0+ for this animation.


Davinci Resolve 16: Need to restore timeline to original aspect ratio I'm new to DR and was trying out some different aspect ratios on one of my timelines. Somehow I messed thing up and now can't seem to get back to the original aspect ratio 1.66. attached is a screenshot of my situation. I have attempted every way of changing it back, but can't seem to make it work.  Using Mac with Catalina.

Grateful for any assistance that you are able to give me.

![Now when I drag a clip (any clip) into the time line, it comes in like this.On their own clips are fine.
]2

It's hard to know what's going on without knowing your project settings or what kind of footage you're using.  But the relevant settings are under Project Settings->Master Settings->Timeline resolution, Project settings->Master Settings->Pixel aspect ratio, and Project Settings->Image Scaling->Input Scaling->Mismatched resolution files.  Unless you're editing old DV footage or unless you used an anamorphic lens (you would know), Pixel aspect ratio should be set to Square, and Mismatched resolution files should be anything except "Stretch Frame to all Corners."


Correct "stripes" in VHS record Recently I recorded my old VHS tapes to my hard disk. There is one thing bothering me concerning the video quality. Whenever the camera moves, the motion produces visible "stripes" in the picture:

It seems like each line is shifted. Can this be corrected by a filter? If yes, what filter can I use? I prefer virtualdub for editing.

Those are interlacing artifacts. They become visible when the motion in the video is faster than the field rate, so that when both fields are combined into a progressive scan image, the movement is visible in a single frame. They can be removed with a de-interlace filter. I've never personally used one with Virtualdub, but several are available:

MSU
Smart Deinterlace
vddeint
Various older ones


Two green screens in FCPX? I am a beginner FCPX user and am currently working on setting up a green screen studio for interviews/podcasts/etc. I am planning on painting a wall with this paint and using a this for my floor mat (in the light green color option). I am planning on doing the keying in either FCPX or Motion, but I am unsure if it (they) will be able to handle to slightly different colors in the same chroma key frame. Is it possible to make the floor and wall, even though they are slightly different shades of green, into one seamless green screen in FCPX or Motion?

Thanks!

It depends, you can typically adjust a tolerance for the level of removal.  If the colors of green are closer than the next nearest color, you should be fine, if not, then you would have to do two keys, though I would expect you should be able to stack two layers to get the necessary transparency.  (Basically keying over a keyed image, since the result of a keyed image is a layer with alpha.)

Keep in mind that lighting will also be a significant concern and you could always paint the floor tiles as well to get the same color on everything.


How can I find camcorders with high quality like Nikon D3100 but without its time limit? I like the video clarity and quality of the Nikon D3100. However, it has a time limit on it, which I don't like.

How can I go about finding an HD camcorder with similar video clarity to this camera, but without such a limit?

I am not certain I understand why you need to shoot a scene for longer than 10 minutes.
Most of the movies I make are under 4 minutes and include up to 30 or more shots some lasting less than a 1/4 second while others may last a minute. I only mention this to give you an idea what I am used to. I have both a camcorder that can shoot as long as there is memory--up to an hour possibly, and I have a pocket point and shoot that has time constraints based on format, not unlike the Nikon D3100.

Assuming you have a need to shoot a scene for longer than 10 minutes such as a traffic study or to document a school play I will proceed to address the issues.

Reviewing the tech specs of the Nikon D3100 I see the following HD movie settings:

HD 1,920×1,080 / 24 fps

HD 1,280×720 / 30 fps

HD 1,280×720 / 24 fps

Noting that these all have a 10 minute recording limit.

Many DSLR cameras are bound to a 10 minute recording limit due to the way the firmware/software is designed to handle memory storage. Many cinematographers and photographers alike are pushing to have this issue addressed as in allowing for
longer takes so you are not alone.

Choosing a camcorder is a reasonable alternative but there will be tradeoffs. Here are few that come to mind. YMMV (your mileage may very).

1) The "Glass": the Nikon D3100 has a removable lens so you can swap in other lenses of different focal lengths and quality while most camcorders have a non-removable zoom lens.

2) FOCUS: the Nikon D3100 will allow you to change focus while shooting video while most camcorders do not allow you to manual focus on the fly or make this difficult by not having a focus ring on the lens but an external wheel which generally causes camera shake.

3) Shutter Speed: I am uncertain if the Nikon D3100 allows for changing the shutter speed while shooting video, but more advanced DSLRs will, e.g. Canon 5D Mark II. This is a significant feature for cinematographers engaged in time-lapse movies, where 'drag the shutter' is very desirable.

(NOTE: one thing you will trade up to is that the Nikon D3100 only records in mono, while almost every camcorder records in stereo if not Dolby 5.1 Surround.)

Here is a criteria that might assist you in choosing a camcorder.
Since the price of D3100 is nearly $649 USD MSRP, then you might consider using this as a baseline for your search in that price range e.g. Sony HDR-CX260V/T about $549.

Alternately you might consider the clarity and quality of the lens on the Nikon D3100 so choosing a Panasonic TM900K that comes with a Leica 12x zoom should be a pretty good contender--about $900.

Or perhaps you favor a camcorder that allows you to use a variety of lenses such as the Sony NEX-VG10 or NEX-VG20H--nearly $2000.

You might want to review the specs of each of these camcorders and visit local stores to give them a test ride.

One very important point, be sure that the camcorder you choose has a video format that works well with your current video editing software, this can definitely be a show stopper.
Currently your Nikon D3100 uses .mov files while Sony uses AVCHD and Panasonic has their version of AVCHD. You might want to join .mov files to work with another format so you want to be sure that they all get along in the same video suite.


Simple, easy to configure streaming server for linux - just transcode & stream After spending a few hours setting up and configuring PlexMediaServer, I realized that it looks awesome for home use, but has some impediments for serving up content to the public at large.

I have 50 or so video presentations (genetics & infant healthcare if you must know) that need to be served up.  The presentations will be available on a web page, and I would simply need a link to point back to a file that the streaming server would transcode & play.  The HTML is not important - I can have simple href links for that.

Are there any relatively easy to configure and set up streaming servers that can offer this basic functionality?   My server is CentOS 6.5.

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-stream-videos-with-nginx-and-jwplayer-on-centos-6 makes Nginx look pretty simple to set-up as the streaming server. I've not used it but I have used jwplayer and that worked well for me (I was streaming from vlc/vlm). Another good option for the player end would be jplayer.

Web Videos via Watch Folders Transcode is a reasonable approach to the transcode issue.


Is there a 4K action camera solution that does NOT have perspective distortion? I was looking at alternatives to the GoPro (such as the Sony FDR-X1000V), but they all seem to only shoot wide-angle with significant perspective distortion (fisheye). Are there action cameras which do not introduce this sort of distortion?

There are two major advantages to recording fisheye distortion rather than rectilinear distortion.  First, it is optically easier to do, which means one can make lenses that are better in other metrics (such as chromatic aberration, resolution, vignetting, etc) while remaining small enough and light enough to fit into the body of an action camera.  Second, the relative size of an object doesn't change radically as its moves from center to edge when the camera is not under tight control.  For that reason, it is possible to define a crop area that follows the subject as it bounces around the full frame and then use motion tracking to create a relatively stable view of the object, which can then be de-fished.  If it were rectilinear, the stabilization process might have to do some major zoom and tilt corrections as well, which would be very distracting.


Capture Date For Video I have tons of videos of my children and they have been moved from drive to drive many times over the years.  Is there a way to easily get the date the video was taken?  I'm importing them into iTunes currently, but I can find nothing that shows the date the video was taken?

MediaInfo gives you a way to check the file metadata, including the creation date for the video and audio streams. This is free, cross platform and open source and also provides a GUI for you to check.

If you're up for using the command line, with MediaInfo:

mediainfo in.mp4 | grep "Encoded date" | head -n1 | cut -d: -f2-

With FFmpeg's ffprobe:

ffprobe -v quiet -print_format flat -show_format in.mp4 | grep creation_time | cut -d= -f2-


Optimizing MPEG2 Encoder in Adobe Media Encoder We're looking at using MPEG2 as an alternative to ProRes 422 for delivery & archiving.

There are many options in there which are beyond my knowledge; I would like to understand them and maybe get even better results. Is there a guide to these terms?

Macroblock quantization
VBV buffer size
Noise Control (Sensitivity/Reduction)
Write SDE
Intra DC Precision (8/9/10 bits)
Ignore Frame Interval

After some deep Googling, I did find explanations for a few of these options:

  MPEG macroblock quantization level. Valid values are from 2 to 31. Low
  values of this variable mean higher quality and higher bitrate, so 2
  is the highest quality and 31 is the lowest quality.

  VBV buffer size in units of 16k bits. The meaning of this parameter is
  confusing because it is used to help predict if the MPEG decoder might
  suffer buffer overflows or underflows. VBV buffer over/under flows are
  more commonly a problem when in CBR mode. If significant artifacts are
  present in the generated movie, try increasing this parameter.

(http://vis.lbl.gov/NERSC/Software/express/help6.2/help/relnotes/mpeg.htm)

  Intra DC Precision: the MPEG-1 DC value is mandatory quantized to a
  precision of 8 bits. MPEG-2 introduced 9, 10, and 11 bit precision set
  on a picture basis to increase the accuracy of the DC component, which
  by very nature, has the most significant contribution towards picture
  quality. Particularly useful at high bit rates to reduce
  posterization. Main and Simple Profiles are limited to 8, 9, or 10
  bits of precision.

http://www.gadegast.de/frank/mpegfaq/mpe1736.html

  In MPEG-2 video, Intra DC Precision indicates the number of bits for
  quantized DC coefficients of intra-coded blocks; it takes one of the
  values of 8, 9, 10, or 11 bits. The more bits are used, the more
  precise quantization is achieved.

http://avs.kddilabs.jp/mpeg/mpcs/faqe.html


Convert mp4 to webm without quality loss with ffmpeg What is the best way to convert a mp4 file to webm without quality loss (using vp8 or vp9) with ffmpeg?

If I do ffmpeg -i in.mp4 out.webm the quality is very bad. I can specify a target bitrate via -b:v and constant quality mode via crf, i.e.

ffmpeg -i in.mp4 -crf 10 -b:v 1M out.webm

This gives better quality. However for this I have to lookup the bitrate of the input video (here 1M).

I also noticed that if you specify a much larger value for the target bitrate than the bitrate of the input (here for example -b:v 100M), ffmpeg just seems to use approximately the bitrate from the input video with vp9 or  slightly higher bitrate with vp8. However this solution doesn't seem to be the intended way to do this.

How would you choose the crf value and why?

Is there a parameter which automatically chooses the bitrate of the input file and a suitable crf value to get the same quality as the input file?

Answer
Use two-pass Constant Quality mode:¹
ffmpeg  -i input.mp4  -b:v 0  -crf 30  -pass 1  -an -f webm /dev/null
ffmpeg  -i input.mp4  -b:v 0  -crf 30  -pass 2  output.webm

Explanation:
Setting the video bitrate to zero while also specifying the CRF (Constant Rate Factor) enables Constant Quality mode which targets a certain perceptual quality level. For VP9, the CRF can range from 0 (best quality) to 63 (smallest file size).
It is important to set the video bitrate to zero. If you do not specify a video bitrate, it defaults to something low which gets you Constrained Quality mode, where each frame has a maximum bitrate. While that can be useful for streaming, it reduces quality significantly as frames with a lot of motion will not have the bandwidth needed to look good.
Another part of the reason you’re losing quality is that webm (VP9) prefers to encode in two passes for best results. The first pass compiles statistics about the video which is then used in the second pass to make a smaller and higher quality video.
Please see the ffmpeg VP9 documentation if you’d like to learn more.
A word about transcoding
By the way, in general, transcoding formats (taking a compressed video and recompressing it with a different codec) is a bad idea as you’ll not only add the normal errors from lossy video encoding, but you’ll waste bits in the new format trying to preserve the artifacts from the old.
If you mean “without quality loss” literally
The -lossless 1 option of ffmpeg’s VP9 encoder enables lossless quality mode, but with a potentially enormous increase in filesize.
All you need is this:
ffmpeg  -i input.mp4  -lossless 1  output.webm

When I tried -lossless 1 on a low-quality mp4, the resulting webm was 100× larger, which was not accceptable to me. However, if your mp4 files are already very high quality, I expect the size difference will not be so great.

Footnote 1: If you're using Microsoft Windows instead of UNIX, change /dev/null to NUL.


Workflow for making interesting videos I'd like to start a bit of a travel video blog about my adventures, but I'm wondering how I can:

Make my videos interesting, and
Make them look and sound reasonably professional.

I currently have the following devices at my disposal:

Canon 60D + lenses
HD capable point and shoot Fujifilm camera
Zoom H1 Mic
Pretty average tripod
MacBook Pro with a range of different software available.

What tips/workflow advice would you give for getting started out?

Little bit confused. The title of the question refers to workflow but then in the description you ask for advice on how to cut it together...

Might just do my best to answer both.

Workflow. You should shoot on your 60D mostly as that'll give you the better looking image. Use the point and shoot if you're doing anything that might compromise the safety of your gear, like skateboarding.
So you have your footage. Dump it onto the computer and convert it using MPEG Streamclip, I would recommend converting the footage to Apple ProRes 422. Import transcoded footage and audio from Zoom mic (if any) into preferred editing software. Edit it. Export to these parameters if you are uploading to the internet.

Interesting product. There are lots of techniques you could use to make a video interesting and it depends largely on the footage that you have. You haven't specified what style of travel video that you want to make and I won't sit here and explain all the different types (mainly because I don't know and secondly because it would take ages). But I will suggest two that stand out to me.

Think of it as a music video. Film things that look interesting, film the people that you meet (ask permission), film your feet – literally film anything that looks cool. You should of course film the landmarks if there are any. Get a large variety of shots: extreme long shots, mid shots, close ups, even macro if you can. In my experience, the more close ups you have the more interesting a video like this will be. And then, using the workflow I described earlier, cut it together. Pick a song that you think matches well with your footage and then cut to that. You won't have to worry about your audio if you choose this path as you'd just use the music and delete the camera's audio track in FCP.
Chat to camera... Pretty straight forward. Go somewhere quiet (and scenic if possible, but quiet is the main thing), set up your camera on a tripod, set up your mic and place it in the best position, hit record and chat away.

Hope that helps.


How to choose a VCR for pulling stock footage from VHS for theatrical release I'm making a documentary and some of our historical footage is on VHS.  I'll be capturing the footage into our Non-Linear editor (We already have the analog to digital converter worked out).

What should I look for when choosing a high-quality VCR that can preserve as much quality as possible when playing these tapes. (They're not SVHS, in fact they're VHS-C which we'll use a tape adapter with.)

Also, do they make $5000 VCR's that the FBI might use to analyze tapes?

I worked on a documentary project two years ago. The solution that worked best for me was a VHS Recorder, that had 6 heads and was able to play NTSC and PAL. I could not find a VHS Recorder with HDD or DVD recording unit, that played both formats.

VHS (and VHS-C) tape quality is limited. No matter how big your budget is, you will not get a full color-range HD video-material.


Remove static text from video? I have a video with text on the side of it and I want to remove it. The good thing is that the video has no changes in that area of the screen for the rest of the video. Meaning that the movement in the video is on the right side of the video while the left side, which has the text has no animation what so ever. Is it possible to remove that text.

Here is a link to the video also, the text is the "press any button" thing.

Thank you!

What you're asking for is called Inpainting and is difficult enough for still images. The result is passable to distracting depending on the size and transparency of the text, the surrounding image, and compression. I found only one mention of inpainting at video stack exchange here. You can see a demonstration of the algorithm here.

Using ffmpeg and mathematica, the following procedure is a quick and dirty solution. The result can be better than blurring, again depending on the characteristics of the video.

Export frames:

ffmpeg -i vid.mp4 D:\data\vid\frames-%06d.png

Create a text mask using the average of every 100 frames or so.

fnames = FileNames["D:/data/vid/frames-*.jpg"];
mfnames = fnames[[1 ;; All ;; Floor[0.005*Length[fnames]]]];
imgs = Import /@ mfnames;
mimg = Mean[imgs]
mask = Dilation[Binarize[mimg, {0.37, 1}], 1]

Note: the parameters in Binarize will need to be tweaked for every video.

If the video contains a fixed camera or other parts similar in color to the text throughout its entire length, you must exclude those parts by multiplying by a 2nd mask (the numbers are positions of the lower left and upper right corners of a rectangle that surround the text to be removed):

Image[Graphics[{
{Black, Rectangle[{0, 0}, ImageDimensions[mask]]},
{White, Rectangle @@ {{377.84411276948595`,
    161.72470978441106`}, {163.44941956882255`,
    127.76119402985057`}}},
}, PlotRangePadding -> None],
ImageSize -> ImageDimensions[mask]];
mask = mask*%

Apply inpaint algorithm:

Inpaint[Import[fnames[[1]]], mask]

This line processes all frames and saves them to a new directory:

Export[FileNameJoin[MapAt[# <> ".output" &, FileNameSplit[#], -2]],
    Inpaint[Import[#], mask]] & /@ fnames

Or if you want it done 1000 times faster use this C++ code:

#include <iostream>
#include <vector>
#include <thread>
#include <opencv2/opencv.hpp>
#include <boost/filesystem.hpp>

// args: D:\data\text_remove\frames_full  D:\data\text_remove\frames_full\mask.png

using namespace std;
namespace fs = boost::filesystem;

void process_files(const vector<string>& infile, const vector<string>& outfile, const cv::Mat& mask, int i0, int i1)
{
    for (int i = i0; i < i1; ++i)
    {
        cv::Mat img = cv::imread(infile[i]);

        if (img.empty())
        {
            cout << "process_files(): imread(): " << "[" << i0 << "," << i1 << ")  : " << i1 - i0 << endl;
            break;
        }

        cv::Mat out;
        cv::inpaint(img, mask, out, 3, cv::INPAINT_NS);

        cv::imwrite(outfile[i], out);
    }
}

void threaded_process_files(const vector<string>& in, const vector<string>& out, const cv::Mat& mask, int threads)
{
    int step = in.size() / threads;
    int rem = in.size() % threads;

    vector<thread> pool;

    for (int i = 0; i < (threads - 1); ++i)
    {
        int i0 = i * step;
        int i1 = (i + 1) * step;
        pool.push_back(thread(process_files, in, out, mask, i0, i1));
    }

    int i0 = (threads - 1) * step;
    int i1 = in.size();
    pool.push_back(thread(process_files, in, out, mask, i0, i1));

    for (auto& th : pool)
        th.join();
}

int main(int argc, char** argv)
{
    if (argc < 2)
    {
        cout << "argv < 2: Missing input directory" << endl;
        return EXIT_FAILURE;
    }

    if (argc < 3)
    {
        cout << "argv < 3: Missing mask image" << endl;
        return EXIT_FAILURE;
    }

    cv::Mat mask(cv::imread(argv[2], cv::IMREAD_GRAYSCALE));

    if (mask.empty())
    {
        cout << "imread(): failed to read mask" << endl;
        return EXIT_FAILURE;
    }

    cout << "mask image: " << mask.size() << endl;

    fs::path infile(argv[1]);
    fs::path ifstem = infile.stem();
    fs::path ifleaf = infile.leaf();
    fs::path ifparent = infile.parent_path();

    if (!fs::is_directory(infile))
    {
        cout << infile << " is not a directory" << endl;
        return EXIT_FAILURE;
    }

    string fstr = ifleaf.string() + ".output";
    fs::path outdir = ifparent / fstr;

    if (!fs::exists(outdir))
    {
        if (!fs::create_directory(outdir))
        {
            cout << "create_directory() failed on: " << outdir << endl;
            return EXIT_FAILURE;
        }
    }

    vector<string> fnames;
    vector<string> fnames_out;

    clock_t t0 = clock();

    cout << "Scanning directory images" << endl;

    int i = 0;
    for (fs::directory_iterator di(infile); di != fs::directory_iterator(); ++di)
    {
        fs::path fpath = di->path();
        fs::path leaf = fpath.leaf();
        fs::path fpath_new = outdir / leaf;

        fnames.push_back(fpath.string());
    }

    cout << (double)(clock() - t0) / CLOCKS_PER_SEC << endl;
    cout << "Processing images" << endl;
    t0 = clock();

    threaded_process_files(fnames, fnames_out, mask, 16);

    clock_t t1 = clock();
    double dt = (double)(t1 - t0) / CLOCKS_PER_SEC;
    cout << dt << endl;
    cout << dt / fnames.size() << endl;

    return EXIT_SUCCESS;
}


How to determine which modules needed for licensing FFmpeg as part of an app I developed an app that uses ffmpeg for some simple muxing, which I am going to sell. I contacted MPEG LA about licensing, and they said I the license I need depends on which codecs I use.

Is there any way to determine which codecs/libraries are actually being used by a particular ffmpeg command?

If not, is there any way to temporarily disable/enable options to see if they are required for a given operation?

FWIW, my operation doesn't re-encode anything. It uses c:v copy and c:a copy with a map function to re-arrange audio tracks. In some cases it converts pcm_s24be to pcm_s24le.

In general, the codecs involved in a pure muxing command are the decoders and bitstream parsers for the codecs of the streams in the input file.

Even though there's no decoding or encoding requested in a pure muxing command, ffmpeg uses the decoders to acquire the attributes of the streams in the input. These attributes are then passed on to the muxer, which will write in the header/metadata section(s) of the output file. This has to be done because the attributes of an encoded stream is stored in a form specific to that codec.


Davinci Resolve with fast CPU but Slow GPU Currently I am rocking this setup:
Nvidia GTX 1080
32GB DDR3
SATA SSD

I have the posibillity to switch to a PC with these Specs:
3900x
R9 290
64GB DDR4 3600
NVMe Gen4 SSD

The main things I do my PC is programming and video editing.
I am unsing Davinci Resolve, which heavily utilizes the GPU AND CPU, would i have a disantvantage using the much older slower GPU but with a much much faster CPU? Or would editing be smoother with the much faster CPU? I am editing mostly 4K:30 footage and redering to 1080p:30 with basic color graiding and effects

From what I've read, Resolve very much depends on your GPU power -- speed and VRAM. I believe there's a preference to turn off at least some GPU usage, but that's probably more of a workaround for something crashing rather than something to be done on a normal basis.
Probably the best place to ask would be the Black Magic forums and over there, Carsten Sellberg answered a similar question with:

In Resolve the CPU is used to run the app, disk I/O and compression and decompression of codecs.
Resolve does all its image processing in the GPU on the graphics card. More CUDA/OpenCL Cores are better.
There are two factors that is important for the Graphics card. The first is, that it have enough vRam to hold a single video frame. For 4K is the absolute min 6 GB of vRam, but min 8 GB of vRam or more are recommended.
The other factor is the CUDA/OpenCL performance. Higher CUDA/OpenCL performance gives a faster Resolve.


Is it feasible to create a true multi-language video file with visual localization? I'm of Russian descent, but I've been living in Germany for the better part of my life now, which means that I deal with both German and Russian media on a regular basis. Most video stuff I have will have two or three audio tracks (depending on source language, which is usually included), so that one or another track can be played, depending on the audience.

This is where my children come into play. I try to raise them bilingual, so they could watch their cartoons in either language, again, depending on the audience. Which is a problem: any Pixar / Disney production is always fully localized, including the visuals, which means that I have to decide which visuals the file will contain.

I would like to incorporate multiple localized video tracks. However, my naive understanding is that there is no way to just replace the localized parts of the main movie (i.e. one large video track with a couple of hundreds localized snippets), but instead I'd have to keep several full video tracks in the file.

Is this correct, is multiplying the file size the only way? Is there any workaround, maybe something like the snippets model described above? Is this problem solved for physical media, e.g. is there any Blu-Ray which provides multi-language video tracks in a comparable form?

I can't give you a complete answer, but it's certainly possible in theory to create 'playlists' (for lack of a better term) that call out a sequence of clips, most of which are common to two or more lists, with localized clips being different in each list.

This would require a player that understands these lists, so it wouldn't work for general distribution since no common, general purpose player I'm aware of can do this. But I've written such players -- not for this purpose, but with the same result -- so I know it could be done. Audio sync might be the trickiest part.

I hope someone else has an off-the-shelf solution. There's a whole lot out there and more every day. Good luck.

EDIT:

It later occurred to me that this is exactly the function of an NLE (non-linear video editor) when previewing: create a timeline onto which you place audio and video clips, then play out the result without creating a new file. If this suits you, there are free or low-cost NLEs available, including LightWorks.


Which of these two crude green screen lighting setups is better? The following two low-budget, crude green screen lighting setups differ in the positioning of the screen lights relative to the talent. Which is better?

1) Screen lights further away from the screen than the talent:

2) Screen lights equidistant with the talent from the screen:

Well the 2nd is better. But the correct way is to light your Green Screen first, and you want to have it lit so it's a flat 70 IRE. You'll need a monitor with a Waveform option, and the waveform should pretty much be a flat and very thin line at 70 IRE.

You can't do that visually (eyeballing).

Then you place your talent so that they are separated as much from the BG as possible, casting no shadows onto it.

Light you talent with the same color temperature light as the green screen.

Hitting your talent with a hairlight that is gelled 1/4 magenta will help reduce edge issues.


What are or where to find SDI record start/stop ancillary packet specification for Sony, Red or Panasonic SDI video coming out of cameras can trigger the video recorder to start and stop via ancillary packets usually contained in the HANC space.  I've found the ARRI specification for this packet in their white paper Metadata_in_the_ALEXA.pdf, but not all recorders work with it.  Where to find the packet specification for Sony, Red and/or Panasonic?

EDIT:

After contacting a manufacturer, I found out that a popular way to flag record is to set the MSB bit of binary group 1 of the RP188 timecode ancillary packet.

I couldn't find specific details, but it appears that ancillary data on SDI in general conforms to SMPTE 291M.  I couldn't find any details about the specific implementations used for deck control.  It appears like there could potentially be some variation between manufacturers or even particular decks since the ancillary space doesn't seem to be that regulated other than specifying what it shouldn't step on with the main signal.


Is a 1/2.3" sensor good enough for tv? I just purchased a Panasonic HC-X1000 but now having second thoughts because I only now learned that the image sensor, being a tiny 1/2.3" sensor, is no better than that in a compact camcorder or gopro 3.

The fact is, I bought this camera to produce for tv. I don't mind that this is not the best camera or the biggest sensor. My real question is, will the video produced by the camera be good enough to be used/licensed by networks (assuming that the content is good enough as well lol).

If not, I think I'll be returning this and going for something like the Panasonic GH4.

Small sensor means two things: increased depth of field (everything is in focus, no soft backgrounds) and more noise in low-light conditions. If either of these are a deal-breaker then consider changing. Here's why maybe you shouldn't:

To get a large sensor camera with the ease of use and ergonomics of this camera you'll be looking at cameras like the Sony FS7 which with lenses is going to be around the $8k mark, maybe close to $10K all up.

Otherwise if you do go down the DSLR route you'll find that simply getting a GH4 probably won't be enough for broadcast work. You'll also need a good on-camera monitor because the built in monitors are way too low res to be able to judge focus critically, probably an external sound recorder, maybe also an external video recorder if you want to record raw or proRes, maybe a follow focus handle, maybe a matte box, and—since you'll have all these extra bits to carry—a rig to put it all on. At this point it will weigh about as much as a family sized refrigerator and look like something from Mad Max. I know, because I've lived it.

You won't have motor zoom, and unless you get a cinema lens (eyewateringly expensive) you'll have to put up with stills lenses: no manual iris control on the lens, focus measurements are very approximate and usually go something like 1ft, 2 ft, infinity, and there's no parfocal zooming—meaning that focus changes as you zoom.

The shorter depth of field also means that you have to really stay on top of your focus. When I first started shooting with DSLRs (5DII) I was going gung-ho with wide open lenses, and discovering that when I looked at the footage in the edit suite that if the subject moved at all they'd go completely soft. It wasn't until I got an external monitor that I could reliably get useable footage from the thing. For documentary shooting, although you can get beautiful results when conditions are right, it really isn't the right camera for run-'n-gun.

If beautiful bokeh is worth it to you, then go DSLR, but if getting the shot is more important then go with something with good ergonomics, that is first and foremost built as a video camera.


Can't set ffmpeg request header when using file for input I'm attempting to set headers (as suggested here) for my ffmpeg concat command like so:

ffmpeg \
    -f concat \
    -safe 0 \
    -protocol_whitelist file,http,https,tcp,tls \
    -headers $'Content-Type: audio/wav\r\n' \
    -i 'inputs.txt' \
    -c 'copy' 'output.wav' \
    -v trace

where my input file is structured as such:

file 'https://path/to/file1'
file 'https://path/to/file2'
file 'https://path/to/file3'

However, when I run the command, ffmpeg doesn't set the headers, as seen by the output of -v:

[http @ 0x7fa133d01080] request: GET / HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: Lavf/58.20.100
Accept: */*
Range: bytes=0-
Connection: close
Host: localhost:3001
Icy-MetaData: 1

What's strange is if I set my input not through an input txt and just through  -i /path/to file (as seen below) it works just fine.

ffmpeg \
    -f concat \
    -safe 0 \
    -protocol_whitelist file,http,https,tcp,tls \
    -headers $'Content-Type: audio/wav\r\n' \
    -i 'https://google.com' \
    -c 'copy' 'output.wav' \
    -v trace

Output of -v:

[https @ 0x7fed3ac03940] request: GET / HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: Lavf/58.20.100
Accept: */*
Range: bytes=0-
Connection: close
Host: google.com
Icy-MetaData: 1
Content-Type: audio/wav

Not sure why reading the inputs through a file would affect the headers getting sent. For now the workaround is to use a string concatenating all of the inputs (a bit messier than I'd like), but I'm curious if anyone might know why this is happening.

UPDATE: According to this post I have to read inputs through a text file, so I'm back to square one....

When a single input is directed fed to ffmpeg (-i), various options can be set on it, depending on what the input reader allows and recognizes.

However, FFmpeg does not natively read an input list from a text file. There's a bespoke module called the concat demuxer, invoked by -f concat, which parses the input list, opens each file and concatenates them. To the main ffmpeg pipeline, this is presented as a single input, generated by the concat module. And the concat module does not recognize or carry over options meant for the individual files listed within the text file. All listed files can only be opened with default parameters of their respective demuxers/decoders/protocols..etc. This is a limitation. You may open a feature request at trac.ffmpeg.org to change this.

What you could do is read all inputs directly.

ffmpeg \
    -headers $'Content-Type: audio/wav\r\n' \
    -i 'https://google1.com' \
    -headers $'Content-Type: audio/wav\r\n' \
    -i 'https://google2.com' \
    -headers $'Content-Type: audio/wav\r\n' \
    -i 'https://google3.com' \
    -headers $'Content-Type: audio/wav\r\n' \
    -i 'https://google4.com' \
    -filter_complex "[0][1][2][3]concat=n=4:v=0:a=1" \
    'output.wav'

For WAV inputs, re-encoding to WAV won't lose quality.


Make only a specific region of a video blurry I have a lower third that  I want to use in adobe premiere. It's slightly transparent and I put an adjustment layer on top to add a bit of blur. When I add some footage to the after effects composition it looks correctly blurred. The problem is when I export it that blur doesn't apply to the footage in Premiere (not even when I import it using dynamic link). Is there a way to make the blur apply to the footage without having to import the entire edited project from Premiere into After Effects? I don't use AE much and I'd hate to keep paying for it only for that one thing.

In your Premiere timeline put two copies of the lower third above each other on top of the footage. Right click on the lower copy and choose Adjustment Layer from the context menu. Now it acts as a mask for any filters you apply to it, affecting only the opaque areas. Apply a blur effect to this adjustment layer and the footage below will blur where the lower third is opaque.

Now because adjustment layers use the opacity of the clip to set the strength of the effect you might find the blur won't be very strong where the lower third is semi opaque (this is what it looks like with the top layer turned off):

You can fix this by making a duplicate of your lower third in After Effects with a more opaque background, and using that as your adjustment layer:

And Voila! Your beautiful lower third with bg blur:


How to slice a video at camera angle changes I have a long live feed recorded.

It has different camera angles switching after one another but unpredictable timing.

The cameras do not zoom or move so what is recorded has parts that don't change that could be used to identify camera angles. There should be a way to cut the film into small segments and group them by angle.

I could do this using iMovie by hand but that would take forever as I would like to do this for many hours of this live feed.

Is there a way to do this using some free software?

To correctly detect the scene changes (almost correctly some changes were still not detected) I used Davinci Resolve. Then I had to type the wanted scene's start frame and end frame into a program that automatically cut it.

From Davinci Resolve it was extremely hard to copy the frame numbers as they could not be selected. I am sure there is a better way of getting the start frames and end frames from Davinci Resolve but I couldn't find it.

The cutting can be done using ffmpeg:

ffmpeg -i example.mp4 -vf trim=start_frame=10:end_frame=50 -an -fflags +genpts output.mp4

But it takes really long to get a clip from the end of a long movie for example.

It can also be done using applescript and that is much faster:

tell application "QuickTime Player"
    activate

    set startFrame to 84361
    set endFrame to 84452

    set fps to 23.976

    set startTime to startFrame / fps
    set endTime to endFrame / fps

    set inFile to "Users:me:Documents:folder:infile.mov"
    set outFile to "Users:me:Documents:folder:outfile.mov"

    try
        set theOpenedFile to open for access file outFile with write permission
        set eof of theOpenedFile to 0
    end try

    open file inFile
    trim front document from startTime to endTime
    export front document in outFile using settings preset "1080p"

    try
        close access theOpenedFile
    end try

    close every document saving no
end tell


Using a Nikon D5100 or Sony SR68 to shoot video of an event I've been asked, on a very short time schedule, to shoot video at a party on behalf of someone too ill to attend.

In my custody are my Nikon D5100 and a Sony Handycam DCR-SR68. I am not experienced at using the former for video (I'm a still photographer by avocation) or the later at all (it is borrowed.)

Conditions are likely to involve mediocre light levels. I have a tripod. Understandable sound would be good. I don't need continuous recording for long periods of time; it can be clips in the 5-15 minute range.

Are either of these devices likely to satisfy, or should I go rent something fancier?

bmargulies, There are few questions here:

Are you looking for a multicam setup?  If so the two cameras are unlikely going to match unless you are willing to put in time to post production work. (fix it in post! http://d3j5vwomefv46c.cloudfront.net/photos/large/639498971.jpg?1345259967)
What is the purpose of this video If its a 'creative' project (as in you are making a video about the event and not 'of' the event) then you should go for a camera that gives you some aesthetic flexibility which normally starts with a good eye and a good lens.
What is the budget for the shoot? If you have a budget then you should get the setup for the purpose.  If its a documentation then consider hiring a couple of cameras of the same model for a muticam setup.  If its creative then I would check how flexible your Nikon is to get the story/feeling/looks that you want to achieve - then see if you need to hire something better.

I'll also touch on what you mentioned about light levels.  If you are working with low light then here you would have two options:

Use the budget camera: DCR-SR68 and other off the shelf budget cameras will work well but at the cost of image quality (ie. the footage will look just like its budget)
Add flexibility to lighting - 1) get a LED Ring light, if you have a decent budget then you can hire out a Gekko George light.  2) You can also hire a lens that have a really low f-stop, just one stop can actually make enough of a difference. 3) Get a camera that can shoot RAW - RAW footage gives you more flexibility in post to push up the levels to brighten the footage and merry this with a decent noise reduction plugin and you will be looking at decent footage.

Hope this helps!


software for frame images to video with changing framerate? I've got some frames that were captured over 24h at 2 frames a min.

I want to convert them to video BUT with different playback speeds depending on when they were shot.

I want to be able to use different framerates for different periods of the video.

Each hour has 120 frames so playback of each hour different FPS would take:

|------------------|
| frames |  play   |
|--------|---------|
|   1    | 120 Sec |
|   2    | 60 Sec  |
|   3    | 40 Sec  |
|   4    | 30 Sec  |
|   5    | 24 Sec  |
|   6    | 20 Sec  |
|   8    | 15 Sec  |
|   10   | 12 Sec  |
|   12   | 10 Sec  |
|   15   | 8 Sec   |
|   16   | 8 Sec   |
|   20   | 6 Sec   |
|   24   | 5 Sec   |
|------------------|

Something like this:

Each hour/120 frames at different speeds, this setup would play a day back in just under 9min.

any ideas where I can find software that would let me do this? preferably adjusting the speed via a graph/equalizer setup?

This is a really late response but I just stumbled onto the question.

The software you're looking for is Adobe After Effects.

Inside After Effects, you'll end up using the effect called "Time Remapping".

Open After Effects
Import all your frames as an image sequence
Create a composition(whatever resolution/framerate you'd like)
Drag your image sequence into the comp(or timeline)
In the effects panel, find the time remapping effect and drag it onto your image sequence
Go to the effects tab and it should show you the time remapping effect.  Add a keyframe using the stopwatch
Add as many keyframes as you need and adjust them to the speed you want depending on where you're at in the video
When you're ready to move to the "graph view" select the "graph editor" button

If you're having trouble just google "Time Remapping in after effects" and "Graph Editor view in After Effects" and you should find what you're looking for.


What computer to buy for PrPro 2015? More GPU than RAM? My current laptop isn't handling PrPro 2015. Its brand new i7, 12GB RAM, but its not playing video smoothly in the editing process. Looking at buying something more substantial.

Is it true that High performance GPU is better than massive amounts of RAM?  Dose PrPro only take advantage of 10-12GB of Ram and the rest is essentially useless?

The price of some of the high performance gaming desktops I was looking at is between $2000 and $4000, really hoping for some advise before spending so much. As an example; will the specs of the desktop below help me? Will it make the program work faster and not freeze up and skip in the editing process?

What are you guys running? Any recommendations?

Thanks

Clarissa

CyberpowerPC Desktop | Intel Core i7 | 2GB Graphics | Windows 8.1 Professional | Liquid Cooled

Processor & Memory:
◦Intel Core i7-5820K Processor 3.3GHz
◦64GB DDR4 RAM

Drives:
◦2TB 7200RPM SATA3 Hard Drive + 120GB Solid State Drive
◦DVD-RW (Writes to DVD/CD)

Operating System:
◦Microsoft® Windows 8.1 Professional (64-bit)

Graphics & Video:
◦2GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 Graphics

Communications:
◦10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet LAN

Audio:
◦Integrated High Definition 7.1 Channel Audio Processing

Keyboard & Mouse:
◦USB Keyboard
◦USB Mouse

Expandability (Total Slots):
◦2x 5.25" External
◦1x 3.5" External
◦7X 3.5 Internal
◦1x 2.5" Internal
◦4x PCI-E x16
◦2x PCI-E x1
◦8x DIMM 240-pin

I/O Ports & Slots:
◦1x PS/2 Style
◦9x USB 3.0
◦4x USB 2.0
◦1x Optical SPDIF Port
◦1x DVI
◦1x HDMI
◦1x Display Port
◦1x RJ-45
◦5x Audio Jacks (2x Front, 3x Rear)

Additional Information:
•Power Supply: 800 Watt
•Cooling: Liquid Cooled
•Dimensions : 7.5” x 16.7” x 19.3”

My setup: I am running a GTX 760 4gb RAM, i7 3930k overclocked to 4.2ghz (very stable), Sabertooth x79, 800 watt corsair PSU

I once read a really good article and I wish I could find it again to link it, but it basically talked about bottlenecks in an editing system and was supported by actual builds and real world tests. But the just of it was, that unless you are running dual Xenon processors with 64gb RAM the added benefits of a 900+ nvidia gpu was marginal at best. The recommend specs were thus an i7, around 16-32 gb of RAM, SSD's, and GTX 700 series.

This setup works pretty well for me, and I can recommend it. Instead of forking out extra money for the 900 series GPU, get one with more memory and more CUDA cores (something PP really utilizes especially with 3rd party plugins) in the 700 series. Cap the RAM at 32gb unless your going Xenon. But at that point your going to need a GeForce Titan to remove the bottleneck.

I have found that the mercury playback engine with cuda is considerably better at processing frames especially with effects, than the 'program mode' processing.

For reference I can play 85mbps DNX 1080p at full ress with magic bullet looks on with no lag. If I'm running of an external hdd, it takes some time to start the play head once its stopped (less than a second, but enough to annoy). SSD's are a must.


ffmpeg remove 1 of 2 audio tracks without video reencode I'm trying to get rid of the 1st of two audio tracks in an mp4 file. But each time I run:

ffmpeg -i test.mp4 -map 0:0 -map 0:2 -acodec copy -vcodec copy new_file.mp4

ffmpeg seems to reencode the file.
The output says:

Seems stream 0 codec frame rate differs from container frame rate: 180000.00 (180000/1) -> 23.98 (24000/1001)
Input #0, mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2, from 'test.mp4':
  Duration: 01:01:37.25, start: 0.-83411, bitrate: 4086 kb/s
    Stream #0.0(und): Video: h264, yuv420p, 1280x720, 23.98 tbr, 90k tbn, 180k tbc
    Stream #0.1(deu): Audio: aac, 48000 Hz, 5.1, s16
    Stream #0.2(eng): Audio: aac, 48000 Hz, 5.1, s16
    Stream #0.3(und): Subtitle: text / 0x74786574
File 'new_file2.mp4' already exists. Overwrite ? [y/N] y
Output #0, mp4, to 'new_file2.mp4':
    Stream #0.0(und): Video: 0x0000, yuv420p, 1280x720, q=2-31, 90k tbn, 90k tbc
    Stream #0.1(eng): Audio: 0x0000, 48000 Hz, 5.1, s16
Stream mapping:
  Stream #0.0 -> #0.0
  Stream #0.2 -> #0.1
Press [q] to stop encoding
frame=33700 fps=944 q=-1.0 size=  583098kB time=1405.53 bitrate=3398.5kbits/s

And this process takes quite some time, that's why I think it reencodes instead of copying.
Any idea why this is? Maybe the different frame rate between container and codec?
Thanks!

The first line of the output you provided explains the problem:

Seems stream 0 codec frame rate differs from container frame rate: 180000.00 (180000/1) -> 23.98 (24000/1001)

and then the last three values in the 4th line tell about it in detail:

    Stream #0.0(und): Video: h264, yuv420p, 1280x720, 23.98 tbr, 90k tbn, 180k tbc

which mean, in words:

I guess the frame rate 23.98 fps from the input video stream.
The time base in the input container is set to (1/90000) seconds.
The time base in its video stream is set to (1/180000) seconds.

Now, return to the the first line of your output, after the semicolon:

180000.00 (180000/1) -> 23.98 (24000/1001)

It means: Your stream's framerate is 180,000 frames per second, but I will convert it to 23.98 fps.

The same is in the mentioned 4th line, in the form 23.98 tbr. It's the FFmpeg's guessed value.

So you are right, the conversion occurs, for both selected streams (video and audio one). You may see it from other lines of your output:

Stream mapping:
  Stream #0.0 -> #0.0
  Stream #0.2 -> #0.1
Press [q] to stop encoding

because in the case of copying them it would be as these:

Stream mapping:
  Stream #0.0 -> #0.0 (copy)
  Stream #0.2 -> #0.1 (copy)
Press [q] to stop

The conclusion:

Your command is correct, but your input file is damaged.

You may convince yourself about it by applying the same command to other, correct input file.


60 fps vs 50 fps in 24 fps timeline slow motion difference If my math is correct, shooting 60 fps, playback 24 fps will allow me 2,5x slower motion.

Shooting 50 fps than should give me about 2x slower motion.

Is that difference significant in real time, or it's just in theory?

Will 60 fps bring “slower” slow motion over 50 fps on the same 24 fps timeline?

Thank you.

The difference is noticable but the question is if it is worth it.
Many low-end cameras compress High Framerate videos more than "normal" framerate videos, thus you loose quality.

So best thing in this case is just to try it out, if you think that the quality loss if worth the slight slower speed


Getting Dailies out of the Middle East Asking for a friend.

We're presently scouting locations in Jordan for a feature shoot, it'll go about five weeks. We're shooting with an ARRI Alexa and generating ArriRaw dailies. We're working with the idea that we'll be generating about half a terabyte of dailies a day on the high side, including multichannel sound. We're cutting and doing post in Los Angeles.

What is the most reliable way of getting the dailies out of country? The last time my friend shot in the area he shipped his dailies out and they were impounded for months by customs, and under the current regime we have no idea what would happen and we want other alternatives (it also doesn't help that Jordan now borders a hot war zone). We're toying with shipping to Europe and from there ingesting into AWS, anyone have any experience with that?

Have you considered any file transfer accelerators like Aspera or File Catalyst?

They use a different network protocol to send your files over and give you significant transfer speed gains.


Copyright of materials used in a video It is common that TV channels or internet TV channels (e.g. those regularly post their shows on Youtube) use materials from other sources. For example, displaying photos from the internet, parts of videos already posted on Youtube and other websites, etc.

I am curious how the copyright permission is handled for using copyrighted materials in videos.

In the past, major TV channels were only in the market, and they had their own reporters and photographers to make their materials. Nowadays, there are many small channels (even personal ones), and I doubt if they take of care of copyright issues at all.

As a more specific example, how to obtain right to use a part of a Youtube video in an online show, which will be posted on Youtube ?

Very broadly speaking, you have a much easier experience obtaining permission if you are not making money from someone else's content.

Most copyright laws recognise 'fair use' -- a small quote or a clip that is proof of someone else having said something.  It is customary and advisable to put such clip in a box or window to show that the content is being referenced.  Fair use for a small portion of text or video is easily established than a picture, for a picture is the entire content.

For images, search engines usually have a license filter in the search. Usually, it errs on the side of caution. Unfortunately, you have to contact the original agency or person and obtain permission to use.
Youtube now has content signature comparison and will warn you that you are using someone else's content but will leave it up to the copyright owner to enforce it.

So, if it is does not fall under 'fair use' and is clearly someone else's copyright, you will have to track down the owner and obtain permission.


Concate two video file with fade effect with ffmpeg in linux is there anyway to concate two video file with fade effect with ffmpeg in linux?
something like this:

ffmpeg -f concat -i input.txt -c copy "--with:fade:out-in" output.ogg

Your present command specifies stream copy. Since you wish to alter the video frames during the transition, that won't work.
It can be done if you know the duration of the two videos and the duration of fade. Also, for the command below, the resolutions of the two videos should be the same.
ffmpeg -i first.ogg -i second.ogg \
-filter_complex \
"color=black:WxH:d=Video1Length+Video2Length-FadeDuration[base]; \
 [0:v]setpts=PTS-STARTPTS[v0]; \
 [1:v]format=yuva420p,fade=in:st=0:d=FadeDuration:alpha=1, \
      setpts=PTS-STARTPTS+((Video1Length-FadeDuration)/TB)[v1]; \
 [base][v0]overlay[tmp]; \
 [tmp][v1]overlay,format=yuv420p[fv]; \
 [0:a][1:a]acrossfade=d=FadeDuration[fa]" \
-map [fv] -map [fa] \
output.ogg

Replace:
WxH with the resolution of the videos i.e. 640x360
And:
Video1Length, Video2Length, and FadeDuration with their value in seconds.


What is Pivot in Color Grading? Most of the controls I at least have a basic understanding of from Photography and other design applications (Affinity Photo / Photoshop / Lightroom etc). But not Pivot.
In the SpeedGrade Manual the word Pivot doesn't exist at all. Pretty big omission but I'm resourceful and know other applications exist. So even though I don't use it I pulled up DaVinci Resolve's guide which states

Pivot:
Changes the center of tonality about which dark and bright parts of the image are
stretched or narrowed during a contrast adjustment. Darker images may require a lower
Pivot value to avoid crushing the shadows too much when stretching image contrast, while
lighter images may benefit from a higher Pivot value to increase shadow density adequately.

Perfect cause this actually sounds like exactly what I need. Except when I use it there's absolutely no change in my video and I've got no idea why:
Here's the original:

Here's the footage with the pivot greatly pushed up, yet no change:

I don't know if I'm not understanding the Pivot or what. I'm not seeing any difference though.

As you know, the contrast function darkens dark colors further and lightens light colors further. Software without a pivot parameter assume that the point where darkening becomes lightening is exactly in the middle, at 0.5 (for a color range of 0 to 1). Those with a pivot parameter allow to move the pivot point up or down. Shifting the pivot slightly down (e.g. from 0.5 to 0.4) results in dark-medium colors (let's say 0.45) not anymore being darkened, but lightened.

In your image, the effect is not that visible because most of the colors are already very bright, very dark, or just in the middle.

If you want to lift or lower your midtone details, I would suggest that you use a gamma or midtone control instead.


Multitrack video export in OBS Studio OBS Studio composites various video inputs into a single video stream, but it lets users configure local recording on the side. Is it possible to save each video input separately, preferably as multiple channels within the same file or alternatively as separate files? I see multitrack audio options but am not sure whether the live export option only works for the composite video stream.

I have been looking for the same answer and found a thread in the OBS forum.

OBS does not support multitrack video support yet. The thread contains two workarounds:

Run two instances of OBS simultaneously

Directlink to post in thread

Open OBS Studio.
Sitting > hotkeys > Gave Start recording and Stop recording nice Hotkey (I use Ctrl+Shift+S and Ctrl+Shift+D)
Close then Open OBS Studio.
Open OBS Studio Again (Now you have 2 OBS Studio)
in the first OBS Go to sitting > Output > Recording > Select recording path
in the 2nd OBS Go to sitting > Output > Recording > Select recording path "Gave it another name"
Ex : Rec\FaceCame and Rec\GamePlay
Start the game and press Ctrl+Shift+S or the hotkey you pick

Drawbacks: A lot of manual steps to execute.

Increase the canvas size, place multiple videos side by side on it and split it in a video software afterwards

Directlink to post in thread

Drawbacks: No usable video output during recording.


How do you load a Bolex H-16? How do you load a Bolex H-16?

A complete answer will include a link to the camera manual, page number for reference in the ASC manual, and a video demonstrating effective loading technique.

The following resources show how to load a Bolex H-16 camera:

Instructional video for loading a Bolex (4 mins, Vimeo.com)

PDF of the manual (see page 13 - "Feeding the film into-the camera by hand")

You can also find instructions on loading this camera in the American Cinematographer Manual.


Had to move a clip partially out of frame, how to deal with the new empty space? I hope this makes sense...

What you see in the clip is a womans arm, and then her grey patterned shirt.
The video clip is constantly panning up towards the woman's head

I had to move the clip to the left side a little to create room for text that will go on top of her grey shirt, which left a blank area to the right side.   I just filled in the blank area with solid blue so you could see the area I'm talking about
But this looks hideous, can anyone think of a good solution to this?
At first I thought I would stretch the shirt to fill the area by cropping it down to just the shirt and then stretching the cropped portion to cover the blue area.  But this looks equally as bad because the pattern of that shirt looks very stretched and unnatural.  It looks much worse in motion, which I'll show you below

Coming from my photoshop background, what I would do on a still image is I would simply clone stamp some of the shirt to cover the blue area with portions of this shirt, but I dont know if thats possible with all the video motion, or is it possible?
I'm desperate and open to any ideas any genius out there has!
Thanks!

It is possible to take a similar approach like you would in photoshop. I recommend using After-Effects, as premiere doesn't really have the abilities to do so effectively. In After-Effects, you can try out the "content aware fill" that was introduced in 2020, I believe.
However, content awareness only works in some cases, and when trying to seamlessly continue the motion and behaviour of cloth, this could get tricky. So let me propose two more options, one simple and one that requires some more work.
First off, you could just use a gradient from blue to alpha, and let the solid blue fade out over the shirt, with the solid's area of 100% opacity just touching the right side of your clip, in order to conceal the edge.
The other method is tricky, and I frankly never tried this myself. You could actually go out of your way and try to simulate cloth using a projected texture from your footage in a 3D-software such as Houdini, Cinema4D, Modo, Blender or something similar with the ability to simulate cloth. In order to match the motion, you could try a cloud-tracker, such as Mocha or the integrated tracker from Resolve and try to apply the vertices of the left side of your simulation to the most right vertices of your cloud-tracking-points. This could work, but I am not 100% confident that it will.
Anyways, I hope this helped you out a bit, have a good one :)


Vegas Pro 13 - Shaking Image - Including Preview Can I shake a transparent .png image in 3D?

(source: ggpht.com)

Yes. In a nutshell:

place an image on the timeline (set Alpha Channel in media properties if needed)
click 'Track Motion' button in the track header
select '3D Source Alpha' compositing mode
use keyframes to create animation


Screen recorded videos have audio sync delays in Premiere Pro I imported several MP4 screen recordings (using Windows Game Recording) into Premiere Pro to edit together, but I noticed all but one of the clips in the timeline have unsynced audio issues.

After investigating a little, I believe the root of the problem to be the fact that each of the videos have different audio bitrates, data rates, and total bitrates (when looking at their properties). I think that when I set a sequence's settings to match the first clip, the audio follows the bitrate of that clip and other videos have skewed timings.

Does anyone know a fix for this to somehow edit together files with different bitrates in a way that wont change its playback speed?

Okay so I found the issue and a quick fix for the .mp4 audio sync issues. First you need to backup your video files, then change the file extension from .mp4 to .mov. This will allow you to reimport with accurate playback speed.

If Premiere gives you a weird error upon importing, make sure you have QuickTime installed from Apple's website, restart, and then try again.

The fix came from this video, and I hope it helps someone else!


Best Digital recorder for use as a ‘body pack’ + good field recorder? I'm looking at getting something to use as a 'body pack' as opposed to using a wireless setup when using a lavalier microphone.

I've looked into Tascam DR-08 vs. Zoom H1 or other.

I found a comparison of these two here (great blog for video):

http://cheesycam.com/tascam-dr-08-vs-zoom-h1-continued/

I've seen various information recommending both of these recorders along with the negatives including build quality and battery problems of the H1.

I thought that that the Zoom H1 with it's protective cover over the mics and the offset angles are great pluses for this device for this use.

What are people's thoughts on ultra compact digital recorders? Any suggestions or recommendations?

The specific feature set will determine if it is appropriate for you application, though from my experience most of the high end field recorders are very good quality.

The Zoom series have a great (well deserved) reputation for being relatively easy to use, and being kind to your wallet.

If you wish to supply your own mic, you may wish to find one without inbuilt microphones as it may be cheaper.

If you do not want to supply your own mic, my experience has been that the inbuilt mics are adequate for recording dialogue, in say an interview.

If you're planning to record with the device on the talent (and want the recorder to be as discreet as possible), I would suggest investing in lapel mic (just the mic not the transmitter), and plug that into the field recorder to get the mic as close as possible.


How do I make this object orbit around the center without making it turn I have this atom that I want to animate in after effects (yes I know you have more than one electron in carbon, but that's not the point). I want this electron to orbit around the middle of the atom. But I want to do it without actually making the minus spin as well, when I set the anchor point in the middle and I do keyframe animation on the electron, the electron spins, but the minus rotates with it.

How can I anchor the minus to the electron? Or, for future knowledge, is there any way to make it so that the electron orbits around the middle, with the minus always lying horizontal, instead of rotating?

Try this:

  Parent the atom to the ring or a null in the center
  Rotate the ring/null which will rotate the electron around the middle
  Apply an expression to the rotation property of the electron layer

Rotation Expression:

parent.transform.rotation * -1

This simple expression will rotate the electron in the opposite direction from its parent (ring/null) layer, which keeps the minus from rotating.

Hope this helps!


Why both videos are of same file size? I am using ProMovie Recorder to record high quality videos using iPhone X, and I noticed a weird thing today.

Here's what I did:

I recorded a 4K 60fps video for 6 seconds (HEVC encoding).
I recorded a 4K 30fps video for 6 seconds (HEVC encoding).
Both the above videos captured the same physical content.
Both videos were captured with the same bit-rate, ~118 Mbps.

Here's what I found:

The two videos I captured (with different fps) are of the same file size - 84MB. How? Why?

Question

  A higher frame rate video with same bit-rate as that of a video with
  lower frame rate should be double the file size, shouldn't it?

  Why isn't there a difference in file size? More the number of frames
  will lead to more the file size, since we're storing extra 30 frames
  for every second, right? Or is the underlying HEVC encoding optimises the file
  size for higher frame rate videos?

  Or, can slight differences in exposure cause significant file size difference?

  Please correct/clarify.

As it seems both videos have a bitrate of 118 (117) megabits per second.
This means - regardless off any other parameter - your video will take up 118 mb for each recorded second.

But as you already noted, a video with double the FPS should have double the data, so if you originaly exported the 4k60 video with 118, you can export the 4k30 video with 57mb/s and gain about the same quality.
There's more to it like diffrent codecs optimized for diffrent types of videos or Interframe Compression, so you can compress high FPS a bit easier. It is recommendable to go slightly above the half.

Keep in mind, that many consumer cameras tend to have a low bitrate for high FPS as the camera is not able to record more.


Is 360 video editing the same as traditional video editing? With the rise and price drop in 360 video I'm wondering what the format is. Looking at the CENTR Camera doesn't even mention editing or file format. Ricoh Theta doesn't mention file format or serious editing but does say they offer their own software for some editing.

What file type do 360 degree cameras use? Can it be edited in regular video production suites like SpeedGrade, DaVinci Resolve, Premier, FinalCut, etc.. or do you need some special software?

Usually 360° videos became 360° only in realtime during playback. You can see it:

Go to to this video (youtube now supports 360° videos)
Now, using Chrome install this extension (it will disable HTML5 player)
Try to see video from the point one again.

You will see something like that:

That happens because Flash player don't know how to interpret 360° video and showing original state of it.

So, during editing your 360° video can be displayed as normal video with huge distortion. If you can handle that, than you can edit it in any program of your chose.

Good luck!


Blackmagic UltraStudio 4k Extreme recording through SFP The Blackmagic UltraStudio 4k Extreme has some SFP ports.

Is it possible for that device to record to a network location like a NAS or SAN directly using a fibre connection?

Or is the fibre connection just used as another way to connect to a Mac or PC which would then do the recording?

According to the B&H details, the SFP cages are for 12G-SDI over fiber. They can only be used for baseband video I/O, not for an interface to a computer or network.


Can I get smoother playback by converting a video to a non-interpolation codec? Although I've read the about page, I'm not sure whether this question fits here. If it doesn't, please refer me to a better StackExchange website.

I'm using a 5 year old laptop. Sometimes, when I play 720p videos, the video will hang for a few milliseconds and then continue playing.

This doesn't really bother me, but it'd be nice if I could have smooth video playback.

I've recently learnt about codecs, and I'm wondering whether I can reduce the workload at play time by converting the MP4 video stream to a MPEG video stream beforehand, or any other codec that doesn't use intrapolation. It would be cool if this would result in smoother playback.

Many different factors can contribute to stutter in video playback.  It could be a CPU issue (check your CPU when playing the video) in which case, a simpler codec or a player that can leverage the graphics card for decoding would help.  It could also be data rate related though.  In this case, using a simpler format would actually compound the problem as less compressed formats (easier to decode) require proportionally more disk space to store the same quality.

If you are constrained by memory or disk I/O then you would actually make it stutter more by moving to a simpler format (and there would also be quality loss unless you made the file size much much higher due to loss of compression efficiency as well as a second generation encoding penalty.)


Video editing with text to speech I am trying to do some screen recordings and uploading them to YouTube. I have a terrible voice and frankly I cannot maintain a stream of speech meaning the the end product will end up being bad. I saw some videos online:

The uploader made use of text-to-speech (TTS) voices. Even though the voice is obviously terrible, the audio was perfectly synchronized with the video.

I am not asking for any sophisticated way of editing videos. All I want to know is a way I can easily add audio to my screen recordings. I have an old version of Camtasia and it doesn't provide a TTS engine meaning that I have to use another program, type what I want to be converted to speech, save as an audio file and import to Camtasia. The problem is that my videos are about 15 min long meaning that it will be an extremely tedious task to be using the two software simultaneously. In fact, what I'm most worried about is having to change some word and maintaining a good synchronicity between the video and audio.

So, I hope anyone with experience in creating such videos can direct me to the easiest way of doing it.

Thanks

You can do this, but why bother.  It is far faster and easier to record your dialog in multiple takes.  As long as you can naturally speak a sentence or two at a time, you can narrate your own video by carefully editing your dialog from multiple takes.  DAW tools will even play the video for you while you are dubbing over it and let you hear what happened before and after your take in order to give you context.  This is faster and will sound better than your text to speech solution.

If you still really want to do text to speech, I would recommend taking the same kind of approach.  Make clips for each of the phrases you need and then move them in to the video and place them as needed.


Recommend a good online video host? I have been using Vimeo for a good long while to host our corporate videos. I like the service, and it is certainly affordable, but I am quickly outgrowing it. I now have almost 200 videos warehoused in there, most of which I can't get rid of. Plus, Vimeo is just so weak when it comes to management. Finding the right video can be sometimes like finding a needle in a haystack, even with decent metatags. I have been looking at Brightcove and they seem pretty decent, if very expensive for my needs. Can you recommend someone?

Depending on how often the videos are watched and how big are they in total?  Rolling your own might work.  For my video streaming needs, I use a dedicated Windows server in a data center (can be as cheap as $110 a month, including a terabyte of disk space and unmetered 100Mb/sec connectivity) and use the included Windows Media Streaming Services to provide streaming video.  Alternately, if you need more cross platform support, there are other stream server software packages you can buy that will allow easy management and streaming of other videos and you can install them on the server.  If your volume of viewers is sufficiently low (less than 20 or 30 simultaneous viewers) then rolling your own may work on a 100 megabit dedicated connection.