How do I make an area in a video darker? SO I am editing this horror scene and I want to change the brightness of the left side of the wall to something similar to the dark right side. I want to light to be mostly on the actor's faces. I tried doing "change to color" and "color change" effect in after effect but didn't get good results. Now I am thinking about masking that bright wall area and changing the brightness. But that process seems long since this is a long clip. Is there any faster way to do this in after effects or premiere pro?

If I may, I would recommend using Davinci Resolve for this. It's free and does what you want way better than premiere. Since your question was raised for premiere though, let me propose two different solutions for this.

Use a Luma-Matte for an adjustment layer. To to this:

Duplicate your footage
Apply curves on the footage to maximise the contrast. (the wall should be completely white, your talent should be completely black.
Apply a curves effect on the adjustment layer and place it below your duplicated, contrasted footage and above your original footage-layer.
For the adjustment-layer, under "track mattes" select the luma matte from your contrasted footage-layer.
Now dial down the curve on the adjustment layer and see that it only affects the wall.

Use a Roto. If the Luma-Matte isn't working well because you can't really separate the talent from the background, this would be your last resort.

Draw a mask around your talent's face on the footage-layer and do that for every 2nd to 3rd frame, so that the mask moves with the face.
Apply curves to your footage-layer.
Press "e" to bring up the effects on your footage-layer and open up the curves.
Under "Compositing Options" click the small "+" and select the mask you just drew.
Make sure the mask is set to subtractive if you masked out the face, or additive if you masked out the portion of the wall.
Now dial down the curve in the Effect Controls and see that the effect only applies inside the mask.
You might want to feather the mask to not have a hard edge that might be distracting.

I hope this helped, have a good day! :)
Edit: You might want to use a mix of the two methods: The Luma-Matte for the hair, which is hard to rotoscope, and using masks for the simpler areas of the head.


How to add simple textual animations to videos? I want to add simple textual animations to videos, just like this one from Business Insider : https://www.facebook.com/228803477461289/videos/231065770568393/

What software do I need in order to realize this ?

I know that After Effects is capable of such things, but I'm looking for (more specialized) software with much less learning curve.

You can achieve that with ffmpeg. Draw text with drawtext command. And draw semitransperent beckground under it with  drawbox. You can see more in that question.

You can add animation of moving text  from side of video with Expression Evaluation.


What's the benefit of Hollywood still using film for most major productions? As a semi-professional cinematographer and photographer, I've always wondered why large productions mostly always prefer to use Film cameras, even with the development of cameras such as RED and BlackMagic?

How do the recorded films get converted to digital? isn't there some sort of inevitable quality loss from this process? Not to mention expensive?

(Sorry in advance if any of these points sound uninformed or just plain dumb!!)

Is this an impression you have or based on statistics you read? My impression is the opposite: projects shot on film have become so noteworthy they get some press coverage for the fact alone they are shot on film. Then you have things like "interstellar" where the hype was about the 70mm or tarantino who says movies on digital are not sexy. What I heard is that unlike 5 yrs ago, the predominant tool in feature film has become the arri Alexa, while RED is going strong in advertisement. From the distribution side I know that (in Germany) the big multiplex cinemas don't have 35mm projectors installed anymore - they set them up on demand - and that at big film festivals like the berlinale, the amount of analog prints has changed from 9 out of 10 to less than 1 out of ten over the last ten years. Apparently it has become difficult finding a lab that can develop analogue film (in Germany) nowadays.

The reason for people still using film is probably that film automatically adds a lot of organic texture, like minor irregularities, grain etc. that a lot of people aesthetically prefer and which is not easy to mimick digitally in post-production. Using the "original" material also is a tribute to the history of the craft in a way... Going analogue all the way, even in editing (which is really not done anymore I think, even with the biggest fans of film stock) takes you back to a process which is actually destroying something (making a cut) to create something new, so there are some powerful metaphors in the original process ;)

Products like Blackmagic cameras are not used in big budget productions because the quality assurance, sensor quality etc. Is not up to par with cameras by arri or red. And for productions on an average Hollywood budget, the difference between I.e. 5000$ for a bm camera or 60.000$ for an Alexa is not really relevant, especially since a flaky camera ruining a shooting day can result in much higher costs.


Send webcam feed to server for buffer Let me explain my problem:
I have 2 webcams looking out over the beach but my internet connection is very slow. So i'm looking for a way to buffer the videofeed to a server and then let my clients connect to that server instead of directly to the webcams.

Here's something I saw at github might answer your question.

  This example demonstrate how to encode set of buffered images obtained
  from Webcam instance, transcode into h.264 stream and send to remote
  peer where it is decoded and rendered in panel.

  Example provided by hepin1989. Thank you! This is wonderful piece of
  the good code :)

  How To Use

  Run StreamServer - this will open the webcam device and start listening for incoming streaming requests.
  Run StreamClient - this will connect to the StreamServer and start displaying image from the remote camera.   The server / client address
  is localhost by default to run client and server on the same machine,
  but if you want to stream over the network, you need to change it to
  reflect your real IP address (server must bind to eth0 instead of lo
  interface to be visible from the NAT).

  Notes

  The code supports sunny-day scenario only, just to demonstrate the idea, so there are is no complex error checking statements and the
  code may behave in unexpected manner when launched in real network.
  It uses Xuggler which seems to be discontinued.
  Remember, this example is to present an idea, so if you need enhancement or bug fix, please implement it and send pull request to
  share it with community. Be creative :)
  To perform streaming over the network you need to change address in server from localhost to your real IP address (e.g. such as
  192.168.1.10 or 0.0.0.0 in general). I'm not sure how it works with the IPv6 support - feel free to test it.

her is the link- https://github.com/sarxos/webcam-capture/tree/master/webcam-capture-examples/webcam-capture-live-streaming


Change to black and white (without greys) in AE I am trying to convert an After Effect layer of regular color video to a completely Black & White layer, that is, Black remains black, but anything not black will turn into snow white. Is there an simple way to accomplish this in After Effects or Premiere? I have struggled to find an easy way and applied different Effects (Channel Combiner, Hue/Sat), with some success, but it doesn't seem to fully convert the layer to a complete black and white image. Any ideas?

The effect that does what you specifically want is called threshold.


What do you call it when the footage has a rippling effect? I have some footage from an action camera that has been affected by vibrations. The footage seems to have an affect that looks a bit like jelly.

Is there a word for that effect and is there anything in after fx I can use to help improve it?

They call this the rolling shutter effect.

Also known as the jello or wobble effect and is caused by the side to side motion of cameras that have the CMOS sensor.

The rolling shutter effect can be caused by:
fast moving objects,
moving or panning the camera quickly, or
camera vibrations.

Why does this happen?
The CMOS sensor on the camera reads information a line at a time, from top to bottom. Thus different parts of the image is recorded at DIFFERENT times, thus creating the wobble effect.

Cameras with the CCD sensor do NOT have this problem. This sensor records the whole image at once. Thus avoiding the rolling shutter effect.

There are pros and cons for using different image sensors, however it looks like we are moving to a CMOS world.
This site below explains the differences between the sensors very nicely if you are curious.

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/find/newsLetter/Comparing-Image-Sensors.jsp

Hope that helps


Transposing keyframes or recursive keyframing in AE I want to embed a clip inside of itself inside of itself inside of itself. I have a clip of a person using a tablet, and I want the same clip displayed on the tablet. I have tracked the motion of the tablet in Mocha and mapped the clip onto the tablet. Rather than track the the motion of the tablet in the video on the first tablet, I'm curious if I can just copy the movement keyframes but transpose them for the movement of the first tablet? Can keyframes be transposed relative to another set of keyframes?

Duplicate your composition twice. Let's call these 1, 2 and 3

In 2, replace the embedded clip layer with 3. With Alt held down and the embedded clip layer being selected, drag 3 on top of it. In 1, replace its embedded clip layer with 2.

I assume that the dimensions of the source clip and the composition are the same, else some transformation will be required.


How can I record adobe flash player stream I am learning english and I want record this stream.

It's using flash player and in addition include PDF doc.
thanks for your interest

Use a browser plugin such as https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/video-downloadhelper/.

When you go to the page after installing, an icon will alert you to downloadable media and provide you different formats if they are available.


Davinci Resolve 15 - color correction of whole tracks I have a video project which I have cut and edited and now I want to adjust color (temperature) of one track that contains clips from one camera (2nd track contains clips from 2nd camera), I know it is possible to adjust individual clips, but I want to do it for the whole track because it is the same camera with the same settings. Or do I have to adjust individual clips manualy?

I bet the functionality must be somewhere and I just can't find it.

Thanks in advance!

Just color correct one clip according to your specifications and then select that clip first and then all other which you want to have the same color correction. To select the other clips you can do ctrl + click. This way all the clips which you selected, will have the same color correction as of the first clip. I saw this in some YouTube video.


Looking for a suitable lossy video codec to quickly record video in-game I'm working on integrating a video recording functionality inside of a game, so that game footage can be
automatically encoded to video and shared online from within the game.
Currently I've integrated the libtheora codec, but it is too slow to be really functional(it can encode about 4 Full HD frames per second).

So now I'm looking for a faster video codec that should ideally also have the following requirements:

Output file shouldn't be too big (duration of video can go up to 30
minutes and needs to be shareable on-line).
The codec should ideally work for Windows Mac and Linux.
Has a license that is usable in a commercial game, so probably not GPL.

paid options are also possible, I have a small budget available.

Do any of you have a suggestion for an appropriate codec for my specific application?
Thanks!

There is a rule in compression, quality, size and speed, pick two of three.  Video compression is an incredibly complex process that requires a lot of resources on either the CPU, GPU or both.  You can get around that one of two ways, you can either reduce the level of compression (with lossless being the fullest extreme) or you can reduce the quality (making larger approximations means the video has more artifacts, but is simpler to compress).

Unfortunately, in the case of video games, this problem is compounded as the game itself requires the same resources that the video encoding requires.  This means that your best (and really only) option for high quality, high compression encoding of video games is to move the processing off the resources that the game is using.

Most simply, this generally means using specialized real time encoding hardware that is optimized for making real time, high quality streams.  Such hardware is unfortunately not particularly cheap and generally runs around $100 on the low end to over $1000 on the high end, with $200 to $500 being around the point at which it becomes "professional" hardware, depending on the features of the device.  Unfortunately, this solution doesn't help your scenario at all other than suggesting that you may want to include support for some of the most popular real time encoders to be used with your game natively.

You can also try doing it by capturing uncompressed on one system and streaming that data over a really fast network connection to another computer and have that computer do the encoding.  This can be a bit cheaper if you already have a second powerful computer and a fast (gigabit or higher) network, but if you have to build a computer for it, the real time encoder is a better option as it is cheaper than a dedicated PC for the job and will do a better job anyway.  You might consider building your own client that could simplify this process for users.

One thing you can do is use the encoder support built in to some more recent graphics cards.  Some cards have started including their own consumer level encoding support for doing things like streaming.  If you tap in to this functionality, you would be able to make pretty good quality encodes on the fly.

Overall, your best bet though, is probably to capture to a lossless or near-lossless quality file and then encode it after the fact.  You can include an encoder of your choice and batch things up to run during free cycles that the game isn't making use of.  After compression finishes, you can get rid of the full size file.

I'd also suggest at looking at some of the codec options used by software like FRAPS to determine what might work well for that high quality, high speed codec that would make the files a bit smaller, but always keep in mind that the more compression you do, the more it will impact the performance of your game.


After Effects won't consistently stop previewing video when I ask it to I'm teaching myself After Effects CC while trying to make a music video. I use the spacebar or the 0 on the numeric keypad to preview my work. When I press one of those keys a second time to stop the preview, After Effects often ignores me and continues playback.

It's very frustrating to carefully time a spacebar press to place the Current Time Indicator exactly where I want it and have my input be blithely ignored by the software. What can I do to ensure that After Effects CC will always respond to keyboard commands?

When you press space bar, After Effects tries to playback the composition out of the current playhead position instantly. Theoretically the playback depends on your machine, but an instant playback of a  composition (in real time) is a very computing-intensive process and with conventional computers not possible at the moment. This also is the simple reason why After Effects sometimes does not respond. Also see the official Improve performance manual.

For correct playback (25fps) use the RAM-Preview instead of the space bar. Press Numpad 0 or the associated |||> in the Preview Panel to start the preview rendering process:

Press Numpad 0 again to stop it
Press Numpad 0 twice to stop and playback the previously rendered (green) frames

In order to facilitate the work:

Set the rendering resolution of the view to a lower value for e.g. to half or quarter
Limit the work area in your timeline, press B to set the start render point (Begin), press N to set the end point (End)
Enable loop preview (7th button) to repeat the preview of the current work area
Press Numpad ,  for audio preview only


What is the difference between audio Sampling rate and Frame rate? I have a video file with audio. ffprobe reports two different numbers: Sampling rate and Frame rate. I understand the 48kHz rate--there are 48,000 audio samples every second. What is the other number, and what is a "frame" in this context?

 Audio
 ID                                       : 2
 Format                                   : AAC
 ...
 Sampling rate                            : 48.0 kHz
 Frame rate                               : 46.875 FPS (1024 SPF)

Audio samples are encapsulated into frames as well. For PCM, the framing is notional, but for DCT-based codecs, it's a basic requirement.

AAC typically bundles 1024 samples per frame, so 1 second of 48000 samples represents 48000/1024 = 46.875 FPS


How can I scale more than 300% in Premiere? I am using the transform effect to scale a clip. I need a scale of around 500%, however the scale control seems to be limited to 300%.

Is there any way I can scale the clip more than 300% using the transform effect?

If you're using an older Version of Premiere:

As mentioned above, you can apply the maximum scale on the original clip,
then nest the clip (right click > Nest), and here apply another scale transformation.
With every iteration of this step you will gain 300%.

Hope this helps.


Making lenses (water and dust) splashproof? Some lenses are build splashproof, while others aren't.

What is the least expensive method to make a lens splashproof which is not splashproof?

It depends on what you mean by splashproof.

Rain covers are the absolute cheapest form of protection (as little as $5 or as much as $70+), though they generally leave the front element exposed and provide only minimal protection since they are not sealed.  They also are somewhat clunky to use as you generally have to reach under them or through sleeves in order to get to controls and you have to look through a plastic window to see the camera controls.

The next level up is water tight bags.  These cost more than rain covers on average ($60-$300), but they actually form a water tight seal around the camera.  This comes with a down side however.  With no way for water to get in, there is also no way for your hands to get in and you must try to operate the camera through the bag.  The objective is also covered, so it does reduce image quality, though models are available that provide an optical quality windows for the objective (though they cost more).  They are also limited to only a few inches to a few feet of water before the protection breaks down, though if you only care about dust and splash, they should do the job fairly well.

The next level up are sports enclosures ($350 to $1000).  These are similar to underwater enclosures, but without some of the over-engineering that goes in to making it withstand depth.  They are designed to handle similar conditions to the watertight bags, but are far easier to use and almost always have optical grade objective covers.  They are bulky, but they allow easy access to controls and are far more reliable in terms of simply placing the camera in to it and closing and latching the door.

Finally, the absolute best protection is the full blown underwater enclosure.  These units are extremely expensive ($1000 - $7000) and have to be assembled to a configuration specific to the lens and body being used (modular systems allow you to re-purpose it for different lenses by changing out parts of the enclosure).  They offer dedicated physical controls and optical grade objective covers.  They are engineered for even deep underwater and can often go 300 feet down or more.  They are probably overkill on land, but they will withstand just about anything you can throw at them without severely impacting your ability to shoot since they offer dedicated physical controls.  They are, however, not available for longer lenses.

Of course, the list wouldn't be complete without suggesting simply a weather sealed camera body and lens combination which would preclude most of this stuff being necessary.  Note that a weather sealed lens alone is not enough though and weather sealing.  The entire camera system (lens, body and battery grip if applicable) needs to be weather sealed and it is only as well sealed as the weakest component. Also, while professional weather sealing will handle light to moderate rain, it may not hold up to the worst of conditions.  I've done shots with my 5D Mark iii and 70-200 f/2.8 IS II in moderate to heavy rain, but had to promptly deal with some minor moisture issues after.  I suppose the cost of getting a 5D Mark iii and a 70-200 f/2.8 IS II is actually more than getting even a cheaper underwater enclosure, however you also get substantially better image quality from it.


Is there any way to add a time remaining (.e.g. from 30 seconds to 1 second) clock to Premiere Pro 2018? I'm trying to figure out how to add a time remaining clock to Premiere Pro 2018. My school's TV program recently switched over from AVID to Premiere and - while that's great for students who are editing - none of us can figure out how to find a time remaining function for the control room, which is an issue.

I don't think this is the right place to ask this question, but I can't figure out how to do anything like this on Google myself.

Thanks in advance for any help you guys can provide.

[I know that APP has third-party plugin support, but I wasn't able to find any that serve the purpose I want. If anyone can think of one that adds a reverse-timecode or time remaining clock where the normal sequence timer would be, that would be greatly appreciated.]

If you're looking to have the GUI Timecode display a reverse timecode (time remaining), that feature isn't possible. You can create a positive offset by clicking the timeline panel icon (upper right), and add positive time to the timeline/sequence. But it doesn't allow for negative values.

Burned in/visible on screen reverse timecode is possible.

Simply setup a new sequence. Create a new transparent video clip. Add the timecode filter.

Set the transparent video clip length to the exact countdown length you need for your program time. Adjust the timecode filter for position/opacity/size.

Return to your program sequence. Nest the "timecode" sequence you've just created within your program sequence on the very top track, or better add a few video tracks and hide it a few tracks above (to give you working room).

Right click the nested sequence clip -> click speed -> check reverse speed.

This will give you an on screen burned in timecode that counts down.

You can adjust the position of the TC display using the effects window.

If used only for editing purposes / pacing, you can use this sequence to reference time left within a given program, then simply disable visibility of the track to render out.

But as for a GUI / Worldclock display of TRT, that's not possible.


MKVToolNix Splitting and Joining Stutter I've been trying to split a tv show episode into two seperate parts, but whenever I try to rejoin the split files, I get a pixelation look on the merge locations.

I've been using MKVToolNix to try and do the splitting/joining.

I made an example of the problem I am having.

https://i.imgur.com/2V35u2B.gifv

Right as the credits start you can see the screen blips grey, and then after that some of the credits become pixelated also.

Is there anyway to fix this problem and just have one smooth video?

Try using a different video encoder when you create the original file. If that's not under your control, you can file a bug agains MKVToolNix, the author is "always grateful for good bug reports": https://mkvtoolnix.download/

Alternatively, try using ffmpeg to join the two parts: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Concatenate


Is it possible to create a hybrid Dvd/Bluray? I'm am doing a short Product demo for our company, intended as a give-away on Dvd (for the moment only burned Discs, no pressed ones).

The whole filming and editing is done in 1080p and since the video is less than 10 minutes long, I wondered whether it's possible to author a hybrid type of disc? I am aware that there exists a thing called "hybrid bluray/dvd" from Pony/Canon which basically consists of two entirely separated disc-structures on different layers (see here) however, that is not what I am looking for.

I try to find out if a disc-structure can be created where the DVD "VIDEO_TS"-folder is on the same UDF-filesystem as the "AVCHD"-Bluray folder. When the Disc is inserted in a DVD-Player, it just ignores the Bluray-content. The tricky bit probably is to get a Bluray-player to read the HD-content rather than to fall back into DVD-compatibility mode, I guess.

Does anybody know of such a technology and possibly how this can be achieved?

Thanks!

No it is not possible to create a hybrid DVD/Blu-Ray disk in the manner which you describe.  The reason for this is that in addition to the digital formats between the two being different the physical media is different too.  You would require a multi-layer or multi-sided disk such as the one you linked to and different digital data on each side.

DVD players read DVDs using a certain frequency of light and a set spacing between the track grooves (it really is laid out kind of like the grooves on an old phonograph record but microscopic).  BluRay players and disks use a different frequency of light and closer spaced grooves.  Initially this meant it was necessary to have separate laser systems for DVD and BlueRay in any combined player.  More recently optical systems were developed that could work for either format and made combined drives much cheaper to produce on mass.

I'd suggest the cheapest way would be to get a writable BlueRay and try gluing a writeable DVD to the back of it.  You would need quite thin disks to do this though as they would not fit inside standard drives.  Buying a combined DVD and BluRay disk (and writer?) is the best way to go.


How can I find out the codec of a video I have exported from Premiere Pro? I've exported some videos from Premiere Pro after working on them, but I've forgotten what the codec of the video is. How can I find out the codec of the video? Thanks!

Use MediaInfo to get technical information for a media file.
The codec id in the video section will print the exact identifier stored in the file for that video stream. The format entry in the same section will print the formal name of that codec.


Clips appear "zoomed" in program monitor (Premiere Pro) This is frustrating the crap out of me.  I'm putting 1920×1080 clips into a 1920×1080 sequence.  There are also some 2560×1440 clips in it, and those actually display correctly, but the 1080p clips are zoomed in the program monitor.  Before this zoom problem, there were bars on the top and bottom.

These are my sequence settings.  I know the frame rate is different from the source clips but that shouldn't be causing this issue?

When I drag a clip to the new item button and it makes a sequence, that clip works the way I want it to.  But the settings on that new sequence are the same as what I've got already.  (Also I feel like there must be some easy solution that I'm overlooking, so sorry if this is a noob question.)

Thanks!

Right click on the clip you placed in your sequence and select 'Set to Frame size' and your clip will automatically be resized to fit the size of the current sequence.

You may also wish to reset the magnification of the Program Monitor by right clicking on the clip shown in the monitor and selecting 'Magnification > Fit'.


Concatenating in sync MP4 (H264+PCM instead of AAC) from a Sony 2018 Camera I downloaded these files (at max resolution 4K, that is important), in this order:

https://vimeo.com/195782736
https://vimeo.com/196725716
https://vimeo.com/195776765
https://vimeo.com/196651176
https://vimeo.com/195781480

please notice that these files are not "a video posted online" but the original output of a RX100m5!!

each video offers:
0:0 video
0:1 audio
0:2 "unknown to ffmpeg"

therefore I changed the titles into
a.mp4, b.mp4.......e.mp4
to avoid the error. Amen.

Question:

I want to simply concatenate them, i.e. no recode!

Problem:

Sony's output is "MP4 = H264av1 + PCM". Curiously PCM is NOT supported by MP4 container (see official specs on wikipedia).
Therefore ffmpeg is unable to do what I want. [It seems that Sony users never used ffmpeg].

I tried:
ffmpeg -f concat -i lista.txt -c copy concatenated.mp4

I got:

[mp4 @ 094630c0] Could not find tag for codec pcm_s16be in stream #1, codec not currently supported in container
Could not write header for output file #0 (incorrect codec parameters ?): Invalid argument

as stated above Sony puts PCM into MP4 and this is not allowed.
threfore I say let's to concatenate the files without recode/transcode and just change container:

ffmpeg -f concat -safe 0 -i "lista.txt" -map 0:0 -map 0:1 -c copy concatenated.mkv

ffmpeg -f concat -safe 0 -i "lista.txt" -c copy concatenated.mkv

I got: no error message but...out of sync. that is unacceptable.
[with MTS 1080p I simply concatenate them via the very very old Ts_splitter&joiner.exe and all is fine and in sync!]

Addendum:

Only if I notice (like in the past!) that a simple "concatenate" let the Mb/s to drop down drastically, then I could add something like
-map "[v]" -map "[a]" -b:v 95000k
(that worked fine).

thanks for a working string for the 5 videos :)
...I warmly hoping that the output will be in sync.

best,

In this case, I can think of two possible causes. First is differing timebases for the video stream, which is definitely the case here. And second is unequal lengths of video and audio within each file. Unknown but unlikely since these are files produced by a camera.

The reciprocal timebase for the video stream is reported as its tbn value.

For the five files, they are 25k, 24k, 24k, 24k and 24k respectively. The first one should be changed to 24k, else the videos streams of subsequent videos will be speeded up 4%, causing a desync.

Normally, I would just rewrap the MP4, only changing the timescale. However, since PCM isn't supported in MP4 - the workaround here is to rewrap to MKV individually and then concat. Matroska files have a fixed timescale of 1000, so a simple command will do.

ffmpeg -i file.mp4 -c copy -dn file.mkv


How to make the smoke become a mask layer? Im a beginner in video editing industry, so I got one main question and few sub questions based on this video:

Main question - The intro title cover by smoke effect, when the smoke effect pass by then it reveal the text, after that it become a shape. How are those done?

Sub question

how the background been made? it is like a curtain and keep moving, is that made by After Effect or others software?
at 0:04 when the food shown up, how is the small sparkling effect that surrounding the food?

Grab a pre-keyed smoke element from somewhere. Mask the smoke element as desired.
Copy that mask onto the text or you can parent the mask as an adjustment layer. Keyframe opacity of text, linear wipe with feather in a gradient/ramp solid for the background.

The "sparkling" effects are lens flares (see JJ Abrams)

The curtain moving effect could be just another preset with the layer style set to overlay. Or you can generate your own layer like that using fractal noise.


Unable to convert Avisynth script in ffmpeg I tried create a video file from the AviSynth script using this command (in Windows 7):

ffmpeg  -i  file.avs  file.mp4

and I got this message:

[avisynth @ 05000e60] AviSynth version is too old. Please upgrade to either
                      AviSynth 2.6 >= RC1 or AviSynth+ >= r1718.
                      file.avs: Unknown error occurred

Very clear recommendation (as I use AviSynth+ 0.1 (r1576, x86)) but I'm not able to find an newer version, neither for AviSynth, nor for AviSynth+.

Nevertheless, it was probably only an recommendation. The most important part is indeed this:

                      file.avs: Unknown error occurred

So I changed the content of the file.avs - I put only one command into it, enough simple and stupid, so my file.avs now looks like:

version

No change. The same message. So I kindly ask for an advice what to do.

(I tried it with versions 3.2.2 and 2.8.4 of ffmpeg, both of them report  --enable-libxavs in their configuration and D  avisynth  AviSynth script in their file formats obtained by ffmpeg -formats.)

From FFmpeg source code:

  On Windows, FFmpeg supports AviSynth interface version 6 or higher.
  This includes AviSynth 2.6 RC1 or higher, and AviSynth+ r1718 or
  higher, and excludes 2.5 and the 2.6 alphas.

From doom9:

  The decision to drop support for anything below 2.6 RC1 was due to
  catastrophic header incompatibilities between 2.5 and 2.6 RC1* and the
  maintenance burden (and potential licensing minefield that could mean
  any additional 2.5 support would violate GPL) that would be incurred
  by trying to continue to support 2.5 while using properly updated 2.6
  headers.

Get AviSynth+ r2420 from
https://github.com/pinterf/AviSynthPlus/releases/tag/r2420-MT


Battlestar Galactica Style Lens Flare? How are lens flares akin to that in shows like Battlestar Galactica, SGU, etc. achieved?

Here is an example:

I think the type of lens flare you're looking for is anamorphic lens flare.


Video for Windows Codec x264 and VP80 I'm looking for VfW codec to encode H264 and VP80.

I already found: x264vfw
And VP80vfw

The 1st is bugged and lost the start and the end. The 2nd do not install on Windows 8.

Why VfW ? to use then in a C# sofware using EmguCV, recording frame by frame. I can't use ffmpeg.

Any Idea ?

There isn't really an alternative to x264vfw. Are you sure the error is with the codec and not your application? It's in wide use, such a major bug would definitely be found.

Also be aware that h264 doesn't work in a frame by frame basis unless you encode only intra frames.
VP80 is NOT h264, just a similar codec.

If you need to develop an app you probably want to turn to a commercial h264 implementation like MainConcepts Codec SDK: http://www.mainconcept.com/products/sdks/codec-sdk/video/h264avc.html
Should also come with a vfw codec.

Alternatively you can turn to GStreamer which offers C# bindings: http://cgit.freedesktop.org/gstreamer/gstreamer-sharp

Another option could may be ffdshow it adds quite a few codecs to VfW and I believe also x264.


Ronin M vs. Helix Jr Has anybody used the new DJI Ronin-M and compared it to the Letus Helix Jr.?
I'm considering a gimbal purchase for my DSLR videography and haven't seen anything that tells me why the Helix is twice the price of the Ronin-M.

For half the price and DSLRs only, the Ronin M probably makes more sense. The Helix Jr. makes sense for more. It can hold up to 12 lb of stuff vs the M's 8 lb (which is kind of crazy, considering that it's even lighter), and the fact that it's naturally at heart-ish level as opposed to belt level means a lot for good framing and the ability to hold it at a good frame for an extended period of time. You can get it to eye level for more easily than the Ronin, even in Upright mode (or whatever it's called), because it flips the camera upside down. (They both have briefcase mode for very low shots.)

If you want a second person with total control, the Ronin is absolutely the way to go. But if you're a one-man band and can afford the premium, the Helix is probably the better option.

Source: I have demoed both.


Kaomoji characters on Text object I'm having problems rendering Kaomoji characters using Premiere's text tool, I'm working on a windows environment. if I copy-paste the Kaomoji below:

٩*ˊᗜˋو

It is rendered like this:

On the effects panel it is shown properly though:

I've tried many fonts even installed fonts that claim to support Kaomoji but the issue persist. Maybe I should tweak some text configuration setting which I'm not aware of?

Get them to work in TextEdit first (assuming you're on a mac).
Check exactly which font works in TextEdit.
Then try that font in Premiere when copying the characters from TextEdit using "paste and match style" into a text box.
If that doesn't work, you might have to export from textedit as a PDF, then import the PDF in Premiere (but this means the text will no longer be editable in Premiere).


ffmpeg/x265: fixed-GOP, IDR only keyframes, repeating headers I need to transcode a video to another one with the following properties:

GOP size is always fixed at a given value
Only IDR frames are used as key-frames (not I-slices)
SPS/PPS/VPS frames are repeated every time before the IDR frame.

Is there a way to do this with ffmpeg?

Also, it would be great if you can also tell me of a simple way of verifying all this (perhaps using ffprobe?).

Minimal command line, for a GOP size of 2 seconds:

ffmpeg -i input -force_key_frames expr:gte(t,n_forced*2) -c:v libx265 -x265-params open-gop=0:scenecut=0:repeat-headers=1 output.hevc

Verification:

ffmpeg -i output.hevc -c copy -bsf:v trace_headers -f null -

After each line containing key frame e.g.,

Packet: 18115 bytes, key frame, no pts, dts 2319977, duration 40000.

You should see the VPS/SPS/PPS. The first Slice Segment Header that follows should have a NAL unit type of 20 which is IDR_N_LP.

ffprobe can't invoke bitstream filters.


Instructional video creation: "see-through glass" whiteboard effect How is this effect achieved?

https://imgur.com/c5fyRDp

(Original video:

            )

The instructor is just standing behind glass and writing on it.


How to Replicate a Color in Final Cut Pro X I am editing video in Final Cut Pro X.  Within a video, I would like to create a title that uses a font color that matches a color within the video itself.  How do I do that?

The key thing to realize is that double-clicking the text color within the Inspector brings up a separate color wheel window which contains an eyedropper.  Dragging the eyedropper to the color of interest within the video is how the color gets chosen for the title.

Here's a video on how to replicate a color within Final Cut Pro X.


Light settings for indoor shoot - Sony dcr sx60 I have a Sony Handy Cam (sony dcr sx60) and no tripod with me.

I have to make an indoor video shoot (I am a beginner and it is a test shoot).

The subject will not be moving and it could be a interview kind of video.
There will be only one subject on which to focus.
The room will have natural light on one side of it (through the transparent glass door of window) and a few more lights will be available on the ceilings (Yellow and white lights).

I have surfed on the net regarding the ISO, aperture, shutter speed and more, confused about all.

Could you please give me quick and simple tips to make a good output?

You may actually be better off without the natural light.  The color is going to be different between the sunlight and the interior lights and will be much MUCH brighter.  It will result in strong shadows and some weird white points.

If you are shooting video, shutter speed isn't really much of an issue since you'll want to have it set at your frame rate to get as much light as possible.  Aperture you will want to set based on the desired depth of field for your shot, the wider the better to allow in more light and the ISO should be set to properly expose your image.

Options for dealing with the color mismatch between lights is to either gel the lights inside or gel the windows to alter the color of the sunlight.  Alternately, it might be possible to use a large white reflector (even white sheets can work in a pinch) to try to reflect light from the windows back on to the subject from a different angle, but that can be tricky depending on the angle that light is coming in at.

The key is that you want to have a light source that fills in the shadows that is near, but slightly less powerful than the main light and you want them to be the same color.  Your interior lights do not sound to be the right color or near bright enough to compete with the sun, so your options are really either shoot entirely with interior light or reflect the sun and shoot entirely based on light from the sun.

If doing entirely interior lights, (really in either case, but harder with sun only) a back light can also be helpful that is below and behind the subject to light up their outline and make them stand out more from the background.  That's what gives the "pop" to the image.  It is referred to as 3 point lighting (key - the main light, fill - the one that fills in shadows, and back - the one behind).


Fair use with copyrighted material I did not quite understand if using copyrighted music in a video falls under the umbrella of the so called "Fair use".

Of course, here, I am assuming that the video is not used for commercial purposes, and it is solely produced for artistic/hobbyist purposes.

I am aware of the fact that royalty free music is available online. However, there are some pieces of music, mostly from movies, which are fabulous and it is a pity to not be able to use them.

I am therefore wondering as to what, at least in the US, is permissible and what is not for non-commercial purposes.

Disclaimer: not a lawyer, but based on the experience from usage (and making) of such tracks -

All music is "copyrighted" by default unless the creator explicitly has in writing abandon those rights. The author can also write it's OK to use his music for "anything". Copyright only means that the author has the right to determine the usage of his track. If the track is used commercially or not doesn't really matter, but commercial tracks are often restricted by default by an organization that represent the artist.

"Fair use" only applies to USA and UK. Though other countries has similar variants and various restrictions/liberties in relation to usage.

For the USA version of it: Fair use means you can use any copyrighted material with another purpose than public performing or sharing. More specifically you use an excerpt of the track to criticize it, review it, as an example in relation to education and so forth.

You can not just use it, or a part of it as a background piece or in some way which does not have a purpose as mentioned above (unless you have permission through for example royalty agreements with the organization or the artist).

Lets say you are a music journalist in a radio or TV station and doing a review of a track. Here you may use a fair part of the music, a part that is sufficient for the task so you can make your point but not so large you have in practice performed the "whole" track publicly.

If you work as a teacher in a lets say a music school and want to show the student how to make a certain effect, bridge, sound or whatever, you can use a part of the music sufficient to demonstrate what you try to teach, but you can not play the whole track or the irrelevant parts of the track for the students (this last would be considered public performance).

If you post a video on YouTube showing a screen recording of a game and use a few seconds of a track as background music - this is not fair use.

If you make a movie trailer and use a part of a cool track you like - this is not fair use (however, there are exceptions in some countries to this for radio/TV stations that makes in-house trailers (commercials for their own programs/shows), I am not sure about USA on this).

Bottom line is - Use common sense and not the heart and love for the track you want to use! :-)

If you want to use a track outside  the fair use you can always become a member of the organization which manage the copyright and pay royalties for the use if it is public performance related. If you want to use it for non-generic performance (movie, commercial, youtube video..) you will need a written permission to use the track for that purpose (and it comes, most likely, with a price tag).

Worth to mention: there are commercial music made especially for usage in films, commercials etc. where you don't have to pay royalties and where you have automatically all permissions you need to use it in that way. There are plenty (too many to list here) of company sites where you can buy this from. For instance SmartSound, iStockphoto Music ++.


How do I get a totally white background without the subject being too bright? I would like to do a product demonstration similar to the White Room's demonstrations done by Apple, such as iPad 2 Product Demonstration

What type of lighting is used to keep the whites extremely white, while producing a professional looking video? Is this done by saturating the room with light, then going in after the video and darkening the video?
What type of room setup is needed?
Suggestions on Video Camera?

We do this all the time. All you need is a white wall and plenty of light.

The goal is to light the wall far brighter than the subject in front. You want it so that when the subject is properly exposed, the wall behind them is vastly overexposed/blown out, thus losing any details/texture on the wall.

It helps to keep the subject at a distance from the backdrop.

Here's the last shoot I was on using this technique:


What lighting setup is recommended for filming a presenter in front of a TV screen? i will be filming a presenter in front of a 48" TV with graphics on it. The presenter will be pointing at the graphics at times to explain certain things.

We will be doing this in a tiny studio on a shoestring budget. Do you have any recommendations at all on how to light the presenter? Are there video lights or setups i can use, that will not blend or glare in the tv screen?

We will probably be using a consumer grade video camera and dump the video material into an editing suite afterwards. It's mainly the presenter and the TV what will be in the shot, i'd say a medium close up.

If you can't use green-screen (the ideal), I'd recommend a couple of things. First, use a screen with a matte surface to reduce specular reflections and present more diffuse ones. These are somewhat rarer that glossy ones.

Second, angle the screen slightly top-forward, to deflect some reflections down and away from the camera. A slight parallax won't be too noticeable. Same goes for a slight off-axis view right-to-left

Third, try a polarizer in front of the taking lens to dampen some reflections.

Last, use cutting flags on all fixtures to minimize the amount of light that actually touches the screen. If you keylight from two directions, you can help avoid hitting the screen. Diffuse fill light is much harder to flag effectively.

Good luck. I'm sure others here will have more suggestions.


Would rendering After Effects project in Premiere Pro decrease quality? I have created a motion logo using After Effects. Now, I want to render it in H.264 or MP4 format. Now, there are 3 ways for it:
1. Using Media Encoder
2. Export as Premiere Pro Project in After Effects and Use it in Premiere Pro
3. Save the Project as After Effects project and Import it in Premeire Pro

Now, what I want to ask is about quality of the video. Would all ways yield same quality for same format? Or There's difference between them in terms of quality? If yes, what would be best?

My 2nd question is: I'm making a short video like a Movie trailer. I would create the scenes in Pr and the Motion Logo (which I've already created in After effects) in Ae. In what way should I render them (I need MP4 video)? Import the Motion Logo project in Premiere Pro and render both Logo and Video OR both Video scenes and Logo in Media encoder?

NOTE: I'm asking these questions in terms of quality of Motion Logo and Video scenes, not in terms of ease of usage.

Thank you.

Importing from AE using dynamic linking and rendering in Premiere or Media Encoder will yield the same quality, but it does give you a little less control over the render settings.

While in AE you can choose whether to render with frame blending , motion blur, draft settings and so on, Premiere will always render your AE comp with the current settings. So when you're setting up your final render in Premiere, make sure you jump over to AE and turn on motion blur and frame blending and check that all your layers are rendering at full quality, not draft. Most of the time you won't want these on while you're editing because they slow down the preview so much.

As far as quality goes I believe that it uses the same render engine, so don't obsess about it. In fact re-encoding from an After Effects render is probably more lossy than importing using dynamic linking, because of the two compression stages. But you will never ever notice the difference one way or the other, trust me. Any miniscule losses due to things like quantisation errors and so on are going to pale into insignificance with quality lost in the compression to MP4.

Use the way that makes it much easier for you. For me that's importing via dynamic linking, allowing me to change things in the AE project without re-rendering all the time and having great big render files all over the place.


Does having hardware encoding chip help? I've been googling for a while now so I finally decided to ask others as well as I'm pretty darn confused.

I'm looking to be able to stream at 1080p at 60fps ( from a gaming laptop, it's more than capable, running actual game at 300fps uncapped ). I know about ShadowPlay and it's fairly easy to use but it's annoying how it automatically changes my stream's title and the quality is pretty bad even at best settings.

Then, I have found the Live Gamer Extreme which has 1080p at 60fps recording and hdmi passthrough, but it doesn't have h.264 encoding chip so I'm receiving RAW data in OBS ( there are cards that have hardware encoding chips already but those don't do 60fps as far as I can see )

So, does having a h.264 encoding chip help in any way ?
Because I'd like doing the whole thing on one laptop and not having to use two laptops one for gaming and one for encoding would be great.

In OBS's Encoding tab I can't find any option like No encoding needed since the signal is already encoded, so, should I look anymore for 60fps w/ encoding chip or should I go with this game capturing card and use the other laptop for encoding.

Thanks in advance !

A hardware encoder will produce video with less CPU usage. However, it will require a higher bitrate to achieve the same quality image.


Importing Adobe Illustrator files as Parametric shapes in After Effects? I need to rig up some expressions to a shape layers "size" and "position" parameters and the layer transform "position" parameter as well. When I create the shapes directly in AE there are the shape parameters of size, position and rotation. Though, when I import AI files and convert them then they lose the options of the shape itself and the only option that is available to edit is the "path" parameter.

How do I import AI files as parametric shapes not a bezier shape?

I don't think that it's possible to import AI shapes as parametric shapes (in 2019 at least, this might change, with luck). There are workarounds that can help though.

If you convert the AI layer to a shape layer you can get the individual points of the path like so:

var pts = thisComp.layer("test Outlines").content("Group 1").content("Path 1").path.points(t = time)

where the layer "test outlines" is the shape layer created by converting the AI document, and Group 1 is one of the paths in the shape layer. Then for a rectangle you can get the size like this:

var pts = thisComp.layer("test Outlines").content("Group 1").content("Path 1").path.points(t = time);
var size = pts[0] - pts[2];

if you want to set the size you could do the reverse, putting this on the path property:

var size = [123, 45];
var pts = [[0, 0] - size/2, [0 - size[0]/2, size[1]/2], size/2, [size[0]/2, 0 - size[1]/2];
createPath(points = pts, inTangents = [], outTangents = [], isClosed = true);

if you do the substitutions you'll see that the second line works out to

[-61.5, -22.5], [-61.5, 22.5], [61.5, 22.5], [61.5, -22.5]]

which describes a rectangle 123 wide and 45 high.


Panasonic G7 - Low cost zoom lens for video I'm about to buy the Panasonic Lumix G7 (body) and I would really like some advice about the best lens I can get for it at less than 400$ if possible. I want it for shooting video, and the lens should be a zoom lens.

Thanks.

A common zoom range of Panasonic MFT lenses is 14-42(45)mm. As an owner of such a lens I found out it's quite a compromise for city videos. 14mm is wide, but often times not wide enough for buildings. 42mm is tele, but not enough for detail shots.

Here are some with a more practical zoom range:

Panasonic Lumix G Vario HD 14-140mm f/4.0-5.8 ASPH./MEGA O.I.S.
Panasonic Lumix G Vario 14-140mm f/3.5-5.6 ASPH. POWER O.I.S.
Panasonic LUMIX G VARIO 35-100mm f/4.0-5.6 ASPH. MEGA O.I.S.

I don't want to get more specific into prices, because they may change fast or be different in other countries.


MPEG - the maximum range for R,G,B? There are sentences:
For analog video or MPEG (including DVD) output, the maximum range for R,G,B is [16, 235] (8-bit).
For YUV, the maximum range for intensity (Y) is [16, 235] (8-bit).

Is this saying correct ? I'm thinking that the first sentence contains an error. MPEG has YCbCr encoding ..
What do you think about it ?

Yes, MPEG-2 video is stored as YCbCr, but video editing programs (like Cinelerra) convert the samples to RGB for processing during editing. That range is 16-235.
From Wikipedia on YCbCr

Analog YPbPr from analog R'G'B' is derived as follows:

To get a YUV output in the 16-235 range, the input RGB is also limited.


How to make multiple shots when there's just one camera? I just want to have a Full shot at first and then a Medium full shot next in my video.

Is it possible if there's just one camera?

*My camera shoot on Full HD, and the video composition in the editing software is set on Full HD too, so it's not possible to scale the video to achieve the Medium shot out of the Full.

This is basic film making, you would do this in multiple takes.

Take your wide shot running the whole scene you want with this shot
Take you scene back to the start point, adjust the camera to the new shot and run through the scene again
Rinse and repeat until you have all the shots needed to make your scene.

You would/should have already made a shot list knowing what needs to be shot with the different camera angles, sometimes only have to act parts of scenes over and over again to get the sections of the shots needed.

Other option would be to get a 4k/5k/6k camera and be able to punch in the shots during editing but this could cause further issues in post with file sizes, performaces, converting, encoding etc etc


Newbie Question - speed of footage lags in Premier I'm using Adobe Premiere to add some graphics that go along with a video we made. The original video was made by someone else, is 2 min long and very HQ and plays well. But once I imported it and worked on it for two days, I didn't realize how slow the frames play in the updated video. It's like the speed of the actors mouths don't move as fast as the audio you hear.

Is there anyway to get the speed back and not drop frames? It does this on my boss's Mac and my laptop.

My graphics aren't very heavy or anything. Just some transparent png images with a few effects.

Problem solved. The video was edited originally in Movie Maker and for some reason destroyed the quality. After I re-did everything all over again and only using Premiere, it cleared it all up.


Does filming in 30p as opposed to 60p provide a brighter video? Does filming in 30p as opposed to 60p provide a brighter video? Would it be better to film at perhaps 24p in darker circumstances?

Yes and no.  Shutter speed is what determines how long light is gathered for and is not the same as frame rate.  Frame rate does place a logical limit on your shutter speed as you need at least one exposure per frame in most cases, but there is nothing preventing you from using much faster shutter speeds than your frame rate.

Some video cameras will even allow for shutter speeds slower than the frame rate and will simply record the same image on more than one frame, though this arguably lowers the meaningful framerate (though faster frame rates will result in a closer match up to the exposure time).

As a general rule of thumb, it's best to use a shutter speed at least twice that of your frame rate, so you would use 1/60 exposure or faster for 30fps and 1/120 exposures for 60fps.

This is partially a throw back to old mechanical film cameras where the film advanced during the time that the shutter was not open.  They used a rotating plate and when the plate was over the lens, the film moved forward.  This is why you will see shutter speeds on some professional cameras measured in degrees.  This corresponds to the number of degrees of the circle that were open.  ie, a 180 degree shutter speed means that the shutter speed is twice that of the frame rate.  90 degree shutter speed would be 4 times the frame rate.

As long as the shutter is timed properly to the frame capture, there is no reason you can't use longer shutter speeds, but it may increase the appearance of motion blur and give an odd feeling to the footage unless that is what you are going for.

Reasons to use slower shutter speeds are to let in more light or to increase motion blur, reasons to use faster shutter speeds are to let in less light or decrease motion blur.

Reasons to use lower frame rates are to save space and to give a more film like quality.  Reasons for higher frame rates are for smoother motion and more video data to work with (better slow motion, stabilization, etc).


How to make python ignore square bracket? I have a code it work with fine with with file name does not contain square bracket []
an example:
10245,13445.avi
def insert_types(out, dir):
for root, dirs, files in walk(dir):
   for f in os.listdir(dir):
        match =  search(r"(\d+),(\d+)\.avi$", f)
        if match:
            startframe = match.group(1)
            endframe = match.group(2)
            out = fvf.InsertSign(out, join(root, f), int(startframe), int(endframe), matrix="709")
return out

This code works with .avi file format and it take the first and the second values with the comma mark ,  and its only work with the filename which does not contain square bracket like  10245,13445.avi
But now I want to make this code ignore the square bracket [] in file name [10245,13445].avi  how it gonna be, any help?
Thanx in advance

the regex pattern should be
search(r"(\d+),(\d+)\]*\.avi$", f)

previously, the pattern is "13445" + ".avi"
now, the pattern is "13445" + "]" + ".avi", and it should be fine with or without square brackets.


Is there an easy method for detecting or marking the actual sample frequency? Some time ago, I did a project where the solo guitarist was sitting in a different location. I uploaded rough down mixes to guitarist, who would load the files into his DAW software, record his guitar parts to separate tracks and send the guitar tracks back to me. It worked really well save for one thing: His tracks always seemed a teeny tiny bit off key. Not only that, but he also seemed to drift very slightly tempo wise. The drift became more noticeable on longer takes and that's where it occurred to me that perhaps his and my sampling frequencies were not in sync. After a little trial and error I was able to identify the drift between our sampling rates and subsequently, I would always resample his submissions to get the tracks in tune and sync with my tracks.

Edit: To be clear, the files were sampled at 44.1KHz at both ends. An example: One file is two minutes long. At the beginning of the file, the transient of the guitarists strum is right on top of my drums and bass. But over the course of 2 minutes, the strum consistently lags behind a little further each time. I know is isn't because my guitarist can't keep time--it's too consistent for that.  Looking at the last strum, about two minutes into the song, I see the transient of the drum and the guitar is now 200 milliseconds apart. There are supposed to be 44,100 samples every second so that's a lag of 8820 samples.  A two minute sample at 44,100Hz is 120*44,100 = 5,292,000 samples so relatively speaking, the lag is less than .17 percent. All things considered that might sound like a pretty good tolerance, but a .17 percent drift after two minutes is 200 milliseconds and very clearly audible.

I know that you can use external clock sources to sync up digital streams, but we didn't have that kind of equipment at our disposal. Besides, although two external clock sources would probably be spot on 44.1/84/96KHz, we'd still have to make sure.

In movie and video production, it is common to use a so-called clapperboard to annotate each take, and to synchronize image and sound. I wonder if maybe marking each take with a reference signal could perhaps help identify equipment that's not sampling the signal at exactly 44.1/48/96KHz. I know I could just add, say, a 1000 HZ square signal at the beginning of each take, but then I would manually have to look at the waveform to see if it is spot on. Are there better ways to deal with this kind of problem?

Is it a common problem or just a case of really bad hardware on my and/or the guitarists side?

What file format are you passing back and forth?  The sample rate is stored in the file.  No need for a reference tone.

One of you is likely recording at a different sample rate than the other.  Probably one is recording at 44.1kHz, and the other 48kHz, or 88.2/96, etc.

Now, audio interfaces do vary in sample rate frequency.  44,100Hz can be 44,099Hz on one, and 44,0102Hz on another.  This won't throw your tuning off by any perceptible amount.  Given enough time, you can start hearing a difference.  However, if you are recording against a track already recorded, this isn't an issue.  The playback sample rate on his DAW while recording will be the same rate as the record rate.

So, if you put together a few parts and send him the files, and then he records a couple tracks and sends you the files, there should be no issue here.


HLS.js player dropping frames at discontinuities in HLS stream I have a need to play small pieces (1 or 2 seconds) of video in various orders via HLS. Think a highlights reel from a sporting match.
Several HLS players struggle with playing a stream with discontinuities between every TS segment, but HLS.js based players appear to cope OK. The one things that does happen is sometimes, but not always, a frame is dropped following a discontinuity. It seems to happen about 70% of the time that the player drop either frame 0 or frame 1 (i.e. the 1st or 2nd frame in the TS segment).
I have experimented with different TS segment lengths, different videos, different frame rates and bit rates. The problem seems pretty consistent.
To reproduce what I'm seeing (on windows 10), create a test video at 25 FPS with FFMPEG:
ffmpeg -f lavfi -i testsrc=duration=60:size=1960x1080:rate=25 -vf "drawtext=fontsize=30:fontcolor=White:fontfile='c\:\\Windows\\Fonts\\arial.ttf':text='Frame\: %{eif\:mod(n,25)\:d}':x=2:y=2:box=1: boxcolor=0x00000000@1" -b:v 1m atestsrc.mpg

Then slice the video into 1 second long TS segments:
ffmpeg -i atestsrc.mpg -force_key_frames "expr:gte(t,n_forced*1)" -strict -2 -c:a aac -c:v libx264 -f segment -segment_list_type m3u8 -segment_list_size 0 -segment_time 1.0 -segment_time_delta 0 -segment_list atest.m3u8 seg%02d.ts

The resulting output plays back just fine, until I add the #EXT-X-DISCONTINUITY tags...
The Problem:
It looks like HLS.js based video players drop frames when playing back the m3u8 with #EXT-X-DISCONTINUITY tags - example stream here.
Firstly, you can see that it plays back a 60 second video in 58 seconds. The same symptom occurs in several different HLS.js based players, such as this one.
If you play it back at 0.1 times speed you can see that it is not rendering some frames, often frame 1:

This difference in playback speed is causing me all kinds of grief in seeking to specific places in the video. Any ideas on how to address this would be much appreciated!

Looks like this might be a bug in HLS.js:
https://github.com/video-dev/hls.js/issues/2873
Hopefully this is rectified in a subsequent version.
UPDATE:
This hls.js bug has been fixed in release 0.14.1:
https://github.com/video-dev/hls.js/releases/tag/v0.14.1


How to move/remove/join adjacent Blade Speed points in FCPX So, the Blade Speed retiming tool in FCPX is half-awesome.

But once I have put a blade marker in I can't work out how to:

remove it (apart from immediate undo, i.e. later on)
move its position in relation to the src clip, i.e. I put the blade point in the wrong place, I want to move it without adjusting the retiming either side of the point
join adjacent retimed segments... related to above, if I put in a new blade point in the correct position I can't remove the wrong one (1) or see a way to join/merge the adjacent retiming segments

Partial answer...

I still don't know how to remove a single blade speed point.  It is possible to remove all speed points for a clip by selecting the clip and choosing a new speed (eg Normal 100%) from the Retiming menu.

I still don't know how to join adjacent segments (kind of same thing as above).

Found out how to move the blade speed point relative to the clip itself without retiming:

double-click the blade speed centre handle and click the 'Edit' button

You get this icon you can drag in the timeline:

(classic bit of Apple "hidden UI" gotcha)

If you are zoomed in and you have a big speed differential either side of the centre point then it may not be at all obvious that you really are moving the src frame (fooled me before) because the preview changes are complex. But with Normal speed both sides it is clear this does what I wanted.


Where can I publish a 50 fps video? I've produced a video in 50 fps progressive. I am having a hard time getting anyone to actually see it: all popular online video players are artificially capped to 30 fps.

Is there any way I can publish this video without halving the framerate to 25 fps, which looks atrocious due to the fast shutter used?

I believe that dailymotion.com can have 50 fps videos, though the recommended is 25 fps. Here is an upload that says that it is in 50fps.
I am not completely sure, so you might have to just end up converting it to 25.


iOS like (partial) slowmotion with easing in Premiere CC i'm curently in the 30 days trail of Premiere CC (and own Premiere Elements 12), and i try to produce iOS like (partial) slowmotion with easing between the different speeds. I already slowed down a entire clip using "Speed/Duration".

How do I get a transition between the different speeds?

Example in FCP: http://help.apple.com/finalcutpro/mac/10.1/#ver41a2cd3ae

You can use the Time Remapping effect, and just use keyframes to ease in/out of different speeds.

https://helpx.adobe.com/premiere-pro/using/duration-speed.html


Canon XF100 live stream -- additional hardware needed Question: How to get the XF100 to live-feed into a laptop for streaming?

Details:
I currently have a Canon XF100 HD video camera, and I need to use it for live streaming of some upcoming events.  I also need to do a HD stream (opposed to SD).  The outputs on the camera are HDMI, YPbPr, and SD RCA plugs.

I would think HDMI or YPbPr with red/white audio would be best, however the part I need to know is, how do I get this into a laptop?  A desktop is not an option in this case.   We do have some laptops around, but we also might be able to get a new laptop if needed.

You need a capture card.  If you have either USB3 or Thunderbolt, then you can use something like the Black Magic Intensity or Matrox MXO2.  You could also consider a stand alone device that is capable of handling the streaming for you directly, such as the Matrox Monarch or similar devices that don't have to rely on the computer's processing to send the stream.


Originally smooth unicolor background shows "steps" in the color gradient when exporting I am using Abode Premiere Pro.

I am working on a video which has a static background. The background is almost unicolor with a light color gradient. Please see here:

I want to export the video. The problem is that in the rendered video the background gradient is not smooth. The background shows "steps" in the color gradient. This is specially visible during fade in from a black screen/ fade out to a black screen.

The "step effect" is stronger when I use a low quality or low bitrate output fromat. But even when I use very high quality output format the problem is still visible. And with very high quality I get a filesize of 13 gigabytes for a 15 minute video.

Here are some example settings wich gives a filesize of 1.5 GB. The "step effect" is quite visible.

1920x1080
length: 15 minutes
25 fps
H.264
render at maximum depth
bitrate encoding: VBR, 2 pass
target bitrate: 15 Mbps
maximum bitrate: 17 Mbps
Use maximum render quqlity
resulting file size: 1562 MB

How to solve this problem? How do I get a smooth output and acceptable file sizes? What is the best format, the best codec for this?

The choice of codec will largely depend on what you're doing with the material. Your problem is that there just aren't enough colours in 8-bit colour space to give you a smooth gradient over the size of the frame.

Problem is that if you want to deliver it on the internet you're pretty much locked in to h.264 (or I guess webm or ogv, but same deal). You can encode h.264 in 10 bit, but almost no-one will be able to watch it, and certainly not in a browser.

There is a workaround which can help a little, which is to add some noise to your gradient. What this does is to break up the banding so that it's not as obvious. It's called dithering, it was big when 256 colour gifs ruled the earth. See this answer for a bit more detail.


Video to Panorama in Android Is it possible to convert video to panorama in android using  FFmpeg?

I have found below command from this https://github.com/ibaaj/awesome-OpenSourcePhotography#video-to-panorama

ffmpeg -i video.avi -r 5 -qscale 3  tmp/images/image-%3d.jpg
pto_gen -o tmp/hugin.pto tmp/images/*.jpg
cpfind --multirow -o tmp/hugin.pto tmp/hugin.pto
cpclean -o tmp/hugin.pto tmp/hugin.pto
linefind -o tmp/hugin.pto tmp/hugin.pto
autooptimiser -a -l -s -m -o tmp/hugin.pto tmp/hugin.pto
pano_modify -o tmp/hugin.pto --center --fov=AUTO --canvas=70% tmp/hugin.pto
pto2mk -o tmp/hugin.mk -p tmp/output tmp/hugin.pto
make -f tmp/hugin.mk all

Any idea how can I use this for Android or any other helpful command, it would be very helpful !!!

While that command may well be the right one to convert video to panorama in ffmpeg, you don't get ffmpeg by default on Android.

You can get a version from the SourceForge FFmpeg for Android project, but I'll warn you that compilation may have its challenges. We have an old question on StackOverflow on this. Top answer there gives some detail on these headings:

Build static libraries of ffmpeg for Android.
Create a dynamic library wrapping ffmpeg functionality using the Android NDK.
Use the ffmpeg-wrapping dynamic library from your java sources.

Any questions on the technical implementation / compilation aspects should be raised over on Stack Overflow (or possibly Android Stack Exchange)


Industry standard HDMI extension? We're recently purchased a new lighting console in our small theatre that supports video output over HDMI. We want to run the signal from the control room out to the proscenium but don't want to settle for a consumer grade HDMI extender. What is a quality device that we can permanently install that can transmit a strong HDMI signal? What are most theatre spaces using for this application?

If you’re going wired, you’re going to be limited to roughly 25 feet before you need to reclock the signal. HDMI simply isnt designed for long runs. There are 50’ cables out there, my experience is their performance is spotty.

You could go with a Wireless Solution HDMI solution. I recommend the Nyrius line of transmitters/receivers which you can buy on Amazon. The Pro version is roughly $300 and you can get a solid HD signal to reach 100+ feet line of sight.

Otherwise, buy the Black Magic Design converters, one to convert HDMI to HD-SDI and one to convert HD-SDI to HDMI and run a long BNC cable. That solution will give you 300 Feet.

If you need longer, do same as HD-SDI concept but do Fiber LCLC instead. you can run it 25 Miles.


How to apply different filters to different parts of a video using AviSynth? I have a video file and want to post process it using AviSynth. Different parts of the movie require different filters to be used (noise reduction etc.). How can one use different filters for different parts of the input video?

What I once did is to trim the video into segments, apply different filters on them and then concatenate the segments back together. Something like this:

a = clip.Trim(0, 100).RemoveNoise("high")
b = clip.Trim(101, 200).RemoveNoise("low")
clip = a + b

Is there any other way to do this? I am asking, because the more segments you create the more cumbersome the script becomes.

I've read that AviSynth+ supports arrays. So one might create an array with the frame indices and then build the final clip using a loop. Something like this:

original = last
segments = [ \
    [ 0,  100,  "high"], \
    [101, 200", "low"] \
]
clip = BlankClip()
for (i = 0; i < segments.Size; ++i)
{
    clip += original.Trim(segments[i][0], segments[i][1]).RemoveNosie(segments[i][2])
}

This way one could create an array, holding the segments. But, it seems to me that despite this post here, AviSynth+ does not support arrays at the moment.

This can be done using the filter ClipClop. Here is an example script from the docs of the filter:

Avisource("D:\avs\test.avi")
ORG=Last

V1 = FFT3DFilter(Plane=0,Sigma=1.6)     # Light Luma
V2 = FFT3DFilter(Plane=0,Sigma=2.0)     # Med   Luma
V3 = FFT3DFilter(Plane=0,Sigma=4.0)     # High  Luma
V4 = FFT3DFilter(Plane=3,Sigma=1.6)     # Light Chroma
V5 = FFT3DFilter(Plane=3,Sigma=2.0)     # Med   Chroma
V6 = FFT3DFilter(Plane=3,Sigma=4.0)     # High  Chroma
V7 = FFT3DFilter(Plane=4,Sigma=1.6)     # Light Luma+Chroma
V8 = FFT3DFilter(Plane=4,Sigma=2.0)     # Med   Luma+Chroma
V9 = FFT3DFilter(Plane=4,Sigma=4.0)     # High  Luma+Chroma
V10= FlipHorizontal()                   # Flip-H
V11= FlipVertical()                     # Flip-V
V12= Invert()                           # Invert

NickNames ="""  # Psuedonyms for clips (clip index number)
    L0   = 1    # Light Luma
    L1   = 2    # Med   Luma
    L2   = 3    # High  Luma
    C0   = 4    # Light Chroma
    C1   = 5    # Med   Chroma
    C2   = 6    # High  Chroma
    LC0  = 7    # Light Luma + Chroma
    LC1  = 8    # Med   Luma + Chroma
    LC2  = 9    # High  Luma + Chroma
    FH   = 10   # Flip-H
    FV   = 11   # Flip-V
    INV  = 12   # Invert
"""

SCMD="""          # Clip editing commands in string, can also use commands in file
    C0  0,99      # Light Chroma frames @ 0 -> 99
    L0  100,-200  # Light Luma frames @ 100, 200 frames ie frames 100->299
    INV 300,399   # Invert 300->399
    L0  400,499   # Light Luma frames 400->499
    FH  500,599   # Flip-H 500->599
    LC2 600,699   # High Luma + Chroma
    C1  800       # Med Chroma, Single frame
    1   900,999   # Light Luma, We used the clip number instead of a NickName
    FV  1000,1099 # Flip-V
    LC1 2000,0    # Med   Luma + Chroma, 2000 -> lastframe
"""

SHOW=True

ClipClop(ORG,V1,V2,V3,V4,V5,V6,V7,V8,V9,V10,V11,V12,scmd=SCMD,nickname=NickNames,show=SHOW)

How to do it:

You define different versions of the original clip (V1 - V12) using your desired filters.
You can assign nicknames to those versions.
You define the segments using the scmd parameter of the filter. Here you can define which frame ranges of the original clip should be replaced by which nicknamed versions.


x264 quality results based on source If I was to compare a 720p video encoded (using x264) from an untouched 1080p Blu-ray rip with the same video encoded at a similar bitrate but from a 1080p x264 rip, which one is more likely to look better in terms of perceived quality?

If the 1080p encode has a high enough bitrate, one shouldn't notice a significant difference, else the BD source offers greater headroom to retain detail.


Which bitrate is needed for dvd quality? As far as I know, cd quality for mp3s is at least 128 kbps.
What should the video bitrate be to obtain dvd quality?

Note I'm using mp4 container with mp3 audio and mpeg4 video.

Of course it depends on the used codec as well, it is not all about bitrate. But it is possible to have a reasonable quality @3,5 Mbit/s. But using the maximum range of ~9Mbit/s. usually looks much better, but the space of a DVD is limited, so that it is not enough for a 90 minute movie. The best thing is to try different settings for your mpeg4. Remember that this video must obey DVD restriction in order to be played in a DVD player.


FFmpeg mosaic with hardware acceleration on Quadro P4000 I'm currently trying to achieve a mosaic including 4 videos using FFmpeg and hardware acceleration.

I'm working on Ubuntu 16.04, I've installed NVIDIA drivers using apt repo aswell as CUDA. I'm using FFmpeg in version 3.3.

I've succeeded to create it without hardware acceleration but I'm stuck. Here is the command line I use :

ffmpeg -hwaccel cuvid -c:v h264_cuvid \
-i bbb_sunflower_2160p_30fps_normal.mp4 \
-i bbb_sunflower_2160p_30fps_normal.mp4 \
-i bbb_sunflower_2160p_30fps_normal.mp4 \
-i bbb_sunflower_2160p_30fps_normal.mp4 \
-filter_complex "nullsrc=size=1440x960 [base]; \
[0:v] hwdownload, format=nv12, scale_npp=720x480 [upperleft]; \
[1:v] hwdownload, format=nv12, scale_npp=720x480 [upperright]; \
[2:v] hwdownload, format=nv12, scale_npp=720x480 [lowerleft]; \
[3:v] hwdownload, format=nv12, scale_npp=720x480 [lowerright]; \
[base][upperleft] overlay=shortest=1 [tmp1]; \
[tmp1][upperright] overlay=shortest=1:x=720 [tmp2]; \
[tmp2][lowerleft] overlay=shortest=1:y=480 [tmp3]; \
[tmp3][lowerright] overlay=shortest=1:x=720:y=480; \
hwupload_cuda" \
-c:v h264_nvenc -f matroska pipe:1 | ffplay -i -

It doesn't work and I get :

Cannot find a matching stream for unlabeled input pad 0 on filter Parsed_hwupload_cuda_17

I think the issue is about the upload of modified frames by filters into the card but I can't figure how to achieve it. I've tried to add [base] before hwupload_cuda but it doesn't help, and honestly, I'm a bit lost.

Regarding,

Cannot find a matching stream for unlabeled input pad 0 on filter Parsed_hwupload_cuda_17

in

[tmp3][lowerright] overlay=shortest=1:x=720:y=480;hwupload_cuda

you have to replace the ; with a , else the overlay filterchain is terminated and the hwupload starts a new chain.

Input options like -hwaccel cuvid -c:v h264_cuvid only apply to the input immediately following them. These options have to be prefixed before each input for which they're intended.

scale_npp is a CUDA scaler, so for a hardware-decoded stream, no filter is required to transfer frames. After scaling, frames will have to be transported to system memory using hwdownload,format=nv12.


Find Position in a Film/Video by a Frame Is there an application or online service that is able to find a position (either as a frame number or time from film beginning) in a film by a frame from that film, represented as standalone picture (even if that picture was converted, resized, cropped, etc.)?

Try the command:

ffmpeg -i in.mp4 -loop 1 -i croppedframe.jpg -an -filter_complex "[0]crop=w:h:x:y[a];[1][a]blend=difference,blackframe=90:32" -f null -

This will match a movie frame if at least 90% of the pixels have a difference in value of less than 32 with the image. Any such matching frames will have their timestamps shown


Find duration only with ffprobe in Windows I want to find video file duration only with ffprobe but
ffprobe FILENAME.EXT 2| find "Duration:"

does not filter output to show just the line with "Duration:"  Instead, I got:

Argument '2' provided as input filename, but 'FILENAME.MP4' was
already specified.

How do I see just the duration of a file from the Windows command prompt?

First, if you just want information about a file, you should probably use "ffprobe", not "ffmpeg". Otherwise you'll get an answer, but you'll also have an error return status.
As to your real question: By convention, ffmpeg reserves STDOUT for binary video and audio data only. Everything else, including all the possible kinds of informative text, is sent to STDERR.
So, try changing your code to:
ffprobe FILENAME.EXT 2| find "Duration:"  (for a *nix shell)
or
ffprobe.exe FILENAME.EXT 2>&1 | findstr Duration (for a Windows shell)


What is the most effective way of slowing down footage? I want to experiment with slowed down footage and I see several ways in doing that with my current set-up.

I have the following hardware/software at my disposal:

After Effects CS5.5,
 Twixtor Pro,
Canon 550D (capable of shooting 50fps 1280x720 footage)

I can think of several ways to slow-down my 50fps footage, I'm interested to hear what the most effective way to go is in terms of quality and what the best way is to slow my footage down as much as possible.
The methods I could think of are written down below.

Interpret the footage in CS5.5 as 25fps or lower. 18fps being the minimum, stutter is noticeable below that.
Interpret as 50fps and then do a time-remapping to slow down the footage. Add frame blending to compensate for any stutter.
Interpret as 50fps and use Twixtor Pro to slow down the footage.

Depending on how much you are looking to slow down.  Interpret as 50fps, and then once in your timeline, say it is a 25fps timeline.  Then you can stretch the footage using time remapping, then you can turn on frame blending to the solid line...this will be good in most instances up to about 25% speed of original...

Less than that the same, 25fps timeline, interpret footage at 50fps, then use twixter to get that super slomo feel.  Not that twixter does not always work and is going to give varying results based on the footage.


How to remove steady video frames from 24/7 video? I have a surveillance camera video backup that works 24/7, and I need to store it for the record and ready to use if any checking is needed. (No Business usage just personal)

So I want a tool/software/..etc that can help me remove the duplicate frames or even check for example frames per minute and if they are not different remove the 60 seconds frames.

I'm sorry, I'm not a video editor so I've no XP in that matter.

If there is no such a tool, I'm a software developer with somewhat decent matlab experience with image processing, but I don't know if I can have something to help with the matter.

mpdecimate filter drop frames that do not differ greatly from the previous frame in order to reduce frame rate.
This command will filter the duplicate frames
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf mpdecimate -loglevel debug -f null -

To remove these duplicates and generate a video
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf mpdecimate,setpts=N/FRAME_RATE/TB out.mp4


Removing black frames with constant framerate i'm trying to create a video made of jpgs (camera-snapshots every hour) with removal of black frames (snapshots at night). It works BUT, whenever a black frame has been removed (or ignored), the video stucks at that point. I want to have a smooth video with 30 fps as result and don't want to fill up the ignored frames with copies etc.
What i've tried:
ffmpeg -framerate 30 -i /home/pictures/%*.jpg -c:v libx264 -vf "blackframe=0,metadata=select:key=lavfi.blackframe.pblack:value=50:function=less,scale=640:-2,format=yuv420p" -crf 28 /home/out.mp4

Any ideas?

Retime the remaining frames.
ffmpeg -framerate 30 -i /home/pictures/%*.jpg -vf "blackframe=0,metadata=select:key=lavfi.blackframe.pblack:value=50:function=less,setpts=N/FR/TB,scale=640:-2,format=yuv420p" -c:v libx264 -crf 28 /home/out.mp4


How does one recover a multiplexed video stream with missing headers? I have some video files which were stored with the format headers in separate files.  Unfortunately, the disk crashed, and the header information has been lost.  I still have large chunks of stream data though.  Before I start writing brute-force code to figure out the parameters, are there any tools available for recovering this sort of thing?

update:  Further research and analysis indicates that this is multiple video streams multiplexed into a single file, with codec data hard-coded into the recording software.  As such, repair is likely impossible.  Software capable of scrounging such a file and extracting likely video frames might have some success, but I do not find any such software available. If anyone knows of any I would be happy to test it out and review it.  If this moves the question beyond the scope of this site, feel free to close it.

Try to extract header from other file (e.g. create a new one with that recording software) and prepend it to your stream.

On Windows you can use that command to concatenate files:

copy /b header.hdr + stream.mov outputFile.mov


What software / hardware is used by TV companies to generate a live video feed that can be made up of smaller, live pieces? For example, I'm watching CNN. Wolf Blitzer is speaking on the background, there's a news ticker feed on the bottom and occasionally, individual video clips are shown on the right to go with the story. How is that all put together, live?

In general, it is done with a production switcher/vision mixer. I believe CNN uses the Sony MVS8000. Specifically, it is a DVE or resizer feature that scales and positions the video. The video is played back from another device, likely a video server, under the control of the newsroom computer system.

They may also be using whatever software that does the real time rendering of the ticker to do the same thing that the production switcher's resizers do. Many broadcasters use renders from VizRT or Orad (now owned by Avid). Whether it is done in the production switcher or in the ticker software is a complex system architecture decision driven by the graphical requirements.


Identify H.265 from the OSX Command Line? Can anyone suggest a way to tell the difference, from the OSX command line, between .mkv files encoded with H.265 from those encoded with H.264?

Plex H.265 streams viewed from some devices (e.g. LG net-enabled TVs) stall frequently, probably due to the lack of H.265 decoding hardware.

I'd rather not have to re-encode all of the MKVs in my video library, so I'd like to be able to process only the H.265 files.

You can use ffprobe for this

ffprobe file.mkv -show_entries stream=codec_name -select_streams v:0 -of compact=p=0:nk=1 -v 0

For H.265/HEVC, this will print hevc; for H.264, h264 .


Losslessly converting Microsoft DV to Quicktime DV I have a bunch of AVI files containing captured DV footage (Microsoft DV, as that is what is captured through Adobe Premiere on Windows).
These now need to be converted to Quicktime DV to work with some other software package.
When I Export as Quicktime and select DV25 as codec (in Adobe Media Encoder) the filesize remains almost the same (not surprising because it is the same bitrate as the source), but what exactly happens during the export?

Is the raw DV footage simply extracted from the AVI container and put into a MOV container (meaning only copying of data with no loss in quality)?
Or is the video transcoded from Microsoft DV to Quicktime DV (meaning there will be a slight loss in quality)?

If the latter, how can I losslessy extract the DV footage from an AVI container and put into a MOV container?

I doubt Adobe Media Encoder is rewrapping the video stream.

To copy the data losslessly from a Type 1 to Type 2 DV-AVI or to MOV, use ffmpeg, a free command-line tool, like so

ffmpeg -i input.avi -c copy -map 0 -video_track_timescale 25 output.mov


What is the name of this effect in After Effects? how to create an intro animation just like this:

            ? What is the name of the effect (time around 00:00:02 until 00:00:05)? I am trying to search it over Youtube but doesn't find something that I want.

The main effect that I am looking for is the text forming from a bubble and the bubble bouncing over the text. Thanks.

You can search "After Effects morphing" and you will find some tutorials which you will help to recreate intro like in this video. It's not a standart (by default) effect in After Effects. It's an animation created from scratch, probably in After Effects. It's a Shape Animation, shape morphing, mask morphing, liquid animation.


Easily convert & archive a bunch of low res Video CD DAT files MPEG 1/2 to newer better format such as MKV or others? Each file is around 350-650 MB.

This is the media information from the Files:

https://i.imgur.com/FqchDMi.png

How could I better archive it?

Easily convert & archive a bunch of low res Video CD DAT files MPEG 1/2 to newer better format such as MKV or others?

Using ffmpeg, a free command-line tool, you can convert these DATs to MP4 (or MKV):

ffmpeg -i input.dat -c:v libx264 -crf 20 -c:a aac -b:a 128k -movflags +faststart output.mp4

Your VLC output doesn't mention it but if the inputs are interlaced (likely), then use

ffmpeg -i input.dat -vf yadif -c:v libx264 -crf 20 -c:a aac -b:a 128k -movflags +faststart output.mp4


Audio noiseless video becomes noisy after importing in windows movie maker I am getting a problem whenever I import a video having formats in wmv & avi in windows movie maker, the audio becomes noisy I dont why it is happening may be is it the bitrate issue or something else please advice me on this as I have to stick with Windows movie maker.

I am using Adobe Soundbooth to reduce noise but after exporitng from Adobe soubdbooth video's audio becomes noisy only in windows movie maker else it is fine.

Try seperating the audio and video streams of the WMV and AVI files - I don't have an app in mind but there should be some free ones avaliable. Put the video part in, which will remain in the original format (WMV or AVI) and should work. For the audio, use Soundbooth to convert it into a variety of formats like WAV, MP3, WMV, etc. until the import works without noise. I don't use MM now, but I have before and know for a fact that there are no problems with importing MP3 files.


Need a video/audio 'time base corrector' with a very large time buffer We'll be receiving a media stream that will suffer varying time shifts, and we need a solution that will clock the video+audio out at a predictable rate. We can time stamp the input stream (assume SMPTE LTC) to aid in identifying the amount of shift that has occurred.

This is basically what a TBC does, but these delays may be on the order of seconds, so the buffer would have to be quite large. Total delay through the system is not important, as long as the time jitter is ultimately removed.

EDIT: This could also be thought of as a rate corrector. The incoming video will have a long-term average frame rate of (say) 30fps, but the short-term rate could vary +/- 10% from that. The goal is to buffer enough video so that the output rate can be exactly 30 fps.

Something that worked with encoded (say MP4 over RTSP) video would be ideal, but if we need to work in baseband (SDI etc) that's acceptable.

Anyone know of such a device or system?

You can do this with GStreamer and a plugin called rtpjitterbuffer. There is an example usage on the bottom of that page with the gst-launch tool to do a simple desktop playback of an rtp stream with network errors.

gst-launch-1.0 rtspsrc location=rtsp://192.168.1.133:8554/mpeg1or2AudioVideoTest ! rtpjitterbuffer ! rtpmpvdepay ! mpeg2dec ! xvimagesink

You can customize this to your need and set specific timeouts and also make a new network stream instead of doing desktop playback. You can do pretty much anything with gstreamer, you just have to read a bit into it.

Regarding hardware I don't know of any that does this but I'd guess its pretty expensive like it usually is with very specialized hardware.


Can't Import Video with Alpha to Premiere This is really annoying. I've heard a lot about how Apple have removed a lot of different codec uses including the most needed Quicktime RGB+Alpha one in After Effects. I can no longer import videos with an alpha channel into Premiere. I've tried ProRes 4444 but that didn't work either. All I get is "The importer reported a generic error."

I've tried restarting the project, restarting my computer, reinstalling premiere and so on. This is absolutely crucial to my business and must be fixed soon. Does anyone have a work around to this?

Only Prores 4444 supports alpha channels, see the manual:

  The Apple ProRes 4444 codec offers the utmost possible quality for
  4:4:4 sources and for workflows involving alpha channels.

It seems to work for me, using the Animation codec with "Millions of Colors+". I'm on a Mac using Adobe CC. Here are the steps I took:

Export your AE comp using Quicktime Animation codec with Millions of Colors+ selected.
Import the file into Premiere CC
Right click on your footage and select Modify > Interpret Footage
Select Conform Alpha PreMultiplication to: Premultiplied Alpha
Press OK
Drag your clip into the timeline

With this you should be able to drag another clip beneath it, and see it through your original clip, as shown below (Intepret Footage settings are also shown):


After Effects - Simple Lighting Effects I'm currently putting together a simple lyric video like in the link below, but am missing this one piece I can't seem to fix together.

On the left side you'll notice the ball of light moving up and down, adding a nice dynamic effect. How would I go about doing the same? Any help is appreciated. Thanks!

VIDEO LINK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9DKftwgGAI

This is a simple animated lens flare. The specific lens flare they use is likely from a package of lens flares you pay for (a plugin) made by Andrew Kramer over at videocopilot, specifically: https://www.videocopilot.net/products/opticalflares/

To create custom light flares without the need to pay for them, I'd recommend watching this video:

You simply create the object, the flare in this case, and animate its' position. Do you know how to do that?


How can I accurately immitate this Picasa filter with Premiere's color correction filters? I'm trying to color-correct a video I'm working on. This is an example frame from the footage:

Since I'm a newbie and pretty clueless about good-looking color correction, I've tried playing around with some Picasa filters. Eventually I've came out with this:

This supposed to be a reference for me to later on immitate with Premire's color correction tools.

In Premiere, I've tried using Levels:

And RGB curves:

And this is the result:

After a lot of small adjusments, still you can see a big difference:

My main problem is that whenever I'm fixing one color, or one area of the frame, always another part is affected in a non-wanted way. For example you can see the wall in the Picasa version is more yellow than the one in the Premiere version, but the left-hand closet is less yellow than the one in the Premiere version. Meaning making the whole thing more yellow might fix the wall's shade but make the closet's shade worse.

My question is, what method should I use while using these filters (or others) in order to achieve a known effect? Is there a specific filter I should use before or after another? Or how could I determine the proper adjusment for affecting one color/shade but leaving another as it is?

This is important to me not only for this specific project, but also because I assume this method is what professional editors use when trying to achieve a specific vision they have for a frame.

This might be better suited as a comment to your original post, but alas I do not yet have those privilegies.

Anyway, my answer to you would be a cliché one: Keep tinkering.

It's really a matter of finding out what effects Premiere can offer, deciding which will be able to assist you the most and then going back and forth between them until you find a result that pleases you.

That said, you might want to check out the Color Balance effect. I find it very useful in most projects.


How to manage colour in After Effects to get precisely a desired colour in h264 output I am working on a video for the web only.
It is going to be on a webpage (never on broadcast), delivered as an h264 file.
The web page background is hex code FFF1E5 (RGB 255, 241, 229).
My background colour in After Effects is a solid with colour FFF1E5.
How do I generate an 264 video file with a background precisely this colour.
Not a little bit off. Exactly this colour.
Because I've tried adjusting colour Working Space in Project Settings until I'm 0000FF in the face...
The link supplied in the highest rated answer in this similar question is broken.
My usual workflow is:
export as ProRes 422 (or 4444 - same problem) from After Effects CC2020
Convert to h264 in Media Encoder CC2020

Since I cannot use hyperlinks in comments, here is the gist of my research:
This answer on a reddit post suggests, that the reason for the color-shift is the way illegal and legal colors are handled. So maybe the "broadcast colors" effect can help limit the color-range to the legal range? I'd recommend giving that a quick shot.
If that doesn't work, it should certainly do the trick to use Resolve and select video-levels instead of data-levels and encode the 4444 to h264 from there.
Please do report back and good luck!