Which different EDL types exist? Edit decision lists are integrated in every pipeline nowadays. I've seen different types of it, but wikipedia only knows CMX 3600 EDL and a xml modification.

Which other formats exist and what are the differences of it? Is there a standard type which supported by all editing systems? Which open type has most features?

CMX 3600 (or earlier 340) is very common and understood by many systems. GVG (Grass Valley Group) format is almost as common. For simple cuts, dissolves and keys the two are highly compatible, but for more complex edits, including speed changes, there are significant differences. Neither deals well with multiple layers or multiple sources in one event.

Many other companies use proprietary formats that are often only slightly different from basic CMX/GVG. Things like the size and contents of the source ID, the use of notes for special effects, and so on, may change from version to version as well.

To list the specifications would take a very long post. If you have specific questions about what each can handle, try asking here. But in general, for interchange you'll probably find XML-based EDLs to be most flexible, and CMX/GVG will be understood by the most different systems, within their limitations.

Google "EDL XML AAF" for a lot more information on the topic.


How can I manage videos with OS X, iPhone and Sony Nex 3N? I asked this question here but I find it is also relevant here. So let's take fresh: I have many videos in iPhone, many videos in Sony Nex 3N and I have Macbook Air laptop. My goal is to create training videos having video collages.

How can I combine the videos from iPhone and Sony to video collages easily?

Since you're a command-line user, you can use ffmpeg to do the conversion for you. I suspect when you mount your Sony camera, it probably always gets the same volume name. (Probably something like /Volumes/SONY/ or /Volumes/DSC/ or something like that.) You could write a script that basically walks through the directory containing the movies, and converts them to a suitable format, saving them on your hard drive.

Looking at iTunes in Automator.app, I see that it supports an "Import Files Into iTunes" function. You could probably make an Automator action that calls your ffmpeg script, then imports the results into iTunes. From there, you just sync your iPhone. (Not sure if it will auto-sync large videos via iCloud or not, but it might.)

I'm not the best at scripting or Automator, but you can probably get an answer to the specifics on either Ask Different or Super User.


Focusing away from Premiere causes playback crash I've been using Premiere Pro since CS5 and am now using CS6.

I have always had this odd bug where, if at any point while using Premiere Pro I switched to any other application on my computer (Mac 10.8), coming back to Premiere would result in the playback function not working anywhere and the audio not playing, even while scrubbing. The only way to fix it is to restart the app. I am able to save and everything, so the app isn't completely crashed, only playback functions are affected.

I can adjust the playhead, but hitting the play button only turns it into a stop button, no playback occurs, and pressing the stop button has no effect whatsoever. And as previously stated, audio doesn't play anytime, not even while scrubbing over the footage.

I have never heard of this bug anywhere in all of my searching. Does anyone know what might be causing this?

1st, make sure you don't have any equipment or 3rd party programs that interfere with the audio on your computer because, more often than not, it is a problem with that instead of the audio on the computer itself.

I actually asked a similar question (which is specific to your question) about a third party program messing with Ableton (same as with Premiere).

I also answered a similar question (that got accepted) that covers a lot of things about different audio drivers and sound and the tendencies of both.

Since you have Hear installed, make sure to remove the leftover plugin located in Macintosh HD/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins even if you followed the correct steps to uninstall the app.


How do I Import an Adobe Animate file with a transparent background into After Effects I've created a frame-by-frame animation in Animate and have exported the file with an alpha channel so the background is transparent, but when I import the MP4 file into After Effects, the file has a black background.  I haven't exported it yet because I have a lot more editing / animating to do on this project, but can anyone tell me how to make the background clear so the animation fits to the background I have created on After Effects.  (I've tried to import the Animate file but it doesn't work as I know this may be a way around it.)

To export out a video so it has an alpha channel! I hope, You need to export the file as an SWF file and I hope it'll work for you!


What is this sun blocker in film making? In the making of Django Unchained, I noticed some people running behind the camera team. These people are holding something that looks like a sun blocker.

Video that shows it in use is here.

I haven't been able to confirm that or find out what this actually does.

Can anybody tell me?

Thank you!

Given the angle, I'd say it's a reflector. The line of people on the right are standing with their backs to the sun, it's probably there to bounce a bit of fill light on to their faces, so they're not silhouetted.


How to achieve this "trail effect" - After Effects I'm trying to achieve the following effect:

Here is the problem: I can't achieve the effect using particles. Some of them spread and linger around. Is there a way to achieve a similar effect without using particles or is there a way to solve the extra particle issue? Thanks in advance.

I uploaded the animated version in youtube, so you all can see how the effect looks in motion.

A quick and dirty solution would be to try applying a fast blur effect over the particle layer to the point they look like smoke.


What does the value in parentheses for ffmpeg ssim log denote? https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-all.html#ssim

I ran a command like this:

.\..\ffmpeg -i [Input] -i [Output] -lavfi  ssim="stats_file=ssim.log" -f null -

and saw this in the ssim log outputs:

n:70 Y:0.947271 U:0.985112 V:0.985611 All:0.959968 (13.975937)

I understand the values for everything except for the value in the parentheses, after All (13.975937). Is this the db representation of the YUV,All values, or is it something different? How is it calculated? Thank you.

It is dB representation of All value, calculated with following formula:

10 * log10(1 / (1 - ssim))


Merging all files in a folder with an avidemux batch file I`ve been trying to create a batch file that merges all files in a folder using avidemux. Ideally, it would be awesome if this works to do some changes as well (basically rescaling the video).
I have tried with this .bat file but it does not do what I intended:
set avidemux="C:\Program Files\Avidemux 2.7 VC++ 64bits\avidemux.exe"

set videocodec=mp4

for %%f in (*.mp4) do %avidemux% --video-codec %videocodec% --force-alt-h264 --load "%%f" --append "%%f" --save "%%f.avi" --quit

What this does is just open each file individually and save it individually, not actually merging them.
If there are any one-click solutions for this kind of issue it would be also appreciated.

Ok I have found a solution using ffmpeg instead of avidemux. I made the following batch file. In this case, I had to know the folder where the ffmpeg executable was, and also i managed to convert the resolution to a different one
for %%f in (*.mp4) do (
    echo file %%f >> list.txt
)
F:\ffmpeg\bin\ffmpeg.exe -f concat -safe 0 -i list.txt -vf scale=320:240 output.avi
del list.txt

This did the trick!


AE - Creating speed/motion lines? https://gyazo.com/6cb8bcf6193716407790a11205bd060c

Any idea how I can create this effect in illustrator on a (rectangle) shape? Are there any effect presets for it?

The gif is from here.

I have found a good tutorial explaining this.


Shooting at 60fps, export in 24fps I would like to be able to add slow motion where ever I need in post so I would like to shoot only in 60fps.
The export target is youtube and since I would like to keep a sort of cinematic look, the export frame rate I would like to keep in 24fps.

I previously did some tests in Premiere Pro, and it alloved me to add and edit clips with various frame rates and export them in the lowest of them - 24fps.

The video looks good, hovewer from informations I'm reading, it's not good to do that for my future workflows...
Can you please explain me why ?

If it's bad, will it helps if I will for future shoot in 60fps and export in 30fps ?

Thank you

I always shoot videos with slowest 50fps in my camera, Full HD. like you said, it provided slow motion & this setting has clearer movement. Sometimes I change back to 25fps when I meet some conditions.

Export in 24fps can be used for website, for example published for vevo, youtube channels etc. Because fast buffering and light file size. It also for animation & Music Video (MV). Full HD.

Export in 30fps is for NTSC Television Boardcasting & it smooth for NTSC live, like TV shows in America & Japan. If you published a video in 30fps alike TV shows.
Other countries used slow motion, able to published in 25fps for PAL TV. FHD, QHD. Mosty they're 4k now, their videos are very sharp.

Cinematic will be more optional and more setting & editing, mostly people used as many as fps their camera have, until 4k/8k 120fps+lighting achieved proffessional result. Export in 25fps, 60fps, etc. It is optional.

You want to be videographer,editor for Music Video, web, etc? Export in 24fps. (Actually your camera fps setting & export is good enough, just remember the quality of camera shoot, quality of resolution FHD or above)

Or Videographer,editor for live or non-live boardcasting TV shows? Export in 30fps. (The researched answer is for Television Boardcasting, 30fps)


Avid "Composer" window blank, won't resize I've got Avid Media composer running on my laptop, and everything has worked fine for the past year.

I traveled from Australia to the US to visit family, and something must have changed on this laptop during that time because the composer window will no longer display video on either side. I can't resize the window - it is stuck that small. CTRL+SHIFT+F still pops up fullscreen, and I can still see video in that. Just not in this window.

I've already tried reinstalling, so I figure this might be some weird problem with my laptop.

Is there any sort of settings reset I could do to try to fix this? Any suggestions?

You can restore the default window arrangement and size using the main menu of Media Composer:

  Windows -> Restore to default


Could not find codec parameters -- for gif? The scene: Ubuntu 16.04, newly upgraded from 14.04 where things perked along happily with avconv

The props: a directory full of stills, motor_animate_000.gif, motor_animate_001.gif, etc.

The players: Me, a mostly-newbie ffmpeg user, and ffmpeg.

The drama:

Based on a suggestion I had to solve another problem, I execute the command line:

ffmpeg -f image2 -framerate 30 -i motor_animate_%03d.gif motor.mpg

After the usual excrutiating detailed list of stuff from ffmpeg, I get the following error message (in more than one color, ooh, ooh).

[image2 @ 0x14f8420] Could not find codec parameters for stream 0 (Video: none, none): unknown codec
Consider increasing the value for the 'analyzeduration' and 'probesize' options
motor_animate_%03d.gif: could not find codec parameters
Input #0, image2, from 'motor_animate_%03d.gif':
  Duration: 00:00:04.03, start: 0.000000, bitrate: N/A
    Stream #0:0: Video: none, none, 30 fps, 30 tbr, 30 tbn, 30 tbc
File 'motor.mpg' already exists. Overwrite ? [y/N] y
No decoder for stream #0:0, filtering impossible
Error opening filters!

Can anyone tell me what's going on and how to fix it?  All I want to do is make an mpeg clip out of a bunch of one-frame gifs.

Thanks.

It's worth a try using the concat demuxer.

First, create a text file like this:

file 'motor_animate_000.gif'
file 'motor_animate_001.gif'
file 'motor_animate_002.gif'
file 'motor_animate_003.gif'
...

Then run

ffmpeg -f concat -i list.txt motor.mpg

Do note that by just specifying a .MPG filename as output parameter, ffmpeg will encode to MPEG-1 at a bitrate of 200 kb/s. If MP4 is not acceptable and .mpg is needed, then add -c:v mpeg2video -b:v 1000k after list.txt to set codec and avg. bitrate. For MP4, just change extension; the defaults are decent.


Text fading in a clip in Shotcut I make YouTube videos sometimes and Shotcut has always been my go-to for video editing, but I am working on a video now and can't figure out how to fade text in and out while a clip is playing. Help?

It has been a long time since you asked the question. Maybe you have found your answer to your question in mean time. I am going to answer it anyway for you and for all others that are using this video editor.

I am using Shotcut in version 17.03.02.

There are probably more elegant and simple ways of doing this. The way I like to do it create a SVG file with the text I want (for example in Inkscape). I import this SVG into Shotcut and put in a separate video track above the main track and leave compositing enabled. Then I add fade-in and fade-out video filters to the SVG-Text video and enable the option "Adjust opacity instead of fade with black" for both filters. You can also adjust the duration of the filter/filters.

So to sum up:

create svg file with your text
add a video track with the svg file
leave compositing on
add fade-in/out filters and adjust duration
check "Adjust opacity instead of fade with black" in both fade filters

Enjoy!


How do I crop multiple areas of each frame of the video using ffmpeg? For each frame I want to crop multiple areas using ffmpeg but I am not sure how to proceed.
This is what I have done to crop one part of the image,
fmpeg -i video.mp4 -filter:v "fps=1,crop=759:41:33:99,scale=128:44" %d.png

This is one frame of the video,

The above command crops the number one row or first position from the image. Likewise I want to crop all the positions or rows from this frame.

Add more outputs.
ffmpeg -i video.mp4 -filter:v "fps=1,crop=759:41:33:99,scale=128:44" row1-%d.png -filter:v "fps=1,crop=759:41:33:140,scale=128:44" row2-%d.png -filter:v "fps=1,crop=759:41:33:181,scale=128:44" row3-%d.png

Or do one row per command.


How to create a video so it can be displayed on 3 screens My question is simple.
Is it possible to create a video (by standard tools and processes) that needs to be displayed on 3 horizontal screens stacked side by side (like a screen wall)?

The idea is to put the screens on this setup:

My designers and video producers are stuck with this task, so I am trying to help with it researching.

I do this all the time at work, I'm currently rendering a 6 screen video wall for an installation. The easiest way to work is to create the video at the size of all the displays put together, e.g. for 3 × 4K displays it would be 11520 × 2160 pixels. This is so that you can work on the whole thing at once, and also so you can justify to your boss the insane amount of money they spent on your workstation (did I say that out loud?).

You can use standard video tools like NLEs, e.g. Premiere or Resolve, compositors and animation packages like Fusion and After Effects or 3D applications like Maya, Lightwave or Blender. All modern versions of this kind of software will have the capability to work at custom resolutions, but as mentioned, your hardware will need to be pretty good, you'll have to budget for render time, and your proxy game will need to be strong (proxies are low-res substitutes that you can use to work on, then swap for the high-res originals at export time).

Then you export, and encode into the playback format suitable for your playback devices. Some playback devices are able to handle large videos and split the playback into multiple screens. Small computer-based devices like Intel NUCs and Mac minis can be hooked up to multiple monitors and standard video players like VLC can be used to play the content full-screen across them all. Alternatively you can get multiple playback devices, one for each screen and synch them over a network. The output format will depend on the hardware you are using to play the material, so talk to whoever is setting that up.

To split the composition you re-compose the full composition into the screens that will be displayed on each monitor. In the installation I am working on at the moment there are 6 screens, but the material is being played as three parts, with each playback device playing to two screens. So I've split my 10800 × 1920 into three 3600 × 1920 compositions.

The tools above all have the ability to take one composition and nest it into another at a different resolution, but as I've found in my current projects you may have to re-edit the main composition to help with renders (I was hitting a GPU memory wall with some GPU-based effects, so I had to resize some of my layers and shuffle things to get it to render without choking).


How to lower the volume of the second audio channel with FFMPEG It's easy to mute one of the audio channels of a video, but I have to lower the second one with some dB.

I have searched in documentation about mapping the channels but I am still confised how to lower the volume of the specific channel. I have only two audio channels in my videos.

Thank you for the help!

After a few hours of searching, I was only able to find this.

I don't know if that's kind of what you are looking for, or at least gives you the info you need to modify the channel volume.

I hope it helps!


Where is video color vector scope in Apple Motion? Color vector scope views are very useful for grading color more objectively. I can find it easily in FCPX 10.4.6, but where can I find it in Motion? (currently using 5.4.3)

I don't think there is a vectorscope in Apple Motion but in FCPX vectorscope comes in with the Color Grading tools. Apple Motion is not intended for this purpose, so I guess they did not require to add the vectorscope. I use version Apple Motion version 5.4.2


Can I move an imported camera track in Maya without manually changing 500+ keyframes? I have a match-moved camera track from Nuke but it's in the wrong place in my scene/environment, is it possible to select the camera's track and manipulate it without having to manually edit the 501 keyframes that make up its movement?

Would it be easier to move the whole rest of the scene, or is there an option I missed when creating the track that would orient/position it correctly?

Select your camera, locators (if exported), and anything else from Nuke. Group them all together with ctrl+g and modify that group as a whole.

You can scale uniformly (but not independent axes), rotate, and translate.

Often one trick is to snap the pivot point of the group to a specific reference point (hold down d and v then drag to the reference point, and then snap the group to the corresponding point in your scene (just hold v while dragging). Then rotate and scale to align the rest of the group.

When finished, you can simply unparent anything not animated with shift+p, but animated objects like your camera will need to be baked:

To bake the camera, duplicate it, unparent it, then parent-constrain it to the camera (Animation menu > Constrain > Parent Constraint). Then bake the keyframes (Edit > Keys > Bake Simulation) and you can then delete the constraint and the original camera.


Audio and Frames Not in Sync in RAM Preview Asked this question before... having same problem.

When I go to the RAM preview of After Effects, the audio of the video will play on sync for a while, then will get screwy. Sometimes the audio will jump ahead or before it should. It is making the sound choppy and my characters sound stupid.

Please, I need a solution!

Try to convert your video into ProRes422. I guess the video codec of your source material is using some sort of compression, that After Effects is having problems with and is loosing sync.

On OSX ProRes422 comes with Quicktime or can be downloaded as a free Update for Quicktime. But if you only have a Win7 computer to work with, you can use FFMPEG: it supports ProRes422.


Broadcast Television - Best specs to supply news footage We are preparing a bunch of 10secs video bites that we hope to be picked up by news media outlets as supplemental footage for news reports.

Could anyone suggest the best specs to export the clips as before sending the links to download in our media release?

Was thinking a ProRes plus a high bitrate MP4 might suit?

ABC, NBC, Comcast and others all have their own specs. What I've found is that 1080 progressive MP4 (h.264) at 29.97 fps (some rare cases need 59.94), with audio between 192-256 Kbps, usually does the trick. You'd obviously edit in ProRes, but to submit that codec to the stations is overkill. Some outlets will even reject specs that don't conform exactly to their specifications during the upload process to their FTP.


Can you use keyframes for motion blur in After Effects? I'm working on a motion-graphic piece in AE, and am trying to figure out if there is a way to disable motion blur temporarily. For example, say I have 100 frames of an animation, but i only want motion blur to be applied to frames 15-30 and frames 60-95. Is there a way to do this, or is motion blur just a toggle on/off?

There’s a built-in “CC force motion blur” plugin you could add to your comp as an adjustment layer. If you use that instead of the system motion blur, I think you could keyframe it on or off, or just keyframe the adjustment layer on or off. Be warned it is slower to render than blurring the usual way.


Exporting in Premiere from mpg 720 to h.264 1920 What do i gain / does it make sense to export video that is originally loaded in Premiere as:

mpg 720x576 /25fps / 7000kbps

to

h.264 1920x1080 / 25fps / 12000kbs target (15000 max) ?

I am just adding lower third for few sec, no other modifications of the video.

No. I assume your 720x576 video uses anamorphic pixels, making for a 16:9 resolution. Still, there is no added benefit to the higher resolution, as it won't increase the quality of your video. On the other hand, your video file will be much larger. Export in your original resolution with a high bitrate instead (not higher than your source material though). If you need to export an uncompressed copy, use a visually lossless codec such as DNxHD or Apple ProRes.

That is, assuming by 'loaded into Premiere' you mean this is the resolution of your source material. If you are referring to your sequence and your source material actually has a higher resolution, create a new sequence with the respective settings, copy everything from your current sequence to the new one and export that using the same resolution as your source video.


Black title changes colour when exporting MXF ??? Been asked by client to export in MXF format. Never done that before (worked within PP with MXF, just never exported to that).

At the end of the ad I've made a very simple after effects title/call to action. Simple black text over the final shot.

Everything fine when I exported h264 mp4. But when exporting MXF, the black title went green.

Any ideas why? Help appreciated.

Might be an issue with the smart rendering option available for MXF in Premiere/AME.
Try disabling that.

http://blogs.adobe.com/kevinmonahan/2012/10/11/smart-rendering-in-premiere-pro-cs6-6-0-1-and-later/

If that doesn't work. Render an intermediate and re-import and encode that to MXF.
Though keep in mind that MXF is just a container, you have different codecs available.
Make sure you choose the one suitable for your source footage and what your client requested.


How can I set the first frame of a video to an I-frame and the rest to P-frames (preferably with ffmpeg)? I'd like to try to do some datamoshing like this tutorial.  But I'd like to be able to do it programatically, so instead of vdub and avidemux, I'd like to figure out how to do as many parts of this process as I can with ffmpeg and/or other command-line tools.

The first problem I am having is that when I use the ffdshow codec rev 3556 with VDub it just outputs a broken video.  I feel like I got close to getting what I want, which is frame 0 as an I-frame and all the rest as P-frames with the following command

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -force_key_frames 00:00:00.000 output.avi

There are a couple of problems with this:

I get B-frames too, which don't work with that type of data-moshing
There's still I-frames every 10 or so frames

I feel like the problem is that I need to use a certain codec to encode the video in and also that -force_key_frames probably just enforces the addition of extra keyframe(I-frames) but doesn't prevent other I-frames from being created.

What you want is a very long GOP or I-frame interval. I believe the ffmpeg option -g nnnn will do that, where nnnn is the length of your video in frames. I don't know how to specify "no B-frames", and this will certainly all be codec-dependent. Give it a try.


Negative SMPTE timecode drop-frame handling? How are negative timecodes handled with drop-frame:

Is the frame before -00:00:59:29 labelled -00:00:01:02 (symmetric), or
Is the frame after -00:01:00:01 labelled -00:00:59:28 (regular)?

Thanks.

I know this is a very old Q, but it should be pointed out that a 'negative timecode' makes no sense. The SMPTE frame before 00:00:00:00 is 23:59:59:29. The namespace for drop frame (and non-drop) codes is already well-defined -- no need to postulate negative values. If there are systems or programs that use this notation, they should be rethought.


Editing objects out of a video Whilst filming a flypast, a stray piece of material flew onto my camera, wrapping around the lens, and appearing in some frames.

Can this string be edited out of the video?

(I can sort the audio etc... as I made a separate recording of the audio. It's just editing out the string I am bothered about)

Many thanks.

In relatively static scenes it's not too tough (just tedious) to either paint out the offender or 'clone brush' using nearby frames. When you have fast motion it gets more difficult. In any case it's usually a frame-by-frame process a la rotoscoping.

If you have a budget, investigate the plugins variously called wire-removal, rig-removal, 'no-strings' etc. which can help automate this.


In Premiere Pro, how do I set the fps of a video to publish? In Premiere Pro, how do I set the fps of a video to publish?

For example, I have imported an audio of 200MB

I've added an image.

And when I export, it says the estimated file size is 13GB.

Really the file size should not be more than 500MB.  A video frame rate of 3fps is fine for me.

But I can't see any setting to change the frames per second for the video that is published.

You need to select minimum bitrate for video, especially if your video have only 1 image.
If you will look how h264 codec works, you will know that it creates one "basic frame" each 'n' frames and then it creates "intermediate frames" only with areas of pixels which were changed.

I have tried some variants and can show you how fps affect on file size. And how keyframe distance affect to file size.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1ZobMxAzPQi2NaVfLDa5wYrHN87tIc11h

You can look at these 5 files.

Sample_minimum video BitRate_10 fps_keyframe distance = 300 - audio bitrate 320kbps.mp4 has size - 1 348 883

Sample_minimum video BitRate_10 fps_keyframedistance - standart - audio bitrate 320kbps.mp4 has size - 1 943 816

Sample_minimum video BitRate_30 fps - audio bitrate 320kbps.mp4 has size - 1 983 552

Sample_minimum video BitRate_30 fps_keyframe distance = 300 - audio bitrate 320kbps.mp4 has size - 1 544 303

Sample_without video - audio bitrate 320kbps.mp4 has size - 1 210 771 B

Minimum bitrate you can set here:


How to fix scale Key-framing issue I have been facing an issue with my Premiere Pro for a while now and no matter how hard I tried to find a solution, I never managed to find something that will fix my specific problem so that is why I came here and am asking for your help...

Here goes the problem,

I want to use the scaling option to create that basic effect of an image slowly zooming in/out over time but whenever I create two keyframes with a different scale value, the image just stays stuck on the bigger value even though it hasn't reached the keyframe yet and the scale value is slowly increasing/decreasing in the Effect Controls panel. To be more clear, here is a quick video of me doing it.

Now, another thing that I noticed happening is that when I create motion on any other layer (doesn't necessarily have to be scaling motion) and try to do the scaling effect on the background image, the scaling effect reacts in some way, but it seems like it is interconnected with the keyframes of the other layer and follows them.

I really can't find the words to explain this phenomenon so here is a video of it happening...

It looks like you machine might just be too slow to live render the effects. The red bar on your timeline is an indicator of that. Try selecting the clip in the timeline after you add the scale keys, then from the menu bar choose Sequence > Render Selection. After that renders out, the red bar in the timeline should change to green, and you should be able to play the preview video.

If rendering each effect before preview isn't an option, or is just too slow for you, you could also try changing the playback resolution in the Program monitor. That's the small fly-out menu under the main preview area that currently says Full. You can change that to 1/2 or 1/4 and it can significantly improve the live render capability of your machine. Everything will look more pixelated during preview playback, but it won't affect the final exports.


Mixing different digital cameras in the same movie For my next movie, I want to have a second camera to record a different angle. My main camera is a mid-range Canon DSLR and I was planning to buy a second, cheaper DSLR. Would it be possible to see the difference between the two cameras in the finished movie? I'm guessing that the number of megapixels would make a difference if they are not the same.

Would a Nikon 1 or Canon Powershot or equivalent higher-end compact work?

HD 1080 video is only 2 megapixels, so the camera full size rating would not be an issue for video.  You have to put all of the video clips together in a video editor of course, which should not any issue.  I would shoot with both cameras at the same settings, like 30p.

There is always a possibly of slight color/tint differences in two cameras.  Probably not noticeable on different scenes, but different views of the same scene possibly might notice? The video editor should allow correction in some degree even it does show.


Sharpness of Canon 80d I am trying to figure out the sharpness while shooting video with the Canon 80d. I find that the video kind of never appears to be in focus. If I take pictures of the same things the image quality and sharpness is fantastic. It's just the video that bothers me. I should say that I am speaking about 1080p video.

Is the video from a Canon 80d low quality? Maybe due to a low bitrate or something? Is it the codec that messes up the video sharpness? Is there a software setting for sharpening up the videos to get the same sharpness as with photos? Is there maybe such a feature within Magic Lantern?

If the stills look sharp and detailed, then the sensor and optics are not to blame. I would blame the encoder and whatever sacrifices Canon made for the video mode. The 80d has the same Digic 6 processor as the older and cheaper models like the T6i.

I have an older model T4i, and it is very low-res in 1080p mode, while in 720p mode it is chock full of aliasing, completely unusable. I presume Canon improved its cameras, yet Canon DSLRs are not known for being particularly detailed when used for video, you will be better off with a Sony or a Panasonic.


Stroke effect with square cap I'm trying to create a simple logo reveal, and have drawn a path over my logo like so:

It would be a lot easier if I could set the end points of my path so that they were square instead of rounded (like I can in Illustrator) but there appears to be no options for it?

Make your strokes using the pen tool directly as a Shape Layer instead of the way you're doing it.
You will see an option for line caps and line joins. They can be round or square:

To reveal the logo, put your original logo on the layer beneath the Shape Layer, then set the Track Matte on the original logo to Alpha Matte.  It will use the alpha of the layer above. You may need to press the "Toggle Switches/Masks" button to reveal the Track Matte options on the layer:

Do the reveal animation by adding a Trim Path to your Shape Layer:


ffmpeg smooth video zoom-in to center over duration of video I'm trying to do a smooth zoom in to the center of a 4k video over the duration of that video, so basically zooming in 2.13x so that the zoom in stops when the zoom is equivalent to an HD file (4096 / 1920 = 2.13).

I'm having trouble finding out how I can control the length of the zoom in effect dynamically, for different video lengths.

Here's the command I have so far:

ffmpeg -i "{filepath}" -vf "scale=w=(4096*4):h=(2160*4), zoompan=z='min(pzoom+0.00213,2.13)':d=1:x='iw/2-(iw/zoom/2)':y='ih/2-(ih/zoom/2)':s=1920x1080" "{output1}"

I'm guessing I need to do a calculation on the # of input frames and adjust the pzoom ratio accordingly, but I'm unsure how the pzoom ratio actually works.

pzoom is the calculated zoom value for the previous frame. It is initialized to 1 at the start of filtering. So, if total no. of frames is X, your zoom expr should be

z='min(pzoom+(2.13-1)/X,2.13)'


Is it possible to automate a workflow in Premiere Pro I need to edit a large set of videos through a very specific process. My workflow is pretty simple. Add a Watermark, a specific intro video and apply invert effect on the video.
I'm quite new to Premiere Pro, So I apologize if this is a common thing

As mentioned in the comments, I realized that Premiere Pro was the wrong tool for the job. Thanks to Florian I got started with ffmpeg.
For the sake of any future users who might want something like this, I thought I'd share my solution.
The following Command helps me convert my wmv source file to mp4 with a png watermark in the bottom right corner and the source video negated (colour inverted).
ffmpeg -i source.wmv -i logo.png -c:v libx264 -crf 23 -c:a aac -strict -2 -q:a 100 -max_muxing_queue_size 9999 -filter_complex "[1]format=yuva444p,colorchannelmixer=aa=0.8[logo];[0]fps=fps=30, negate=1[flip];[flip][logo]overlay=x=(main_w-overlay_w):y=(main_h-overlay_h)" output_file.mp4
I also made a gist with the broken down commands for each of my requirements. ffmpeg is blazing fast too!
https://gist.github.com/gigincg/338ec705632ee69cfe72eae73c2bb95f


How to film a falling shot Were trying to film a vine using an iphone. We want to have a first person shot of falling off of a building. Our budget is £20.

Is there a way we can get this shot without damaging the iphone nor jumping from the building and killing one of us in the process? I was thinking of some kind of camera protector if they exist...how do amateurs get falling shots?

A dad and his young son sent an iPhone to space, had it fall back to earth and got it back safely. You could have a look at their rig for inspiration (basically a polystyrene box and a parachute).


How to generate this animated view of wave form? This official video of the song Do I Wanna Know - Arctic Monkey has a really cool minimalistic smooth flow of free-style drawings occasionally accompanied with wave forms of the audio. I wanted to know how to get at least the wavy patterns of the song. Any hints on how to generate these or what tools could have been possibly used, would be of great help.

I am a new user of this site, so please let me know if this is not the appropriate platform to ask.

That is not a waveform, it is an animation simulating one. :o)

Most likely the shapes are it is in vector format, so you can morph it from state A to state B, etc.

There is not a simple way, it needs some work, for example you need to define the exact frame where you want Shape A and where you want Shape B. So make some timelines.

Then use vector-based animation software. Either After effects or the free one Synfig.


Upwards particle effect in After Effects I'm getting started with After Effect and I want to make some simple music videos.

How can I achieve the subtle effect of this video video which shows semi-transparent upwards particles in a loop?

There are numerous options for particles in AE, without needing any 3rd party plugins. For example the CC Particle Systems II effect which is included with AE CS and later. A PDF manual for the cycore effects (all the CC-something effects that are included with AE) are here

If you add it to a layer you'll see this:

By default the effect produces particles exploding from a small spot, and they fall as if effected by gravity. We're going to change it to look more like what you posted.

rendered version on YT

First, open up the effects control window, and work though the settings.

Change the producer size. This is the area from which the particles are produced. We'll mke it the width of the comp, without making it any taller vertically. So the Radius X will be 1920 for a HD comp. You might also want to wind down the birth rate, to say something like 0.1. Since we're making the particles move more slowly we'll need to increase their longevity. 15-20 seconds might be in the ball park for gently drifting particles.

They're shooting out of the producer at this point, so we'll turn that off. You do this in the Physics section, using the Animation drop-down. This sets the initial motion for the particles. For a more interesting movement you might try twirly. Twirly adds some random directional velocity, explosion adds velocity away from the producer, vortex makes them swirl around.

You probably want to turn the Velocity right down, maybe 0.1 or thereabouts.  For a gentle drift we'll turn Gravity right down, and make it negative. I ended up using -0.25, see how you go.

Resistance acts like friction, slowing the particles down from their initial velocity. A little bit is probably good, but if you want the particles to all have random velocity you can leave it quite low, like 1 or 2.

Play with the physics until you get it to look right. Reading the manual is a start, but fiddling with the controls to see how they work is the best way. Once you've got them drifting gently upwards you might want to move the position of the producer down below the bottom of the frame, e.g a bit more than 1080px. Also, if you want the particles to be there at the start of the comp, slide the start of the layer a few seconds before the start of the comp.

Next change the particle from the default line, to something else. I've chosen lens to create flat circles. Lens uses the original colour of the layer it's on, in this case it's a solid. You can muck around with colours, how the particle looks over time, and change the particle type here.

Remember you can also add more effects before or after the particles to change how they look, eg, blurs, colour correction, distortion, and so on. You can change the opacity of the layer as well as its Blending Mode to change how it interacts with other layers. Go nuts!

Here's a screenie of settings that produce a good gentle swirling particle effect. Don't just copy them though, they literally took me like five minutes, so you could easily refine them. Try twiddling the knobs, just to get a feel for what they do.


After Effects: Linear Expression - going from value 1 to another value and then back to value 1 Essentially I am trying to get a position expression on a video layer (two dimensional) to go from 640, 360 (middle of the screen) to another value defined by an expression control and then back to 640, 360. To define the duration of this effect I have used placeholder checkboxes (start, middle and end) to create drag-able keyframes that mark the start and end points. I know this is a strange way to define the start and end points of the effect, but it works well for what I'm doing.

Current code:

start = effect("Start (use keyframe)")("Checkbox");
end = effect("End (use keyframe)")("Checkbox");
mid = effect("Middle (use keyframe)")("Checkbox");

if (start.numKeys > 0){
start1 = start.key(start.numKeys).time
}
else{
start1 = 0;
}

if (end.numKeys > 0){
end1 = end.key(end.numKeys).time;
}
else{
end1 = 0;
}

if (mid.numKeys > 0){
mid1 = mid.key(mid.numKeys).time;
}
else{
mid1 = 0;
}

[linear(time, start1, mid1, 640, effect("End Position")("Point")[0]), linear(time, start1, mid1, 360, effect("End Position")("Point")[1])];

[linear(time, mid1, end1, effect("End Position")("Point")[0], 640), linear(time, mid1, end1, effect("End Position")("Point")[1], 360)];

Note: the code has worked fine without the mid variable and the second linear expression, however it won't go from 640, 360 to x, y and then back to 640, 360. It will only go from 640, 360 to x, y and then stop.

I have also tried using the loopOut("pingpong") function but it breaks the entire expression.

Is there any reason why you're using this approach? There are far easier ways to do it (see below).

But anyway the problem is that the second last and last line both return values, but an expression can only return one set of values, and so it only returns the last one. I think this points to a misunderstanding of how expressions work. An expression is calculated every frame*; it has no memory of what happened previously or what will happen later. So your expression has to return one result for any particular point in time, and the result is calculated from the value it returns at that time.

You need some flow control there. Use an if/else statement to replace the last two lines:

if (time < mid1){
    [linear(time, start1, mid1, 640, effect("End Position")("Point")[0]), linear(time, start1, mid1, 360, effect("End Position")("Point")[1])];
}else{
    [linear(time, mid1, end1, effect("End Position")("Point")[0], 640), linear(time, mid1, end1, effect("End Position")("Point")[1], 360)];
}

But you can make your life a lot easier. Why not have a slider effect that has a 0-100 range that defines what percentage of the distance along the path the object should be at. Then you just keyframe it to ramp from 0-100 and back again. The whole expression would just be:

rampCtrl=effect("the Effect That Controls How Far Along It is")("slider");
linear(rampCtrl, 0, 100, [640,360], effect("End Position")("Point"))

Note that you don't have to split it into two parts, the linear() function can deal with vectors as the value1 and value2 inputs.

*(you can think of expressions as being calculated every frame, but they are actually calcualted every time the comp is rendered. If you have motion blur on, the frame is composed of numerous time slices at sub-frame points in time, blended together, and the expression is calculated for each of those time slices. Generally you can ignore this, but it does impact rendering speed if your calcualtion is very time consuming, and it can cause weirdness if your expression returns unexpected results between frames, e.g. when looping back to an original value between two frames)


What counts as a "View" on Youtube? How does Youtube decide that a video was "viewed"?

If a video is 5 minutes long and a viewer watches for 10 seconds, will this be counted as a view?

YouTube now have a Creator's Academy and I think they answer your question in this video: Why Subscribers Matter Basically, it matters how long a video is watched, this is measured. But a single view means a single "opening" of the video itself. (E.g., I can produce two views in a few seconds, but this won't matter so much to internal metrics other than views' count.)


How do you make orbiting text in Davinci Resolve 15? Spinning globe with orbiting texts

Does someone know how to make the orbiting text shown at the bottom right corner of the linked clip or where to such a tutorial online by using Davinci Resolve?

I can put this in a video tutorial later if you need it but here is what I did to achieve an effect like that. I took an animated PNG and recorded a 20 second clip of it doing its thing on the my screen. The PNG was a bouncing Firefox logo and by default is was a transparent animation but I used IrfanView to play the animation, which gave it a solid black background for recording.

Next I imported the clip into Resolve, added it to the video track above the main video, sized and positioned it to the lower left of the screen. Next I went into the color grading page and removed all the black (background) from the animated clip, which left just the bouncing logo over the original video.

This end result is not perfect because I put this together fast to answer your question. But this is what I ended up with in less than a half hour of effort.

Bouncing Firefox Video


Best format for audio track with a single/few images What would be the best (e.g. most compact) format for a "video" that is actually an audio track with a single static image the whole time? (example)

And if it was not one static image, but a slow slideshow (maybe 1 image every couple of minutes)?

EDIT
One more case: What if it is a short clip (1-2 seconds), that itself is full quality (I think that means 25 FPS, right?), but is played in a continuous loop throughout the entire audio?

The best compression would come from a variable frame rate format.  Variable Frame Rate formats are designed to adjust their frame rate based on the level of activity in the video.  For something with a very low effective framerate, this would allow it to store the image far fewer times and simply describe how long the image should stay up for.  It would then use more frames when necessary for any transitions.

The one downside to variable framerate formats is that there aren't a whole lot of well supported ones and even fewer good encoders to support working with them, but it is what would give the best results.

Handbrake appears to support VFR output.


Whats the best video camera for shooting weddings and Docs? I was just wondering what would be the best professional Video Camera for shooting weddings and documentaries? I have a Canon 6D but want to invest in a prosumer camera that I can move around and keep focus. I find it awkward that you cant digitally zoom in to check focus on the 6D when its recording.

I was looking at the Canon C100 but its not very ergonomically designed for run and gun shooting. That said with the Atmos Ninja it can be every bit as good as its big brother the C500. Has anyone used this for weddings.

Is there anything in particular that would be a deal breaker on a camera. Ie no XLR's, a noisy internal zoom.

Should I invest in gear that can shoot 4K? I want to steer clear of Mini DV and i have a macbook pro with 16 gb RAM and an i7 processor.

I'm thinking of spending between 3000 - 3500 Euro on it as it'll need to last me for years.

I'd really appreciate any information you can give. Thanks!

I shoot weddings and currently use a Canon 7D with a Zoom lens, it is all up to how you shoot and feel when shooting, I like the 7D as it is small and doesnt look to intrusive, I would like to upgrade to the Canon C100 as it would give me better options but still stay in the small form.

It is all down to personal preference in the end, You could just hire a few out and see if you like to feel, form factor etc as some people would say go ARRI and others would be DSLR route


What is a subtle displacement at the moment of the cut? In In the blink of an eye book (page 6), Walter Murch explains that displacements at the moment of the cut should be either subtle or total:

  What we do seem to have difficulty accepting are the kind of displacements that are neither subtle nor total: Cutting from a full-figure master shot, for instance, to a slightly tighter shot that frames the actors from the ankles up. The new shot in this case is different enough to signal that something has changed, but not different enough to make us re-evaluate its context: The displacement of the image is neither motion nor change of context, and the collision of these ideas produces a mental jarring—a jump—that is comparatively disturbing.

As I understand it, all following cuts are total, right?

A cut from a person walking down the street to the same person leaving the elevator and walking to the door of his flat,
A cut from a person walking down the street to the same person turning at the corner of the same street,
A cut from a person walking down the street with the camera showing him from the front to the same person on the same street with the camera from behind,

But then, what exactly is a subtle displacement? A displacement which is neither subtle nor total?

Would a cut from a 35mm shot of a house with a person in front of it to a 50mm shot of the same house and the same person will be considered as a subtle displacement?

I don't recall seeing any subtle displacement in movies. Are they used at all? Are there any well-known examples of such cuts?

Subtle cuts are cuts that are blended such that you don't notice they are occurring.  They are the hardest type of cuts to pull off.  You can do them during a quick pan or if you have a near stationary scene.

The key point that Walter Murch is getting at is that jump cuts, cuts where the viewer is jarred in to noticing the cut, should generally be avoided as they break continuity.  As with any guideline, there are exceptions and in some situations you may want to intentionally jar the audience, but generally, you avoid it by either having a major change in context or angle or you blend it so smoothly that the cut is not noticeable.

For a great example of a subtle cut, look at the boat sinking sequence used frequently in the TV show Arrow (available on Netflix).  There is a shot where they go from being in a cabin there is a whoosh of water as the girl is washed out of the boat and then we are looking at a shot from outside.  While there is no clear cut, a transition was made (though in this case it could also be a total cut as there is a context shift).

You may also occasionally notice subtle cuts in documentaries when the editor is able to make a cut between takes where the speaker's head was positioned in the same spot and so you don't actually particularly notice that an edit was made.  These are only possible when the situation lends itself perfectly to such an edit, but it can sometimes be done.


Final Cut Pro X & Davinci Resolve workflow I'd like to grade a Final Cut Pro X project with Davinci Resolve. Unfortunately my Final Cut experience is very limited and I don't understand how to get a consolidated project, linked to the original footage files in order to create a clean xml file for Davinci Resolve.

When I try to consolidate a project (File > Consolidate), Final Cut creates additional, encoded and conformed files with a weird naming scheme - unfortunately this is not what I expect.

Is there a way to keep the source footage links and create a 'clean edit' which is assembled from the source material instead?

What I'd do:

Duplicate the project for a backup.
"Collapse" the timeline from the bottom up:  Lasso all of the clips
immediately above the primary storyline (to make a Premiere
analogy, if the primary storyline is V1, then select all of the
clips on V2), right click, and select "overwrite to primary
storyline."
Repeat step 2 until there are no clips above the primary storyline.
File->Export XML
Import this xml file into Resolve
Color clips
Render individual source files
Replace FCPX clips with new ones

I don't have my DaVinci Dongle on me, or I'd elaborate on that side.


Software to Remove a Person from a Video I have a video with multiple moving people, from which I would like to remove one person. I know this is possible and that software exists to do it (see this paper), but I can't find any available to the general public.

You could export the video to still frames, then the problem is reduced to removing the person from pictures.

You can use Gimp or any decent paint program with a clone tool to copy sections of a good image to the image that needs correcting.  The clone tool is pretty quick to use.  But yes, at 30 fps if your perpetrator is in the scene for 5s is a lot of frames to tinker with.


ffmpeg fade to specific color values over time I have a background image that I'm trying to fade to specific color values using this filter: lutrgb=enable='gte(t,3)':'r=0.3*val:g=0.3*val:b=0.3*val'

This almost works, but it changes the values instantly.  How do I get it to fade to those values gradually over time?

The lut filter expressions don't work with time. geq does.

geq=r='(1-0.7*min((T-S)/D,1))*p(X,Y)':g={the same as r}:b={the same}:enable='gte(t,S)'

S should be your start time in second. D is duration for the change in colours. T and p(X,Y) are variables and should be kept as is.


Transparent video background from image Is there a simple way to make the background of an video transparent, removing the background where it is similar to the image?
Just like a green screen, except that the chroma key is an image.

Is this possible in blender, or some other free/cheap mac programs?

What you're looking for is a difference matte. (Not to be confused with a Color Difference Key which is similar to regular chroma key.) It can certainly be done, though you should know that difference mattes are fairly temperamental.

The way it works is by finding the difference between an image and each frame of video, and removing anything that's the same, while leaving whatever's different. This means you need a locked-down camera when filming and you need a clean plate of the scene without any actors (or whatever you're trying to remove).

I'm not knowledgable in Blender, so I don't know if it's possible there. I haven't used one in a long time, so don't know what the current landscape is for plug-ins or apps that do this.


Script editor in Premiere Pro Is it possible to integrate an editor for voiceover texts and other scripts into Premiere Pro CC? Adobe Story will discontinue this year.

I do not mean texts sticking to a clip or a time in the sequence. This can be done using markers or titles. The editor should be independent of clips and exact seconds as this can change while the voiceover text stays the same.

A perfect editor would stick text to a clip but keep it when the clip is replaced later. But a very simple text editor would be enough.

At the moment I open my texts in a separate window while every other function is integrated into Premiere Pro. While speaking voiceover, the mouse and eyes jump between the controls and preview in Premiere and the editor on the other screen.

Unfortunatley no. Adobe Premiere dropped what would have been your best possible “tool” when CC replaced CS6.

CS6 has a tool called Analyze Speech, used primarily for automated transcribing.

This tool could be used to substitute a rolling message box within the MetaData Window, tied to Key Frames. So you could use it manually in that sense to drop in a script and change the timings.

Your Best Bet is to either use basic slates/titles using the titler window. You could try playing with the rolling title feature, making a single rolling slate the length of your program... Or just block it out.

I do a ton of VO heavy productions however, and have never really thought of this as being an issue, even with CS6.

Not sure what your workflow is. But just recording a scratch track of your VO and dropping in temporary slates to indicate the placement of graphics, future media, tittles, etc, should get you there.


Is CABAC encoding lossy or lossless in ffmpeg? I've been looking into how to compress a video using ffmpeg when I stumbled across CABAC encoding which I could specify by using the libx264 for the video codec and pairing it with the proper arguments (-x264opts cabac=1), however I know that libx264 is usually used for lossy compression. However, CABAC encoding is listed as a lossless compression technique on Wikipedia. I know I can control the quality of the file by using the -crf tag but I wanted to know if I specified ffmpeg to use cabac, would the output video be compressed lossless or lossy?

Cabac is lossless, but h264 is lossy. The part you are missing is that cabac is not THE compression algorithm. It is just the final step out of hundreds of steps in video compression. By the time you get to cabac, all the lossy steps have already been performed, and a final lossless step is added to squeeze a few more bits out.


FFmpeg - Synchronize external audio file I'm creating some encoding templates for Multi-Bitrate streaming and I want to create a fallback that is audio-only. So when the bandwith of a users connection falls below x, it drops video playback and switches to audio-only.

The problem is alignment of said audio stream. I've aligned the videostream with

-x264opts keyint=48:min-keyint=48:no-scenecut

This creates equal intervals in keyframes, allowing consistent GOP's for streaming. But such an option is not available for audio only.

I extracted the audio from the original file, like this:

ffmpeg -i Sample.avi -vn -ar 44100 -ac 2 -ab 128k -f mp3 audio_only.mp3

That creates a seperate .MP3 file, equal to the audio-streams of the original file(.MP4). However, I have no way to ensure this is inline with the audio streams of the encoded .MP4's (the multi-bitrate set).

So, is there a way to make sure these files are aligned? Or should I extract the audio from one of the encoded files, instead of the mezzanine file?

One way to achieve this might be to create an .MP4 with your audio and an all-black image, which should encode to something not much larger than the audio file but still have the same internal structure as the full video files.


Choppy playback after rendering in Premier Pro CC I am editing a music video and after I rendered the workspace, I began previewing the video...

In several places the video has become very choppy, skipping frames or something. How do I fix this? Should I play around with playback timing or fps? No clue what to do..

Any help is much appreciated!

Navi

The first thing you have to do is to determine whether the choppiness is due to a bad source (your camera skipped some frames) or an inadequate playback system (your editor is demanding more from your hardware (most likely disk subsystem or GPU) than it can provide).  To do this, render out a small version of the video (such as 360p) and see whether that plays back with or without glitches.  If the render has glitches, you have a bad source file and fixing it will be very hard to do.  If that render plays back without glitches, the problem is likely that your hardware is not powerful enough to edit video as is.  In that case, you can try editing proxies, which are basically smaller versions of your original files.  Once you have all the edit decisions made, you can render out a full-res version.  But it still may not play back without glitches unless you have a good disk subsystem and a sufficiently powerful CPU/GPU.

To test the speed of your hard drive system (and to see what video specs it can support without glitching), run the Blackmagic Design Disk Speed Test (if you have a Mac): https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/blackmagic-disk-speed-test/id425264550?mt=12 .  Or equivalent if you don't.


Why are these flickering lines appearing during a fade to black in my Premiere render? I am working on documentation of a performance/musical instrument design project I completed in the springtime. The footage I received from my cameraman was shot on a GH5, and it's technical specs are 23.976 fps, 1920x1080, and H.264 10 bit 4:2:2.

I have completed my edit in Premiere and used a couple of "Dip to Black" effects as transitions between different moments of my performance. Everything looked great and I rendered the project out. After watching the render, I noticed that on every fade to black transition, a bunch of flickering lines would appear on the white wall behind me.

Here is an example of the problem: https://vimeo.com/346004760 (the password is "help")

Does anyone have any clue as to why these flickering lines are appearing during fade to black transitions? How could I get rid of them?

I've spent the past two days trying to find a solution, to no avail: the problem continues to appear. Aside from countless hours of Googling, here is a list of things I have tried:

Switching from GPU to Software renderer
Removing all effects except dip to black i.e just Dip to Black on pure raw footage
Using opacity keyframes from 100 > 0 > 100 instead of dip to black
Rendering the project in every imaginable way i.e .avi, very high bitrates, CBR, playing with every encoding settings
Cleaning media cache
Installing an older version of Premiere, downgrading the project, and rendering out of the older version
Rendering the same footage on a Macbook (I usually work on a PC)

I did learn that I can replicate the issue just by setting In and Out points on the timeline and rendering inside Premiere i.e by going to Sequence > Render In to Out. The flickering lines then appear when I preview the timeline. They do not appear if I haven't pressed "Render In to Out". This cut my troubleshooting time down considerably, as I didn't have to keep exporting footage.

I believe what you reference is called "artifacts".

Those phenomenons are a result of compression. Vimeo does not use the raw file you upload as playback. Instead, the file is converted and compressed for storage-purposes mainly. This might be one reason as of why this is appearing.

The second possibility is that your footage was not recorded at a deep-enough bitrate, and so it seems from the information you gave. h.264 is always a lossy codec, which means that you're gonna throw away a chunk of data when writing a file in h.264. I know that the gh5 is able to record in avchd, which would be a far better choice in terms of image quality compared to mov h264 or mp4 h264. Try recording in that format.

Lastly, using a flat profile could safe you some extra-information in those parts that get compressed could help you. The gh5 has a vlog-L profile as well as a Cinelike D one. These are so called "flat profiles" which will lower the contrast and saturation at first, but give you the ability to adjust contrast and brightness afterwards. Recording in a flat profile captures more information in very bright or very dark areas, which would otherwise get lost. Trying this might also improve your results.

However, Vimeo, youtube, Clipfish, hell what ever Streaming-Service you use - compression will take place, which means that your video will look worse there than in the original file. Depending on what you're planning on the long run (for example sending a video to a client) it might be a better idea to straight up upload the prores4444 or DNxHR or similar near-lossless codec and send the link to the client (for example via ftp-server) so he/she/it can download it directly without the use of 3rd-party streaming-services.

Hope my answer was helpful, happy filming!


mplayer/ffmpeg How to set caca filter's output size I'm curious how different clips would look like in ASCII art. So I'm trying caca.

To just play, I use mplayer -vo caca $FILE.

But that creates an output of quite small size.

How can I change that size?

Found. Caca library is driven mostly by environment variables rather than filter params.

export CACA_GEOMETRY=200x78
mplayer -vo caca $INPUT


How can I extend the ten minute video limit on a Canon PowerShot ELPH 300 HS? This question addresses the fact that DSLRs have limits on video recording time and provides some speculation as to why the limit exists. It mentions that Canon has a 30 minute limit.

I am recording HD video on a Canon PowerShot ELPH 300 HS point-and-shoot, and am coming up against a 10 minute limit. This site says that there is a 60 minute limit on standard definition and 10 minute limit on high definition. With 720p a 10 minute video is about 1.5 Gb. I wanted to mention the 10 minute limit explicitly because it seems that many people talk about a 30 minute limit and so this seemed like a somewhat unique case.

My question is whether there is a way to extend the limit from 10 to something like 30 minutes? 10 minutes is just short for my purposes of recording my own judo tournament matches.

I guess it would have to be some kind of patch to the firmware. Does such a thing exist?

I believe the limit is due to the file size, not the actual recording length.  This forum thread seems to confirm this for the T2i/500D, and Wikipedia agrees for the 5D mkII.  Also according to these sources, the limit for both cameras is 4gb.

For the PowerShot cameras, the file size limit is likely much lower. For the S2, it appears to be 1gb.

What all this means is that the time limit isn't a time limit, per se... but a file size limit.  So if you are able/willing to reduce the file quality, you may be able to extend the time limit.

If you can shoot in a lower quality video mode (say 480i instead of 720p), that will likely improve your recording time.  If you can reduce the frame rate, that may improve your time limit, as well.  Of course all of these things will make the video noticibly lower quality, as well.

If you can't get different equipment, you may be best off strategically stopping and starting the video during pauses in the action.


Why does the color red always appear pixelated on TV and videos on the PC? I hope this isn't off-topic.  While technically about video production, it's not about a problem I am having.

Have you ever noticed on TV how the color red is always noticeably pixelated?  It's the same why while watching video on the computer, as well, be it a Blu-ray, DVD, a video playing directly from disk, or a video being streamed from the internet.  No other other that I know of looks pixelated like the color red.  I've noticed this since as far back as I can remember starting with DVD.  I haven't watched any VHS tapes for many, many years, so I can't say whether or not this pixelation occurs with tapes, but it'd make sense to think that it wouldn't since those are analog.

BTW, I've searched for this online and found a lot of people asking the same questions, but I have yet to see an actual answer.

Here's an example of red pixelation that I just happened to come across on YouTube, although the same thing occurs even on TV broadcasts.  Although you can still see it at actual size, zooming in lets you see how pixelated the color red is in comparison to the rest of the colors which really aren't pixelated at all.  I strongly doubt that this is merely a visual anomaly.  Instead, I believe it has to do with how the color red is processed during encoding.

It's not an illusion - it's called chroma subsampling.

Most video codecs do not represent colour in full resolution. This allows for more efficient "lossy" compression because it takes advantage of the fact that the human eye is more sensitive to brightness ("luma") than colour ("chroma"). Most lossy codecs lower the chroma resolution to half or one quarter of the overall resolution, so you may only get one pixel's worth of colour for every four pixels of brightness. This dramatically decreases the amount of data needed, with only a small loss of apparent quality.

It's slightly more complicated though: the brightness is actually made up of the sum of the three colour components Red, Green and Blue. And they're not encoded as RGB, that would be require more bandwidth, they're encoded as YUV. Y corresponds roughly to the green component, and the U and V are Y minus the red component and Y minus the blue component (a gross approximation, actually - if you want the whole formula look here).

In most codecs the U and V components are sampled at a lower resolution than the Y. this is expressed in the three-way ratio you often see if you hang around video forums too much, e.g. 4:2:2 or 4:2:0. For a two row rectangle of pixels the numbers represent:

  "width of sample region (Y samples)":"UV samples in the first
  row":"additional UV samples in the second row"

A common example of this notation is in the codec name "proRes422" the 422 part of the name comes from 4:2:2 meaning for every a 4x2 rectangle there will be 4 Y samples in each row 2 UV samples in the first row (half the horizontal resolution) and 2 UV samples in the second row. So proRes422 has half the chroma resolution of the luma.

On the internet and on telly you're most likely seeing everything in a 4:2:0 codec. In every 4x2 rectangle of picture there are only two UV samples (the 0 means that there are no additional samples on the second row). So the colour part of the image is composed of chunks 2x2 pixels in size, in other words, one quarter the resolution.

This means the red channel on its own has one quarter the resolution of the overall picture.

TL;DR the red looks pixelated - because it actually is.


How can I record from do multi iPhone cameras I’ve been asked to provide a cost effective solution for recording a church service. I need to use three cameras in three different locations. There is a Mac onsite that I will be recording to. I need to be able to switch between the cameras. It won’t be broadcast live but uploaded to the web shortly after the service. There won’t be time to edit three separate recordings hence the need to switch between the cameras. The other constraint is the cameras need to small and it’s likely I can’t run cables. So I was thinking there maybe an iOS app that produces a stream I can connect to and some software on the Mac that can record and switch between the streams.
I’m new to this so appreciate alternative solutions. I can get three phones together and we have the Mac so hopefully just an app software solution.
Thanks

There is nothing free, i can't suggest you purchase anything to fit your scenario; nonetheless i suggest you take a look of How to Use Your iPhone as a Webcam for OBS Live Streaming (Not Free Anymore) and Google OBS


Streaming live to co-hosts I've recently started livestreaming, and during the test stream feedback was received that I tended to concentrate a fair amount on the game I was streaming, and not able to respond to commenters on the stream, despite my moderators' having a system to flag posts for my attention.

To resolve this, I started a Skype call with said moderators so they could participate in the stream too. However it was quickly noticed that their participation was limited to responding to comments and talking about the site that the stream was being hosted on (it's a YouTube stream embedded in my game site), because the stream output lags by about a minute.

To fix that, I started sharing my screen on Skype, thus allowing the moderators on call to see my screen and therefore the stream with much less delay. However, this started causing problems because it made the video stream lag for the viewers, and I had to stop the Skype video.

I'm using XSplit Broadcaster, and during real streams I will be streaming to YouTube as well as to a local recording. XSplit is perfectly capable of broadcasting to multiple sources (and my bandwidth easily allows it - I get a minimum of 16Mbit upload and the stream quality I'm sending is 4.5Mbit), however I'm wondering if there's any way I can provide a live stream to my moderators, so they can see what I'm seeing and participate properly in real(-ish)time.

Any advice on this would be much appreciated!

You need your own stream server.  The problem with services like YouTube and Twitch.TV is that your stream has to go through a lot of processing and content distribution on their end before it goes out to viewers.  That processing takes time and results in lag.  You can send the exact same stream to your own stream server and have it directly related with far FAR less delay (sub-second to a couple seconds), but are limited to the capabilities of your stream server to meet demand.

I've only done this kind of thing with Windows Expression Encoder in the past using a Windows Media Streaming server which is pretty easy to use, but only works on WMV files and thus isn't really all that good of a modern solution for h.264 video in cross platform streams.  RED5 should theoretically be capable of relaying a stream for you and you could either set it up locally or preferably throw it up on a VPS somewhere that can do the relaying for you (as 16mbit will get consumed really fast sending a 4.5mbps stream to multiple people).

Streaming is unfortunately not particularly easy to get setup and going for yourself though and that is a big part of why services that simplify it, like Youtube and Twitch.TV, are so popular despite their massive lag times.


How to transcode HEVC footage on a mac if you don't have CC2018 yet Is there a good free way to convert iPhone HEVC footage to .mov prores or something similar using a Mac (MacOS 10.12) with Premiere CC 2017?  Googling provides lots of unreliable looking apps from companies I haven't heard of. Any good (preferably free) recommendations?

Install Homebrew.

Open Terminal.
Install FFMPEG with extra features by entering the following on a single line:

brew install ffmpeg --with-fdk-aac --with-ffplay --with-freetype --with-libass  --with-libvorbis --with-libvpx --with-opus --with-x26

Wait about 10 minutes for it to install.

From the Terminal, run FFMPEG, using a line like this:

ffmpeg -i input.mov -c:v prores -profile:v 3 -c:a pcm_s16le output.mov

input.mov is the name of your HEVC file.  It can also include a full path, but spaces need to be preceded by backslashes  “\”

output.mov is an exported ProRes quicktime movie that will play in Premiere

Do process more than one file at a time:

In terminal, go to the directory where your files are.

for i in *.mov; do ffmpeg -i "$i" -c:v prores -profile:v 3 -c:a pcm_s16le "${i%.*}_out.mov"; done

Output files will appear in the same folder appended with “_out.mov”


Codec genealogy / kinship: DivX, MPEG-4 Part 2, H.263 Yes, I know, H.264/AVC is here for everyone, and we're moving (slowly) towards H.265/HEVC, so why bother with these historic formats? Well, just because it's history. I admit my research has been limited to Google/forums/Wikipedia, but I haven't managed to get the relationship between these codecs straight.

Wikipedia DivX

  There are two DivX codecs; the regular MPEG-4 Part 2 DivX codec and
  the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC DivX Plus HD codec.

Okay, the latter doesn't matter here, that's just their H.264 implementation. But this does seem to state that the first and famous DivX is an MPEG-4 Part 2 implementation.

Wikipedia MPEG-4 Part 2

  Several popular codecs including DivX, Xvid and Nero Digital implement this standard.

Okay, but wasn't DivX some kind of rogue development, decompiled Microsoft code, then modified, and even the Microsoft code being a modification of MPEG-4 Part 2?

Wikipedia H.263

  MPEG-4 Part 2 is H.263 compatible in the sense that a basic H.263
  bitstream is correctly decoded by an MPEG-4 Video decoder.

So there's overlap between the two, but one is for movies and such (MPEG), the other for teleconferencing and such (ITU), so their specced out for different contexts.

Sorry for the confused question … guess what I'm looking for is a mental map of these codecs with their relationships and how they came about and in how far they are the same and/or different.

H.263 was a sole development of the ITU but I wouldn't bother all too much with the specified use case of video conferencing. It's a codec with the main purpose of improving the compression compared to older codecs which of course is beneficial for video conferencing where bandwidth is a very limiting factor, especially at the time the codec got developed.

The MPEG then developed MPEG4-Part 2 which is based upon H.263 and offers bit-stream compatibility to the base-line level of h.263, meaning there is a h.263 compatible bit-stream in an MPEG4-Part 2 encoded video that you could call the basis for the actual MPEG4-Part 2 video stream that extended the h.263 compatible stream. So MPEG4-Part 2 offers a few more features than h.263 but essentially they are very closely related.

With MPEG4-Part 2 started this weird age of many companies making their own implementation of these two codecs resulting in a few new container formats that were only used by these specific implementations f.e. RealMedia's .rmf/.rmvb or DivX's altered version of AVI, .divx.
RealMedia even made their own codec again based on h.263. A horrible age of a ton of different formats that needed their own browser plugins and players because they weren't fully compatible to each other, either because of their container or slight alterations to either h263 or MPEG-4 Part 2.

Which made this codec generation a bit special, while .MP4 was already present at the time in an early form it was barley used as the container format for MPEG4-Part 2. So h.263 and MPEG-4 Part 2 was found in a ton of different container formats unlike h.264 which has is also found in several container formats but with the intended container format MP4 being the defacto standard that is found everywhere. The most popular alternative being the open source Matroska container format (.mkv/.mka). Apple's QuickTime .mov also supports h.264 but even in the Apple Ecosystem MP4 is dominating. In my opinion the biggest reason why h.264 is such a huge success today.

DivX began as a reversed engineered version of Microsoft's MPEG4-Part 2 implementation. At that point there was no company behind DivX, it gained popularity because of its good compression at that time and also being free to use.
After DivX made it into a company they revamped the code for the codec as it was still based on some Microsoft code.

Though it still was an MPEG4-Part 2 implementation after the rewrite and became a pretty popular codec that was supported by a lot of DVD players at the time. Some developers of DivX went on and made the open source version called Xivd (that used AVI instead of .divx) that gained a lot of popularity in the movie "pirating" scene and was their standard for encoding videos for several years until h.264 came along. Though even after h.264 was readily in use by consumers Xvid was still used for a few years because of it's good understanding in the scene. It became somewhat of an art to encode movies in Xvid because of all those sophisticated encoding options available in the Xvid encoder.
Xvid had a few advanced features that weren't implemented in DivX which made videos encoded with those feature in-compatible with DivX certified devices.

Since MPEG4-Part 2 the MPEG and ITU-T are jointly developing codecs, H.264 being their first co-operation. This is the reason why the codec is often referred to as h.264/MPEG4-4 AVC. MPEG-4 AVC being the MPEG's/ISO name for the standard and h.264 that of the ITU-T. Different names but identical standards. The same goes for h.265/HEVC.

I hope that helped a bit clearing things up, though a lot of this is also knowledge taken from Wikipedia, so it might not be new to you but I tried to put it an order that made sense.


What is the most basic standard raw video format? What I mean by the question is, for audio we have the WAV file format which stores a representation of audio where each word stores the intensity of one sample of audio. In addition to this there is a standard header format which is agreed on universally to make it easier to process these files. Similarly for image files we have the BMP file format where each word stores the RGB value for each pixel inside the image, along with a universally accepted header file that helps process the file. For text files we have TXT file format which just stores the ascii equivalent of each character on file. Non of these are compressed formats and one word of predefined size in each file represents one unit of the media type the file represents.

Is there anything similar for video files? Almost any video format I can think of (.wmv, .mp4 etc) are either proprietary or compressed formats. Does a video equivalent of BMP or WAV exist? Does such a format take into account both audio and video?

The reason there is no widely used uncompressed video format, as there is for audio is that the data rate for uncompressed video is so colossal that uncompressed video is kinda useless. While a relatively cheap device has been able to deal with a stream of PCM audio since the eighties, even today you need fast storage and a decent system to play a stream of uncompressed video. I'll illustrate by giving an example of the size of an uncompressed stream of video.

First it might be worth noting the difference between RAW and uncompressed codecs, and uncompressed and losslessly compressed codecs. Matt provided a good description of RAW codecs, but they are not prevalent in video, other than as camera codecs that get transcoded before use. But there are also uncompressed and lossless codecs that store the raster in a mathematically lossless way, so that each pixel in the decoded video will have the same colour information as the encoded video.

The difference between uncompressed and lossless is that uncompressed just store the colour channels as a stream of bytes, similar to a PCM stream in audio. At say, 10 bits per colour channel, each pixel will take 30 bits. Given that a single frame of 1080p video has around 2.1 million pixels, each frame is going to require a about 7.8mB, and at 24 fps thats ~187mB per second, or 671gB per hour. Even though storage is cheap, that's still going to pose a problem; just playing it back will be taxing. An example of an uncompressed codec is V210, developed by Apple, back when dinosaurs ruled the earth. It's a bit like wav, except that almost nobody uses it.

A solution to the storage and transport problem is to compress the data mathematically — as you would compress other files that you need to restore perfectly. An old lossless codec, Apple's Animation codec uses RLE encoding, which given the highly redundant nature of video streams gives fairly significant size reduction, at the overhead of more processing.

Other lossless encoding use more efficient algorithms, and the more efficient they are the more processing they generally require. So lossless codecs will allow you to retrieve the pixel data as it was originally, with no generation loss, but do not store the pixels as a simple stream of bytes. An example of an open source, mathematically lossless compressed codec is FFV1, developed by the makers of the ffmpeg software.

Something else worth noting is that many video streams are not full resolution. Almost all of the video you see on the web is encoded as YUV-420. This is what is know as chroma subsampling. YUV refers to the way colours are encoded: rather than use the RGB values of the pixels it stores the colour as luma (≈brightness), and two difference components called U and V (≈red - brightness and ≈ blue - brightness, the green component is ≈ the difference between the Y and the sum of the UV channels. There are perceptual weightings given to each component, hence the ≈s but the idea is the same).

Almost all video codecs use YUV encoding, and many sample the colour components at a lower resolution than the luma component. In the case of 420, or 4:2:0 as it is commonly written, for every 4 pixels of luma information there will be 2 pixels of colour information. Some codecs only allow one sort of subsampling (e.g. Apple's Prores 422, which is, not surprisingly 4:2:2 or DVCPro which was weirdly 4:1:1), others let you encode in a variety of subsampling pattern (h.264 has variants that let you encode 4:2:0, 4:2:2 or 4:4:4).

If you wanted a codec that was similar in ubiquity to wav, then probably Apple's  ProRes might fit the bill. While not lossless, it manages a good tradeoff between file size and quality, and was one of the first lossy codecs to allow 10-bit sampling. Avid also make a similar codec called DNxHR, and there is an originally proprietary, but now open source codec called Cineform that fills a similar niche — these codecs are often called intermediate codecs, they're good for moving video from one stage of the post-production chain with minimal generation loss.

However the most commonly used video codec by far today is MPEGLA's h.264. This is a delivery codec, as it is suitable for the final delivery of content, especially via the web, and usually lossy, though it can be used to encode losslessly. The main reason that this is so common is that it does an excellent job of maintaining perceived quality at far, far lower data rates than uncompressed video.


Using select in ffmpeg to choose frames I am trying to use the select filter to choose frames to be included in the output file, but the resulting output file actually has more frames than the input file, which is completely baffling.
Following the example in the documentation to keep every 16th frame, I am using the following command:
ffmpeg -i input.MOV -filter:v "select=not(mod(n\,16))" output.MOV

output.MOV has more frames than input.MOV and nothing has been removed.
Interestingly, when I use the command:
ffmpeg -i input.MOV -filter:v "select=not(mod(n\,16))",showinfo output.MOV

it lists the frames that should be in the output (i.e. the ones that should be selected by the expression), but the actual output file contains more frames than that and seems to completely ignore the select filter (it seems to be the same no matter what select command I use, unless I use select=0).
Am I doing something incorrectly? I basically just want an example command that works the way I expect it to, so I can better learn how ffmpeg works.
Thanks.
Edit: select is not the only filter that ffmpeg seems to ignore when producing the output file, but if this problem is solved, the fix will probably work for other filters as well.

In your command,
-filter:v "select=not(mod(n\,16))"

does select only each 16th frame, as you have discovered. However, your output format is MOV, which is configured as constant frame rate. So, ffmpeg will duplicate frames if the timestamp gaps between frames from the filter output are greater than 1/fps where fps is the nominal frame rate of the stream, and drop frames if they are closer.
Add -vsync 0 to tell ffmpeg to not duplicate or drop frames.


How to capture 4K screens? I want to create videos for youtube, but because I am using a 4K screen it is very difficult to find a proper recording solution.
My idea was to buy a card, that I can put into my computer that records my HDMI. (Also the hdmi of my camera)
What are your opinions? Are there better solutions?

As you know there are two solutions, one using your CPU, the other a dedicated GPU.

CPU Solution

As of today, the CPU solution exit for 4K content, at 60 fps, using x265 or x264 codec. x264 is embededded in OBS in fact, and x264/x265 are known for being the fastest implementation of the standard H264/H265. But, you need a powerful CPU, of course, and then you'll have to make trade off regarding the file size and/or quality. FYI, the x265 has been demonstrated to be able to live encode H265 stream 4K 60 fps, but using a dual socket server (not a standard CPU). It was last year.

GPU Solution

nVidia released end of year 2015 the fist cards with 2nd generation Maxwell architecture that is the first allowing H264 4K live encoding.

Since the Ultra High Definition streams needs a lot of resources, you couldn't really find an acceptable solution before new CPU or GPU are released. If I were you I would go with the GPU solution because you could use that card for both display and capture on the fly. If you could afford it of course, such nVidia card are pretty expensive!


How can I replicate Google's "Glamour" effect in Premiere Pro? I need to replicate the video effect named "Glamour" in the Google Photo app using Adobe Premiere or any other video editor with professional tools. Here is a sample. Can someone point me in the right direction?

There are a few things going on here:

The image is enlarged, slightly blurred and scaling up in the background
Another copy of the image has a white border added to it, and both fades in and scales down in front of the background. Some of these copies are at a slight angle.
Once the foreground image has reached its final position, a bloom filter is applied to the entire image with the amount of bloom increasing over time. It's used as a transition, so that the outgoing clip gets more and more bloom, and also fades into the incoming clip, which starts out with a lot of bloom and gets less and less over time.

So you'll need 2 layers - one for the foreground and one for the background. You'll need to blur, scale, and animate the scale of the background layer. Then you'll need to add a border to the foreground layer, animate its scale over time, and possibly rotate it. You may need to precompose that into a single layer and apply the bloom filter as a transition as described above.


Premiere CS6 hanging on ExporterAVI.prm after an upgrade from Vista 64bit SP2 to Windows 7 How do I fix Premiere CS6 hanging on ExporterAVI.prm after an upgrade from Vista 64bit SP2 to Windows 7?  It hangs indefinitely but was working fine before the OS upgrade.  No unusual CPU usage or memory usage, it just sits there forever.

This is most likely related to an AVI codec not loading properly after the upgrade.  In my case, I had the Matrox VFW software codec installed.  Uninstalling it and installing the newest Windows 7 version fixed the problem.  Clean up your installed codecs and reinstall updated versions of the codecs you need and the problem should be resolved.


how to smoothly increase a video in picture of picture mode Pretty much this effect.

What I tried:

I put the movie in a picture in picture mode
Cut the overlaying movie (the one on top) every second for about 5 seconds
gradually increased each newly created scene a little

This looked horrible and not smooth at all

What you're trying to do is easily achieved with after-effects. iMovie really isn't made for motion graphics.
What you want to do is the following:

Create a composition from your footage
Drag the pip video above the main video.
Press "s" while having the pip video selected to bring up the scaling.
Scale the video down and drag it to the position you'd like.
Now press the stopwatch on the scaling (this will create a keyframe).
Go forward in the timeline and enter 100% in the scaling, which will make it full-screen again.
Do steps 5-6 with the position (you can bring it up by pressing "p"), except for entering 100%, you'll right-click the position and choose "reset". This will center the now full-scale pip video perfectly.

Notes: It is important that the first keyframe from scaling and position are on the same frame, and the last  keyframe of position and scaling must also be on the same frame.

If you look at the animation, it might look a bit "linear". To make it smoother, you can select all four keyframes you have created, right-click and choose "easy-ease". This will interpolate your keyframes in a smoother way.


How does Premiere Pro keep markers on audio files even after export? I opened a project with video and audio, and the audio had markers done in Premiere Pro (right-click on the playhead -> Add Marker).
Then I exported the audio to AIFF. And then I imported the AIFF file into another Premiere Project.
And the Premiere Pro marker was still there.
I'd like to understand how that happened. How was it preserved through export and reimport? Was it kept in the audio file's data, like EXIF data for a photograph?

Markers are part of the XMP standard and are stored in the file. So yes, it's comparable to EXIF. You should notice, that immediately when adding a marker, the file on the disk will be changed, meaning the change date of the file should update. At least that's true on Windows. I don't know what file system a Mac uses and if that's behaving differently.
In the case of AIFF files (and probably any other file), the XMP data section is written at the end of the file. You find the markers in the XML element xmpDM:markers.
An entry for 1 marker in the marker section can look like this:
<rdf:li rdf:parseType="Resource">
   <xmpDM:startTime>839040</xmpDM:startTime>
   <xmpDM:comment>Test Comment</xmpDM:comment>
   <xmpDM:name>Test Name</xmpDM:name>
   <xmpDM:guid>8e5a3759-fe4a-4804-91e1-956c5dfc47f0</xmpDM:guid>
   <xmpDM:cuePointParams>
      <rdf:Seq>
         <rdf:li rdf:parseType="Resource">
            <xmpDM:key>marker_guid</xmpDM:key>
            <xmpDM:value>8e5a3759-fe4a-4804-91e1-956c5dfc47f0</xmpDM:value>
         </rdf:li>
         <rdf:li rdf:parseType="Resource">
            <xmpDM:key>keywordExtDVAv1_90c13ac7-d433-487b-a9bb-da6330736178</xmpDM:key>
            <xmpDM:value>{"color":4292277273,"index":0,"name":"","payload":""}</xmpDM:value>
         </rdf:li>
      </rdf:Seq>
   </xmpDM:cuePointParams>
</rdf:li>

Since the file is mostly binary you may need a special editor that shows you the last part of the file which is human readable text, if you want to see that. On Windows I've used WinMerge. I don't know what can be used on a Mac.
P.S:
This only works with the preference "Write clip markers to XMP" enabled:


In what aspect ratio shoud one record with a DSLR? This Question is not about what aspect ratio should be chosen for the final film, it's rather about how to get the biggest "resolution" capable of the cammera.

When you take a photo with a Modern camera "usually" it's 4/3, I know you can change the aspect ratio, but that's not my point.
I assume, that the sensors of DSLR cameras are the same ratio, because they are created for the purpose of creating photos, aren't they?

I guess focal lenght can be taken in account as well.

Now when you shoot Video in 16:9, I assume, that the image is "croped", because you can't change the size and ratio of your sensor.

So the only way, to have that aspect ratio, is to leave it blank or record on the top/bottom of the image (or both) a black bar.

Wouldn't it be smarter, to record with the fullsensor, to get "more" of the image"?

This might sound redicolous, because you'd have a bigge file size and have to put black bars over it in post. But like this you'd have some extra "room", for example someone dips the Microphone or the boom in the picture, you could just crop the clip a bit further down and still be able to use it.

More footage = better to edit, right?

Because you still have the same width of the sensor that you use, you just use all of the avaivable height as well.

Now here is my question:
What aspect ratio, should you put your cammera into, to get the highest resolution.

When you take a photo with a Modern camera "usually" it's 4/3, I know you can change the aspect ratio, but that's not my point. I assume, that the sensors of DSLR cameras are the same ratio, because they are created for the purpose of creating photos, aren't they?

Actually, no. Only low-end digital cameras (mostly point-and-shoot) use a 4/3 aspect ratio, because they were designed to match the aspect ratio of computer displays (which used to be 4/3). DSLRs use the traditional 3/2 aspect ratio of 35mm film. So if you set your DSLR to 4/3 (for photos), a part of the sides gets cropped.

  Wouldn't it be smarter, to record with the fullsensor, to get "more" of the image"?

Most DSLRs don't use their 'full' resolution for video because of technical limitations (mostly memory buffer, but also memory card transfer speed). For example: My Canon EOS 80D has a maximum resolution of 6000x4000 pixels for photos. However, the highest video resolution it can record in is 1920x1080p @ 50fps (IPB). IPB means every frame is recorded as a full frame, no interframe compression is applied. Recording 25 or even 50 frames per second at a resolution of 6000x4000 pixels would result in an absurdly high data rate that DLSRs simply aren't built to process and transfer.

  What aspect ratio, should you put your cammera into, to get the highest resolution.

Depends on your camera. Either the camera menu or manual will specify the available resolutions for each aspect ratio, possibly it's a seperate setting as well. This way you can tell what combination gives you the highest resolution. If you can't find the resolution specified in the menu or the manual, take a test recording with every setting the camera has, copy the files to your computer and check each file's resolution with MediaInfo or a similar program.

Note that apart from the resolution, the bitrate will have a much higher impact on your video quality than some pixels more or less. Make sure to get a fast SD card with a lot of space so you can always record at the highest bitrate (and I-frames only if that's an option with your camera). Also, it's good practice to film in the resolution that you want your final video to be in for more reasons than video quality. So if you're creating a video that is intended to be viewed on normal video screens, film in 16/9 from the start.


How to organize captured footage for documentaries before sending to editor? I have captured 20TB of footage. It's currently organized as follows:

a separate folder for each day filmed, (example: 11/1/16) inside that:
separate folders for each camera (2-4 cameras used)
separate folder for audio tracks

The film will be edited on Premiere. I don't have an editor yet, but I need to get started on sorting and tagging the footage.

What is the most recommended way of structuring the files (folders & naming) so that the tagging done is not wasted when an editor gets the footage to start cutting?

If I was going to send this to an editor Or If I was going to be sent this I would like the following structure (this is all dependent on how they work but it helps)

 - Project name
   - Raw Video Files
     - Day 1
      - Cam A
      - Cam B
      - ...
     - Day 2
      - Cam A
      - Cam B
      - ...
   - Audio Files
     - Dialogue
      - "Audio recorder"
       - Day 1
        - Audio File 1
        - Audio File 2
        - ...
       - Day 2
        - Audio File 1
        - Audio File 2
        - ...

Im sure you can gather where im going with this, simple folder structure can make a whole difference to how easy and quick it can be to edit this my files at the top level look like

Project Name
 > Raw files
 > Audio files
 > project files
 > Exports
 > XML
 > DVD
 > ...

Hope this helps, there are many ways to organize this and many blogs, sites advising which is the best way but it comes down to how you want to work and what works for your filming and editing process within your company