Starting with voice acting I hope this is the correct place to ask this question. If it is not please point me to the right site for this.

A lot of my friends have said that I would possibly be decent in voice acting, it has also interested me.

Now my question is,

how do you start with something like that. Is it common for voice
actors to have their own equipment?
Are there sites where you can
register as a "voice" actor so that people come to you for something,
paid or unpaid?

Is it common for voice actors to have their own equipment?

Yes, unless you want to pay more than you will get for simple jobs. Transportation + Studio recording fee.

Get a USB microphone https://duckduckgo.com/?q=usb+microphone There are some not too expensive.

Before buying one read some reviews and HEAR some reviews, youtube is a good place for it.

You could start with a cheap one, and if the business is for you, get a more pro mic for cleaner and brighter sound.

  Are there sites where you can register as a "voice" actor

Yes... if you are one. But you are not yet, you do not even know if you would like to do that. Like all activities, you can become good at something or just not.

So, first of all, try youtube, publish some video narrating a story, try royalty-free classic stories, (you can not simply buy a book and use it, even if the original copyright has already expired because the version could still have it)

Find noob writers and ask them about recording one story and make a channel.

You also can use a website where people pay a small fee, like Fiverr, record some demos, and see if people are willing to pay you for the quality of work you offer.

Compare prices. Do not offer the cheapest price or you will never know if they want you for the price or for the quality.

If it is a feasible road to you, you need to take courses. Again, there are pro-people and people that just want to play doing stuff. There is a lot to learn in the field. As a talent to be nurtured and as a business.

Final note.

Do NOT do something because your friends tell you. Do something because you want to!

One edition to make the answer on-topic on this video production site:

Offer your voice as a voice-over talent for documentaries with a small budget.


How to remove video streams from .wmv with FFmpeg? I'm working on a method to programmatically remove video and subtitle streams from video files of various formats and have been having some trouble with most .wmv files. Below is what I believe to be the minimal command required for this:
ffmpeg -y -i a.wmv -c copy -map 0:a -map 0:d -vn -sn b.wmv
And here is the output I'm getting
  built with gcc 9.1.1 (GCC) 20190807
  configuration: --enable-gpl --enable-version3 --enable-sdl2 --enable-fontconfig --enable-gnutls --enable-iconv --enable-libass --enable-libdav1d --enable-libbluray --enable-libfreetype --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libopencore-amrnb --enable-libopencore-amrwb --enable-libopenjpeg --enable-libopus --enable-libshine --enable-libsnappy --enable-libsoxr --enable-libtheora --enable-libtwolame --enable-libvpx --enable-libwavpack --enable-libwebp --enable-libx264 --enable-libx265 --enable-libxml2 --enable-libzimg --enable-lzma --enable-zlib --enable-gmp --enable-libvidstab --enable-libvorbis --enable-libvo-amrwbenc --enable-libmysofa --enable-libspeex --enable-libxvid --enable-libaom --enable-libmfx --enable-amf --enable-ffnvcodec --enable-cuvid --enable-d3d11va --enable-nvenc --enable-nvdec --enable-dxva2 --enable-avisynth --enable-libopenmpt
  libavutil      56. 31.100 / 56. 31.100
  libavcodec     58. 54.100 / 58. 54.100
  libavformat    58. 29.100 / 58. 29.100
  libavdevice    58.  8.100 / 58.  8.100
  libavfilter     7. 57.100 /  7. 57.100
  libswscale      5.  5.100 /  5.  5.100
  libswresample   3.  5.100 /  3.  5.100
  libpostproc    55.  5.100 / 55.  5.100
[wmv3 @ 0000024f26ba3ac0] Extra data: 8 bits left, value: 0
Guessed Channel Layout for Input Stream #0.0 : stereo
Input #0, asf, from 'a.wmv':
  Metadata:
    copyright       : ChessBase GmbH
    WMFSDKVersion   : 12.0.9600.17415
    WMFSDKNeeded    : 0.0.0.0000
    IsVBR           : 0
    DeviceConformanceTemplate: MP@ML
  Duration: 00:00:23.08, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 526 kb/s
    Stream #0:0: Audio: wmav2 (a[1][0][0] / 0x0161), 48000 Hz, stereo, fltp, 96 kb/s
    Stream #0:1: Video: wmv3 (Main) (WMV3 / 0x33564D57), yuv420p, 640x480, 415 kb/s, 25 tbr, 1k tbn, 1k tbc
    Stream #0:2: Data: none, 10 kb/s
Could not write header for output file #0 (incorrect codec parameters ?): Operation not permitted
Stream mapping:
  Stream #0:0 -> #0:0 (copy)
  Stream #0:2 -> #0:1 (copy)
    Last message repeated 1 times

When I try to specify either local_header or global_header, I get
[aac @ 00000297ccbac080] Qavg: nan
I tried to research it for quite a while, but since I don't really understand much of any of this, I didn't get any good leads.
What is this problem and how do I solve or work around it?

Apparently, I needed to specify pcm_s16le as the audio codec. Other files (not in the snippet from the question) where using aac, .wmv required me to specify otherwise.


Smoothly keyframing a wheel to decelerate from point A to B I am trying to accomplish this:
I have a transparent image, a wheel that can be rotated and moved in DaVinci Resolve (that's what I am using but I guess a solution to this could apply in any editor).

I want this wheel to come from off the screen in motion, and stop at the end of the screen without any jerky movement.... but it should decelerate as it goes along. Smoothly. How should I accomplish this? I've given multiple tries to this and failed. There's always some jerky movement. I think it is a matter of getting things mathematically right lol.

Following are the transform controls we can see in Resolve, for reference (these are not values I've set for this wheel, just to show you the two controls I was trying to modify. Position and rotation angle.

For good or bad, in Davinci it's all about maths. Since you want to move the wheel you will change position x/y and rotation, as you mentioned. But you will have to add time points and make the calculations (i.e. if you want to speed up/slow down, change move/rotation direction etc).

For example you want to have the motion for 5 secs, 1 full rotation lasts 1 secs. So you are gone have something like that:

time=0s x=-200, rotation=0
time=1s, rotation=360
time=2s, rotation=720
time=2.5s, x=0
time=3s, rotation=1080
time=4s, rotation=1440
time=5s, x=200,rotation=1800

I hope to help you out a little.. :)


Make a cinema box around a video clip I am new to video editing so if my terminology is wrong, I apologize. I am making a video with output settings : 720p and dimensions 640 x 480. I am inserting a series of video clips but their dimensions are smaller than 640 x 480. Instead of the video clip slide expanding up to 640 x 480, I want it to remain the same size but have a black cinema box or border box around the video clip. How can this be accomplished with a video editor?

Just import the video and don't scale it.  Any decent NLE should support using clips at their original resolution and placing them within a larger format either scaled or unscaled.  Without knowing your intended NLE, I can't really offer any more advice than that.  Premiere Pro would certainly meet your needs.


"Subtracting" image with clean slate on Premiere Pro/After Effects I have a camera set up in a room. I take a picture without any foreground as a clean slate. Then, I record a video with a moving foreground while the camera stays in the same position.

Is there any way I could use Adobe Premiere Pro or After Effects to "subtract" the clean slate from the footage so that it would key the background out, leaving only the foreground?

Haven't tried it, but this might work by dragging both shots in after effects, setting the layer with the subject to "difference", which shows the parts that are different. You can then pre-compose both layers, drag in the footage with the subject again, put it on top of the precomp and then add levels to the precomp, dragging the rgb curve up so that the image becomes only fully black and fully white, giving you the luma-mask for the subject. If you now set this precomp as the luma-mask for the shot with the subject, it should subtract only the subject and cut out the background.

Here are some reasons why this shouldn't be an alternative to greenscreens:

You really need to make sure that the camera, as well as the background stays exactly the same for both shots. Any difference will produce bits you need to mask out using a garbage-mask.
Because nearly all cameras compress the captured images, those blocky compression-artifacts will get masked out as well. This might result in messy edges and ugly smudges, especially while moving rapidly.
When for example a hand is in rapid motion, the background will shine through the blurry hand, because the difference will detect it as if its a completely opaque foreground.

Now some reasons for why you should use it under some circumstances:

You won't have to deal with "spill", which is the color of the key-screen (usually green) that gets bounced onto your subject. Cleaning up spill isn't magic, but not having to think about this issue might save you some time.
You don't need to buy and set up a proper greenscreen, which - especially for indie-filmmakers - can be a pain in the rear.

I hope I was able to help :)


Templates for video production? I am planning to release short and basic videos on youtube. I would like to have a more polished look and feel so I am wondering if there are templates that you can use with, say, adobe premiere, that are complete with graphics, sounds, etc. Sorta like how a theme works with Wordpress.

Take a look at http://www.premierepro.net where I'm sharing some project templates. If more people share their own templates there, it will become a great resource for free Premiere Pro templates. Everything you see on http://www.premierepro.net is free for both commercial and private use, and you can even download free sample chapters from the book "The Cool Stuff in Premiere Pro".

/jarle


ffmpeg cut same video to multiple pieces For the project that I'm working on I have to cut some parts of same video with some subtitles. So I made a bash file that executes multiple ffmpeg commands like this.

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf scale="w=640:h=-2",drawtext="fontfile=/usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts/verdana.ttf: textfile='1.txt': fontcolor=white: fontsize=20: box=1: boxcolor=black@0.5: boxborderw=5: x=(w-text_w)/2: y=((h-text_h)/2)+90:" -ss 00:00:45.674 -to 00:00:50.093 -async 1 ./out/1.mp4

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf scale="w=640:h=-2",drawtext="fontfile=/usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts/verdana.ttf: textfile='2.txt': fontcolor=white: fontsize=20: box=1: boxcolor=black@0.5: boxborderw=5: x=(w-text_w)/2: y=((h-text_h)/2)+90:" -ss 00:00:49.344 -to 00:00:52.971 -async 1 ./out/2.mp4

but it fast for first times (start) of the input file, it gets slower if I want to start seeking from middle or near end of input. So it gets nearly 7-8 minutes for 22. minute of the input file...

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf scale="w=640:h=-2",drawtext="fontfile=/usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts/verdana.ttf: textfile='226.txt': fontcolor=white: fontsize=20: box=1: boxcolor=black@0.5: boxborderw=5: x=(w-text_w)/2: y=((h-text_h)/2)+90:" -ss 00:22:23.345 -to 00:22:25.846 -async 1 ./out/226.mp4

Anybody knows better way to do that?
Can I do that without seeking file each time? (Because it seems this is a seeking problem to me....)

Use ss/to as input options. This seeks at the demuxer stage, which is much faster.

ffmpeg -ss 00:22:23.345 -to 00:22:25.846 -i input.mp4 ...

You'll need a very recent build of ffmpeg (> Nov 19 2017)


use ffmpeg to convert interleaved raw yuv/pcm to compressed I'm always impressed how smart FFmpeg has been designed so giving this a go. Can I use FFmpeg to convert part of a file to a compressed video file w/audio? The file I have consists of YUV420 frames interleaved with (floating point) audio PCM. So raw video & audio. I would like to convert part of it, so would want to give an offset into the file. It is part of a ring buffer so the file is opened and growing, but I have full control over this.

Here's a method that should, in principle, work. It assumes VAVA interleaving and for somewhat efficient processing requires the packet sizes for both video and audio having a reasonably large greatest common divisor.

The examples below assume a video packet size of 1382400 bytes and audio of 7680 bytes. As it happens, the former is exactly 180 times the latter. The idea is we can ingest the raw stream as a raw "audio" stream and deinterleave using a selection expression, which routes 180 "frames" to one output and the 181st frame to another. Then the separated outputs are dumped into regular or fifo files which can then be read by another ffmpeg process with a sane interpretation of the input.

Command 1:

ffmpeg -f u8 -channels 1 -i raw-input-url -filter_complex "asetnsamples=7680,aselect='1+not(mod(n+1,181))':n=2[vid][aud]" -map [vid] -f u8 file-vid -map [aud] -f u8 file-aud

Command 1 with input offset:

ffmpeg -f u8 -channels 1 -i "subfile,,start,3248615,end,0,,:raw-input-url" -filter_complex "asetnsamples=7680,aselect='1+not(mod(n+1,181))':n=2[vid][aud]" -map [vid] -f u8 file-vid -map [aud] -f u8 file-aud

where 3248615 is in bytes and should point to the start of a video frame for this to work.

Command 2:

ffmpeg -f rawvideo -pixel_format yuv420p -framerate F -video_size WxH -i file-vid -f f32le -channels N -sample_rate R -i file-aud { -encoding parameters } output


Audio quality deteriorates on Rendering I have a video from which I extracted audio to clean it using Audacity. I applied both High Pass Filter (50 Hz) and Low Pass Filter (1000 Hz)  and then used Noise Gate to remove unwarranted noise.

Now, when I merge the audio back with the video, it plays fine in the Editor (I have tried several paid and free programs), but after rendering, the audio quality becomes very poor with constant random noise in background.

What may be the cause of it? Any idea?

Edit -  I found out that the rest of the audio stays almost the same, but the voice's texture changes to be a lot noisy. I am sure I'm doing something wrong, but cannot point out what.

The audio is clipping internally somewhere from the sound of it.  The background noise gets louder and so does the speaking, but the speaking is getting crushed.  I'd double check if there are any adjustments being applied in the render.  It sounds like either an incorrectly adjusted limiter or possibly an additional signal boost being applied.  It might also be rendering in to a lower bit depth that clips.


best tool to use for vine production on windows I want to create a vine on my laptop bit not sure which software to download to do it as most of the ones I have come across look spammy and don't want to kill my computer with virus's.

if you´re using Windows you can use / download MovieMaker, and just import your clip and start to editing in most commons formats & if you have a mac imovie does the job also , those are "defaults" software and are pretty intuitive and in a sort way "basic".


Check for video file integrity for - bulk Have more then 1000 mxf files.
Is there a software that can bulk check all of them for any kind of corruption/integrity ?
I found several answers on stackexchange but all include Linux commands that I am not sure how to use since I am on win10.
Any sort of user friendly software would be great, like handbrake or media encoder ?

There are several widely adopted file-based QC systems on the market. They include:

Interra Baton
Telestream (formerly Tektronix) Aurora
Telestream Vidchecker
Venera Pulsar

Note that as of NAB NY 2019, Telestream had not announced plans for what will happen with Vidchecker and Aurora after the Tektronix acquisition.


Re-encode with ffmpeg using libx265 - rawvideo I have a script that is going through a media library and re-encoding files to HEVC with ffmpeg and using libx265. The default command I use is:

ffmpeg -i "$origFile" -map 0 -c copy -c:v libx265 -preset slow -crf 28 "$newFile"

However, for some files this process fails, it outputs the following information about the video:

Output #0, matroska, to 'test.mkv':
  Metadata:
    encoder         : Lavf56.15.105
    Stream #0:0: Video: hevc, none, q=2-31, 128 kb/s, SAR 1:1 DAR 0:0, 23.98 fps
    Metadata:
      encoder         : Lavc57.14.100 libx265
    Stream #0:1: Audio: mp3 (U[0][0][0] / 0x0055), 44100 Hz, stereo, 128 kb/s
Stream mapping:
  Stream #0:0 -> #0:0 (rawvideo (native) -> hevc (libx265))
  Stream #0:1 -> #0:1 (copy)

And then, I just get the wall of errors that are printed below here:

[rawvideo @ 000000c56052c920] Invalid buffer size, packet size 295 < expected frame_size 1
769472
Error while decoding stream #0:0: Invalid argument
[rawvideo @ 000000c56052c920] Invalid buffer size, packet size 362 < expected frame_size 1
769472
Error while decoding stream #0:0: Invalid argument
[rawvideo @ 000000c56052c920] Invalid buffer size, packet size 5926 < expected frame_size
1769472
Error while decoding stream #0:0: Invalid argument
[rawvideo @ 000000c56052c920] Invalid buffer size, packet size 406 < expected frame_size 1
769472
Error while decoding stream #0:0: Invalid argument

I've tried following some other advice, since when I try and read the codec, it says "rawvideo", and using commands like ffmpeg -f rawvideo -pix_fmt yuv420p...., but that also does not work. If anyone has any insight or ability to help explain how to overcome this issue, it would be really appreciated. I've included the ffprobe output for this particular file as well if that is helpful:

ffprobe version N-76479-gc878082 Copyright (c) 2007-2015 the FFmpeg developers
  built with gcc 5.2.0 (GCC)
  configuration: --enable-gpl --enable-version3 --disable-w32threads --enable-avisynth --e
nable-bzlib --enable-fontconfig --enable-frei0r --enable-gnutls --enable-iconv --enable-li
bass --enable-libbluray --enable-libbs2b --enable-libcaca --enable-libdcadec --enable-libf
reetype --enable-libgme --enable-libgsm --enable-libilbc --enable-libmodplug --enable-libm
p3lame --enable-libopencore-amrnb --enable-libopencore-amrwb --enable-libopenjpeg --enable
-libopus --enable-librtmp --enable-libschroedinger --enable-libsoxr --enable-libspeex --en
able-libtheora --enable-libtwolame --enable-libvidstab --enable-libvo-aacenc --enable-libv
o-amrwbenc --enable-libvorbis --enable-libvpx --enable-libwavpack --enable-libwebp --enabl
e-libx264 --enable-libx265 --enable-libxavs --enable-libxvid --enable-lzma --enable-deckli
nk --enable-zlib
  libavutil      55.  5.100 / 55.  5.100
  libavcodec     57. 14.100 / 57. 14.100
  libavformat    57. 14.100 / 57. 14.100
  libavdevice    57.  0.100 / 57.  0.100
  libavfilter     6. 14.101 /  6. 14.101
  libswscale      4.  0.100 /  4.  0.100
  libswresample   2.  0.100 /  2.  0.100
  libpostproc    54.  0.100 / 54.  0.100
Input #0, avi, from '109 - The Voices of the Dead.avi':
  Metadata:
    encoder         : Lavf56.15.105
  Duration: 00:58:35.47, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 359 kb/s
    Stream #0:0: Video: rawvideo, bgr24, 1024x576, 219 kb/s, SAR 1:1 DAR 16:9, 23.98 fps,
23.98 tbr, 23.98 tbn, 23.98 tbc
    Stream #0:1: Audio: mp3 (U[0][0][0] / 0x0055), 44100 Hz, stereo, s16p, 128 kb/s

For files already encoded to AVI, you'll have to extract the video to a raw HEVC stream first:

ffmpeg -i in.avi -c copy -map 0:v -f hevc in.265

and then

ffmpeg -framerate 30 -i in.265 -i in.avi -c copy -map 0:v -map 1:a -video_track_timescale 1k fixed.mp4

Replace the framerate value with the true rate of the video.

Encode new files to MP4 or MKV.

ffmpeg -i "$origFile" -map 0 -c copy -c:v libx265 -preset slow -crf 28 "newFile.mp4"


Why does this clip go green and how do I fix it? I have a 4k clip in after effects, in which I have used the Keylight effect. The shot looks like this (I have to blur the face for privacy reasons):

Anyway, but in some frames, towards the end of the video, the shot flashes briefly to this and back to the original:

This sometimes happens during preview while I am working if I start running out of RAM, but I don't know for sure. Sometimes, the shot stays green like that for quite a while before switching back.
I have had this happen in other after effects projects that were not 4k...
I don't know what is going on. Can someone please tell me how to fix this?

This happens to me sometimes using Keylight.  I find that if I make a tiny adjustment to the settings (holding down CMD and dragging on one of the controls (eg Screen Gain or Screen Balance), it usually disappears.


Starting a YouTube channel - Advise/Questions/Tips everyone. I want to start a YouTube channel with some Computer Science and Mathematics tutorials and would want to hear your opinions/advice on how to get on about it.

So, here is what I want to do:

Ideally, I would want my videos to be similar to Khan Academy's tutorial style/Organic Chemistry Tutor's tutorial style for maths. This is because I am not really comfortable showing my face and doing calculations on a whiteboard.  So, I want to be able to write on a screen.
For Computer Science, I want to switch in between writing code, and/or slides and the board where I write all my content.

These are my questions:

I have an iPad and a Macbook. What software can I use to record my videos for the written portion/coding portion?
I don't have any experience in editing videos. So what skills should I familiarize myself with in order to be able to make videos that people can hopefully understand?

This is too broad, but here are some tips.

If it is like this one

you could start with a nice PowerPoint presentation... Nicer than that example.

  So what skills should I familiarize myself

There are three main categories.

1. Videos with significant production value.

Animation, photography, Illumination, music, voice, good quality, a script, storyboard, revisions...

Because of the big effort it represents, the scripting part (and its revisions) are of paramount importance.

Introduction, development, climax, conclusion.

2. Live recorded tutorials

As you remember to do things, with bloopers and fixed later with some annotation over the video.

3. Anything in between

  I don't have any experience in editing videos... videos that people can hopefully understand?

Simply make them suited to your target.

This is not related directly to editing video, it is related to your capacity to make your explanations understandable but mainly interesting. It is related to what draws attention to the intended audience.

We live in a competitive era. There are a lot of videos with good quality. Some rely on personal charisma, some on the production, some in the style, some on a ton of other things.

Define what is your "mojo". What is the thing you are going to do to differentiate and add value to your product?

Yes, some of that is given by the editing. The editing is meant to give you rhythm. Some parts are meant to give you unity, volume to the voice, volume to the music.

But any editing is not enough if your source material is not good. So...

Simply prepare a video like if you are preparing a good exposition to a live audience.


Best approach to go through tv series, annote key scenes? There's this great TV series that I am a fan of. I would like to go through each episode, available on DVD, and make note of interesting scenes, i.e. funnt stuff, reoccurring events, etc. Is there a good way to go about this? I know that shows such as The Daily show do something like this in order to find relevant clips for their show.

If you have a Mac, iPhone or iPad I would suggest Bento. It's a program based on FileMaker that allows you to organize all sorts of projects and data.  You could try this Film Library template from their template exchange or search for a different template.  Or maybe just download the program and start entering data.


Is it worth re-encoding GoPro footage to H.265? Considering that I'm not a professional editor and only record some random skateboard, snowboard or just some travel footage around with my GoPro Session 4, is re-encoding to H.265 to save storage space a good idea?

What possible drawback could I expect if I wanted to edit with these files after the re-encoding?

If your only goal is to save storage space and you never plan on editing or re-encoding the files again, you probably won't notice any change in quality.

However, if you plan to edit or re-encode to another format in the future, I'd strongly recommend against re-encoding to H.265 now. Every time you decode and re-encode video to the same or a different codec, especially highly compressed codecs like H.264 and H.265, you lose quality. With these highly compressed codecs, the generational loss and concatenation artifacts become noticeable to the average viewer in as little as one codec cycle.


Software for video cut automation / scripting I am very new to a/v editing and need to automate a simple process. Basically what I need is a way for my mom to capture video from her camera and input a series of numbers like

1:02 1:30
1:55 2:34
3:10 10:00

then the software to process the full video, cut out only the sequences specified by these time signatures and mix everything into one file.

I am a software developer by trade so ideally that would be some software that has a scripting language which I can learn and make a script in. I can semi-automate the process up to the point where it needs to cut out the desired sequences. I would do it myself for her but we don't live in the same town.

Note that no special editing is required, only cutting out sequences and stitching them together. I have googled around after "adobe premiere automation" and similar but found nothing. I am sort of familiar with AP, but it can be any other software.

If all else fails I would have to use some sort of desktop automation, but I would rather avoid this.

MoviePy looks less intimidating than other scripting languages. It may be easier to script your time tag cutting tool with it.

http://zulko.github.io/moviepy/


ffmpeg - coordinate system This is a pretty simple question yet i couldn't find the answer to it anywhere.
How does ffmpeg's coordinate system work? Meaning - for all operations such as crop and overlay, is the (0,0) point at the bottom left or top left?

Thanks!

Top left.

Pixels in a raw video stream are stored left to right, top to bottom. And all filters work on uncompressed frames, so that's the easiest way to setup the co-ordinate system as well.


How to use MELT or FFMPEG for layering of a video (i.e. shifting an overlay of the same video by one frame to remove flicerking from LEDs)? I am looking for a possibility to remove the flickering from LEDs on a video under Linux on the commandline. To do that one would have to

Put the video on one track
Put the same video on a second track with 1-2 frames delay
Overlay the second track with 50% transparency
Use the audio from one of the tracks

Thanks a lot in advance!

You would carry that out, like this:

ffmpeg -i in.mp4 -filter_complex \
  "[0]split=2[base][shifted]; \
   [shifted]setpts=PTS+1/TB/FRAME_RATE,format=yuva444p,colorchannelmixer=aa=0.50[shifted]; \
   [base][shifted]overlay"   out.mp4

setpts=PTS+1/TB/FRAME_RATE delays the overlay by 1 frame. Change the 1 to adjust delay.

format=yuva444p makes sure there's an alpha channel.

colorchannelmixer=aa=0.50 sets the alpha to 50%.

I haven't specified any encoding parameters, so the defaults will be used.


Premiere - Easy way to extend last frame of a video clip Let's say I have a 5 second clip. I want to extend it for an additional 10 seconds, but where the additional 10 seconds simply show the very last frame of my original 5 second clip.

In Camtasia there is an easy way to do it: Just right click and select "Extend frame" (or alternatively the keyboard shortcut is 'E'), then drag the clip out for as long as you like.

But after a bit of googling I haven't managed to find an easy way for Premiere, but surely there is.

P.S. Right now the quickest way I've found (and which I cannot imagine is the quickest way possible) is:

Go to the end of the clip.
Go back one frame. (So that now that last frame you want is now displayed.) appears
Select the clip.
Right-click and select "Add frame hold". (You can actually assign a keyboard shortcut for this.)
Now the last frame is "held". You can drag it out as far as you want.

What I usually do ...

Locate the frame in the clip you wish to extend, hit C, the razor tool, cut the frame. Then right click on the cut clip and select 'frame hold'

A popup menu appears, Select hold on, in point (the start of the clip) and select OK.

Then just drag and extend the selected clip for as many additional seconds you wish to extend it for.

Normally I would also unlink the clip before cutting so I keep the audio separate.

Edit:
For CC there are a few more options in the menu to freeze frame the video
You can see here:
http://creativeclouduser.com/creating-freeze-frames-in-premiere-pro/


What is good software for video editing under Linux? I plan to create some homemade video lectures and I am under Linux. Is there comfortable open-source tool that has the following abilities:

to clear noise
to have a few sound channels
to allow adding a slide screen in part of the video screen
to add titles and labels over the footage
to have simple effects

Thanks in advance.

There are a lot of answers regarding open source on this answer: Good open source Video Editors?

If you specifically target Linux I'd suggest Lightworks or Kdenlive. Lightworks isn't open source yet but is announced to be after the mac release is finished.

Both a great option for video editing under Linux and fullfill your requirements. Lightworks has only one downside, that being you need to register it on the first start with a free Lightworks account. After that you don't have to connect to the internet again.

If OpenSource is the most important factor I suggest to go with Kdenlive.


Youtube 720p video has more MB than 1080p I watched a video and downloaded with idm in 720p. I don't like the resolution and I decided to download 1080p. But I saw 720p is nearly 21 MB but 1080p is 10 MB. And I opened the video(1080p) I saw it is better than 720p. Why?

I tried this with the video provided in the comment.
The reason why the 1080p video is smaller is because it has a lower bit-rate (327 vs. ~207 Kbps). In the case of this type of content its likely that the bit-rate for the 720p version is too high. Same for the audio the 1080p version has 96 Kbps and the 720p version has 144-155 Kbps.

A possible reason why this is the case, is how YouTube handles 720p and 1080p video. Unlike the 720p stream the 1080p stream isn't truly constant in it's bit-rate. For 1080p YouTube uses a protocol called "DASH" which adapts the bitrate of the video on the fly to meet the bandwidth constrains of the user which might change during streaming. You get lots of video bits from the server which might differ in bit-rate depending on your current connection. So if you download the same video on a very slow connection it will probably be even smaller.

In this case it saved you bandwidth while having better quality, in other cases the 1080p video could actually look worse than the 720p video, though DASH is pretty smart so usually you will probably end up with a better looking 1080p.


Corrupted video (Green/pink) on Premiere Pro CS6 in Win8.1 Pro 64bit but not on Mac OS Yosemite I have a volume license for Premier Pro CS6 whereby I can run it on Mac OS and Windows.

When I run it on Windows, I get this:

But on MacOS it is fine.

The video is HDV 1440x1080i MPEG4 QuickTime.

Do you know why this happens?

You can change
Disable GPU acceleration of effects

Choose Project > Project Settings > General.
In the Video Rendering And Playback section, select the appropriate renderer: Mercury Playback Engine GPU Acceleration or Mercury Playback Engine Software Only.

It Worked For Me


What is the difference between RGB and RGB + Alpha? I know what is Alpha channel but when I rendered a motion logo using RGB and RGB + Alpha in After Effects, I didn't see any difference. So what's the basic difference between them and how to decide which should be used?

The alpha channel is a grayscale 2D image plane of the same size as the RGB image, and is used when overlaying (or blending) the image on top of another image. If the value of an alpha pixel is zero, then the corresponding RGB pixel is invisible when the image is overlaid. If the value is 255 (in an 8-bits per channel image), then the RGB pixel is fully opaque. For intermediate values, you get a composite result, depending on the blending mode used. When viewed in a video player, you won't notice a difference because there's no other video 'underneath'.

See Alpha compositing for more details.


Filming a football game from inside the goal. Which camera is best? So the problem is simple, I'd like a video camera to just leave on record and i can just leave it in the goal mouth, or more preferably at the top of the goal.

I record all my games and then edit them, but having this angle would give a brilliantly close insight into things which we just don't get to see normally.

So any ideas?

There are many variables here, depending on cost, what type of shot you want etc., but I would suggest you look at something like the GoPro HD Hero 2 because it is:

relatively cheap
takes HD video
has a range of wide to standard angle FOV
is waterproof
has useful mounting brackets
and is incredibly robust


Decimating files in Moviemaker I need to find a way to cut down on the total number of frames in a video I'm editing. Essentially, if it was shot in 60 fps, I'd like to choose to only keep every 20th or 30th frame.

The only programs I have available are Windows MovieMaker and any freeware available. I have a video that is too detailed for the analysis program I'm using which is why I need to be able to keep only every 30th frame.

You can use ffmpeg, a free command-line tool, to do this:

ffmpeg -i in.mp4 -vf "select=not(mod(n\,30)),setpts=N/FRAME_RATE/TB" -r 30 out.mp4

-vf specifies a video filterchain i.e. a sequence of filters applied to a single input.

select=not(mod(n\,30)) - this filter keeps only each 30th frame from the source.

FFmpeg works primarily within the framework of time-based containers, such as a video, which is a series of images shown in a cycle through time. The PTS is the presentation timestamp of a frame i.e. when the player should present a frame. Due to how ffmpeg works, setpts filter is needed in this case to ensure that no frames are duplicated or dropped other than what the select filter specifies.

-r 30 is the framerate of the output. To set it to the rate of the source, you can either skip this parameter or set it manually i.e. -r 60 for a 60 fps source.


Audio noise reduction: how does audacity compare to other options? Audacity's noise reduction filter is pretty good.  Before I use it, though, I want to know if I'm missing out on any fundamentally different approaches that may work better.

I have some recordings of my brother singing and playing piano.  It's pretty good as-is, but there's noticeable white noise.  There's also a 60Hz signal that's audible (but not really objectionable) during quieter portions of the recording.  Audacity does a pretty good job of getting rid of them.  So I'll almost certainly just use that, esp. since very recent audacity changes apparently have improved the noise-reduction filter.  (or maybe just the config UI?  I didn't look at the diffs).

The comments at the start of the file describes the design pretty well, and what the settings sliders mean (esp. the frequency smoothing was a mystery until I thought to check the source, and found it had a great comment describing the design.)

It gets a profile of the kind of noise you want to remove from a clip of only noise.  For the main pass, it FFTs the input, and silences every frequency bin that is below a threshold.  So it's a bandpass filter that adapts to only let through frequencies with signals above the noise level for that bin.  (Thresholds established from the noise profile.)

So my question is, are there other designs for noise filters that work any better?  Mostly out of curiosity, since audacity works very well for my application.  (noise energy distributed over a wide frequency range, signal I want to keep made up of fairly narrow frequencies.)

I am the author of the code you are reading.  It appears you were an alpha user of Audacity 2.1.0 in advance of its release, which was only days ago.  You have a version of the noise reduction effect with many experimental optional controls exposed to the user that are not in the release version.

You may be interested in what I wrote here about the inadequacies of the previous version of the effect that I tried to remedy with this rewrite.  But the overall procedure remains unchanged.

http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Proposal_Noise_Removal#Critique_of_current_Audacity_Noise_Removal_by_Paul_Licameli


Recording 2-4 live video feeds in sync I would like to video record my (and my friends') soccer match. I've bought a Chinese mini DV cam that I attach on top of the door and record on an SD card. But I want to do more: I would like to record using 2-4 wireless IP cam, and have a synchronized video in a grid side by side.

Which software can I use? And what kind of hardware would I need to record 2-4 live video files?

Assuming you don't need great quality and are ok with ip camera quality footage (which it sounds like you are), you could pick up several wireless ip security cameras and connect them via WiFi on the same network as a Mac laptop running Security Spy.


Relationship between bit depth and dynamic range? Is there a direct relationship between higher video bit depth (10-bit vs 8-bit, for example) and higher dynamic range, i.e. HDR?

I'm somewhat confused regarding this particular aspect of bit depth. I know that more bits allows us to capture and recreate more colors and their shades, but where exactly does dynamic range come in?

More bits mean more possible values for each channel. So each channel in an 8 bit image has 256 possible values, from 0 to 255, while a 10 bit channel has 4 times as many: 0 to 1024.

Dynamic range however is the range between the brightest sample a sensor chip can encode and the darkest - it is a property of the sensor. So you could conceivably have an 8 bit sensor with a wider dynamic range than a 10 bit sensor if it could resolve very bright and dark images, it would just have fewer steps between these than a 10 bit sensor with the same dynamic range.


How to convert single image to video in infinite loop and set duration of 15 seconds using FFMPEG Can anyone help me with a command line for the below scenario please using FFmpeg?
Convert single image.jpg to output.mp4 for 15 seconds.
Thank you.

ffmpeg -loop 1 -i https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/cartoon-weather-images-16836392.jpg -t 15 output.mp4

FFprobe result:

ffprobe version 3.4.8-0ubuntu0.2 Copyright (c) 2007-2020 the FFmpeg
Input #0, mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2, from 'output.mp4':   Metadata:
    major_brand     : isom
    minor_version   : 512
    compatible_brands: isomiso2avc1mp41
    encoder         : Lavf57.83.100   Duration: 00:00:15.00, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 188 kb/s
    Stream #0:0(und): Video: h264 (High) (avc1 / 0x31637661), yuvj420p(pc), 1182x1300 [SAR 1:1 DAR 591:650], 186 kb/s, 25 fps, 25
tbr, 12800 tbn, 50 tbc (default)
    Metadata:
      handler_name    : VideoHandler


Lossless screen-recording software For a small project of mine I want to record short screen-casts which show features of my program. Currently, I'm using a small app on my Ubuntu box which creates directly animated gif output. The drawback is, that gif has some limitations in the number of colors. If you inspect some of the gifs you may note that although it looks great, it's not perfect, especially when you look at the aliased fonts

There are some handmade solutions, for instance the demonstration on the sublime-text site. To have something that nice, you first need to record your screen completely lossless. Most screen-casting programs I know unfortunately do compress the video.

Question: I have Ubuntu and OSX at my disposal, what (if possible free) screen-casting solutions exists which let me create lossless videos?

Extra credit for programs where I can select the region or window to record and turn off audio.

Update

To make it clear what I mean with lossless: Usually, videos are compressed with a method which is perfect for natural images/videos but horrible for images/videos having sharp edges and one-colored structures. I made two screen-casts and zoomed a small part so that those effects are visible. The first one is done with gtk-recordmydesktop with highest quality and the artifacts in the gray area are clearly visible

The second one is done with the small Record your Desktop tool which saves gif files directly and takes the exact pixels of the screen without compression.

What I want is a screen-caster which saves its videos in this raw format without the limitations of gif.

Possibly related questions:

How does Salman Khan make his screencasts?
creating a lossless mp4 screencast

FFmpeg with a lossless codec is one solution. I recall a comparison of different codecs which concluded that Apple Animation (known to ffmpeg as qtrle) gave the best quality for screen-recording.

ffmpeg -f x11grab -r 25 -s 1024x768 -i :0.0 -c:v qtrle output.mov

Stop it by opening its terminal while it is running and pressing q. Obviously change the resolution (1024x768 here) to match your own. For selecting a section of your screen, see how to grab the screen on the ffmpeg wiki.

It is possible that the ffmpeg which comes with your Linux distribution does not have the qtrle codec included. In this case you have to download and compile your own version.


Sony DCR-TRV140E Digital 8 tape problem I recently borrowed a Sony DCR-TRV140E (which stores footage on the Digital8 medium) from a church in order to shoot my friend's wedding that took place there. By the looks of things, the camera had not been used for a while prior to this. When I set it up to capture into Final Cut, the preview window within FC and the LCD display on the camcorder both showed the footage, but with equally spaced grey bars, as shown below.

This being the tell-tale sign of dirty heads, I subsequently bought this head cleaner, and put it in the camcorder bay, and attempted to run it as instructed. The camcorder refused to play it, and the 'eject' symbol flashed on the LCD. When I tried to eject it, the cleaner proved difficult to remove from the bay.

I then left the camcorder for a while to rest, and attempted the same  thing about 90 mins later. After I had the same experience, I inserted the original footage tape back into the bay, and attempted to play that, and the unit refused to display footage, displaying only the blue screen. After leaving it to rest again, I reinserted the footage tape, and now this causes the camcorder to beep and flash the eject symbol also.

My question is, is there anything I can do to either make the camcorder recognise the tape again, and make it play (and therefore capture) properly? I have consulted the manual for this type of problem, (with it only helpfully stating that the tape is recorded in Hi8/8mm analogue system as it's solution) but to no avail.

The only thing I can think of is that the head cleaner, even though it was advertised to work with Digital 8 systems, was not in fact compatible and has damaged an internal component.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated, thank you for your time.

Ok, so it turns out that after a large amount of research into error codes, the Error: e:31:23 means that there is a problem with the right hand side tape reel cog. It appears that the cog cannot move the spool, as it clicks a bit before displaying the error when I insert a tape. I think this can only be fixed by a specialist, but I included this answer to give someone in the same situation a resolution.


How does shutter speed affect the video? As shutter speed affects the coming light on sensor.But has it any affect on movement of subjects in video?

A high shutter speed can make individual frames look more crisp but make large motion look like it is stuttering. e.g. fast panning looks like it is flickering or jumping

A low shutter speed can make individual frames look blurred and make the motion look smooth.


Differences of h.264 and h.265? What are the main differences between h.264 and h.265?

HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding),  the new video coding standard brings promise of huge bandwidth savings of approx. 40-45% over H.264 encoded content

More info here


Lossless Capture with FFmpeg I’ve been attempting to do lossless game capture as I’ve been working on a program to do frame rate analysis. I haven’t had much luck finding a program that does lossless capture as AmaRecTV, Dxtory, and Virtualdub all seem to be abandoned.  I’m trying to use FFmpeg and have come up with the following command:

ffmpeg -y -f dshow -rtbufsize 500M -i video="Game Capture 4K60 Pro Video 01" -framerate 60 -vsync 0 -c:v libx264 -preset ultrafast -crf 0 -pix_fmt yuv420p "e:\Captures\out.mkv"

Unfortunately, the file size doesn’t seem large enough to be lossless.  For example, according to MediaInfo, I got an overall bit rate of 132 Mb/s (16.5 MB/s) for a 720p 60 fps capture.  However, I’m pretty sure that a lossless 720p, 60 fps, 4:2:0 file should be closer to 640 Mb/s (80MB/s).

I’m using Windows 10 1809 x64, a nightly build of FFmpeg x64 that is newer than 4.0.2, Nvidia 399.24, and an Elgato 4K60 Pro.

Does this command produce lossless capture?  And how can I improve it?

libx264 is a very efficient encoder, so that bitrate isn't unusual. In fact, it's on the higher side, but since you're capturing a game, I expect there is constant motion involved, and your preset is ultrafast which disables some of the aggressive compression.

When you say 80MB/s, I believe you're thinking of uncompressed full raster i.e. 1280 x 720 x 12 bits/pixel x 60 fps. Lossless does not mean uncompressed, just like there can be a compressed ZIP of a binary program.

BTW, the -framerate 60 goes before -i video="Game Capture 4K60 Pro Video 01" as it's an input option.


How can I recreate this distortion effect from Midsommar? I want to create a distortion effect around someone's head, kind of like what a swirly bokeh would do.  There are two different shots that I could find that use this effect in the film 'Midsommar', one in which there is a swirly distorted effect around a head, and another where general swirls around the screen appear.  While it looks like a keyframed liquify effect from PhotoShop, I'm not sure if it can be recreated in after effects.  How can I do this?

https://giphy.com/gifs/a24-midsommar-QW3GavVLEeTa3Rpkx1

Without having seen the movie, it may be difficult to get it down exactly, but here is what I came up with.

Duplicate your layer twice, so that you have three copies.
On the top layer mask out the person.

Set the mask feather to around 30px.
Copy and paste the mask to the other two layers.
On the middle layer, set the mask feather to 60 and the mask expansion to 60. (can be adjusted to suit).
On the bottom layer, set the mask to subtract mode and add a 'Turbulent Displace' effect to the layer.
Adjust the size to suit (I chose 30) and you can keyframe the 'Amount' to have it animate on or off. I also added the expression 'time * 500' to the 'Evolution' property to add some movement.

Here is what mine ended up looking like:

Hope this is close to what you're after.


Can I reproduce video in 1440×1080 12M MP4 on a Full HD TV? I am interesting in shooting some amatorial videos (family) with a digital camera.

At the moment my camera support AVCHD and MP4.

I found AVCHD less compatible and more time consuming to process so I was thinking if MP4 would be a more convenient options.

In that format my digital camera shoot at 1440×1080 12M MP4

I would like to know:

Can I reproduce video on a FULL HD TV (1920x1080) recorded with 1440×1080 12M MP4?
Would you suggest AVCHD instead for my use scenario?

Her some technical details of my camera:

http://docs.esupport.sony.com/dvimag/DSCRX100_guide/en/contents/04/03/02/02.html

http://www.sony.jp/products/overseas/contents/pickup/english/110324_promotion/DSC-TX100_Full_HD/

http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/sony-cybershot-dsc-rx100-m2/5

You don't mention either how (or IF?) you are editing anything here, or what forms of storage, distribution, archiving, etc you anticipate?

You are probably correct that MP4 is a more compatible distribution format, but distribution format does not necessarily have to be identical with recording and editing format.

I would not anticipate any issue with displaying a 1440×1080 frame on a 1920x1080 screen. Modern digital displays typically handle scaling (UP or DOWN) pretty seamlessly.  In any case, shouldn't it be easy to actually try it for yourself?  No amount of anonymous advice from the internet beats actual first-hand experiment.


Is there a buffering difference between increasing and decreasing stream quality? When you change from low quality to high quality on a stream, is buffering time (or anything else) slower than changing from high to low?
If so, is there a difference in doing this on a live stream as opposed to a premade video?

1) It depends mainly on the streaming protocol. For HLS and HDS for example, yes because the player will usually download a number of segments before starting playback, and the download time is proportional to the size of each segment of course. For RTMP for example, the buffer is custom-set by the server which means it will theoretically depend on what the server has chosen for every bandwidth. E.g., it may chose a 0KB buffer for all streams, in which case there will be no difference in buffering time. In more realistic cases, however, I expect the server would set buffers to each stream according to its bitrate, which brings us back to what happens with HLS or HDS.

Note that the difference in buffering time really depends on your own bandwidth. If you have 50Mbps internet speed, you won't feel any difference whatsoever since it would be the difference between downloading ~3MB of data vs ~2MB/~1MB of data. Of course if the server is setup improperly and has high latency, then your speed means very little and you will feel a difference.

2) No because as far as the client is concerned, a livestream is basically the same as a prerecorded stream (apart from the fact the server may let you download the stream faster than you can see what you download, aka faster than real-time).


Do I need to encode video in both ogg and webm? I'm doing some HTML5 video work; I'm taking uploaded video and using ffmpeg and related packages to convert the original videos (usually .mov, but whatever) into mp4, ogg and webm versions for presentation via video.js.  The ogg and webm encodings are both working nicely in Firefox across Windows, Mac, and Linux (the main reason for producing both, it seems); my question is whether, as a practical matter, I need to produce both ogg and webm versions.  Both seem to be working well; I'm asking out of an interest in not producing stuff that I don't really need.  Any thoughts?  Thanks!

Probably better suited for Stackoverflow but I think its still a valid question for this SE.

Producing theora(ogg) versions of your videos is actually redundant. Any browser version supporting ogg is also supporting webm.

For questions like these I recommend using caniuse.com.
If you compare webm with ogg you quickly see that you cover the same browser versions and more with webm.
Unless you need to cover Firefox 3.5+.


possible to lighten almost black video? My caravan was recently broken into. The good news is I have a surveillance camera installed and I captured and recorded the breakin. The bad news is the footage is so underexposed that it is almost black.

Is there anyway I can lighten the footage in Premiere Pro? Is premiere pro even the best software for that? I am not after high quality stuff, just lighten and cleanup enough to be able to identify the suspect. I have tried adding a brightness and contrast filter to the footage, and I can see he goes right up to the camera, but there is just not enough detail to even tell if he is male or female.

Any help would be appreciated.

You can brighten the footage, but it's doubtful you'll get anything out of the footage. Odds are, the areas you see as black are clipped which means they'll just turn into grey when you brighten the footage.


Are the EV principles that are used in photography the same in video production? I am new to photography. I have been reading about the EV values and how to calculate them, with the f-stops, the shutter speed and ISO. However, I want to know if those same principles, tables and values apply not only for still photography, but for video shooting.

In summary, can I use the same tables that are used to calculate the EV (for still photography) for video shooting? Or do I have to take other variables into consideration (FPS etc.)

Thanks in advance

Marios

P.S. This is the original question I asked in the Photography forum of the site, I am reposting it here since a member of the other forum told me to post here.

Yes.  For things like exposure time, EV, f-stops, video is just the same as still photographs.  You just happen to be taking 24 or more of them per second.

The one difference in actually exposing a frame would be that still photography typically uses a mechanical shutter.  (You can hear it k'thwap when you take a picture on many cameras.)  But video uses an electronic shutter.  This could very slightly effect things like how motion blur looks, or how parts of the image are exposed over the course of the exposure time.  But that 99% doesn't matter, especially if you are just getting up to speed on the basics of things like f-stops.


FFmpeg concat creating time jumps I am creating timelapse from PNG single frames.

Using the first and last frame as stills I create a header and a trailer with a text and a fade filter. In the end I use concat to put all parts together. What I see happen is that in the final video there is a jump between the end of the main body and the trailer. It seems as if the concat process has cut away some frames (at the end) from the main body. That makes the transition from the main body to the trailer look very bad.

What do I have to do to fix this?

Header
------
/home/tools/bin/ffmpeg -loop 1 -i Timelapse_1080/IMG_7255.png -c:v libx264 -vf drawtext="fontsize=60:fontcolor=yellow:fontfile=/usr/share/fonts/truetype/freefont/FreeSans.ttf:textfile=./Scripts/header_text.txt:x=(w-text_w)/2:y=(h-text_h-line_h)/2" -t 5 -pix_fmt yuv420p  -crf 16 -r 24 -y ./Video/header_txt.mp4
/home/tools/bin/ffmpeg -i ./Video/header_txt.mp4 -vf fade=in:0:48 -crf 16 -r 24 -y ./Video/header_txt_fade.mp4

Timlapse body
------------------
/home/tools/bin/ffmpeg -start_number 7255 -i Timelapse_1080/IMG_%04d.png -pix_fmt yuv420p  -crf 16 -r 24 -y ./Video/body.mp4

Trailer
--------
/home/tools/bin/ffmpeg -loop 1 -i Timelapse_1080/IMG_7490.png -c:v libx264 -t 6 -pix_fmt yuv420p -crf 16 -r 24 -y ./Video/trailer.mp4
/home/tools/bin/ffmpeg -i ./Video/trailer.mp4 -vf fade=out:20:60 -crf 16 -y ./Video/trailer_fade.mp4

Concat all together
-------------------
/home/tools/bin/ffmpeg -safe 0 -f concat -i ./scripts/ffmpeg_concat_all.txt -c copy -y ./Video/Timelapse_crf16_24fps.mp4

There's no need to work with individual files; you can put everything into one ffmpeg command. This is also much faster and will result in better quality.

Define your three inputs (intro image, outro image, and the image sequence), then create individual filters to draw the text, trim the intro/outro clips, and run the fade filters. Finally concat everything into one stream.

I have omitted some specific text options and image file names for the sake of brevity.

ffmpeg \
    -y \
    -loop 1 -framerate 24 -t 5 -i intro.png \
    -loop 1 -framerate 24 -t 5 -i outro.png \
    -start_number 1 -framerate 1 -i frame-%04d.png \
    -filter_complex " \
    [0:v] \
        drawtext=fontsize=500:fontcolor=white:text=foo:x=(w-text_w)/2:y=(h-text_h-line_h)/2,
        fade=in:0:48 \
    [intro]; \
    [1:v] \
        drawtext=fontsize=500:fontcolor=white:text=foo:x=(w-text_w)/2:y=(h-text_h-line_h)/2,
        fade=out:20:60 \
    [outro]; \
    [intro][2:v][outro] \
        concat=n=3:v=1:a=0
    [outv] \
    " \
    -map "[outv]" -c:v libx264 -pix_fmt yuv420p -crf 16 out.mp4

The -t 5 sets the duration of the intro/outro directly.

You can replace the input -framerate parameters with the desired frame rates of the intro and outro, and also change it in order to set the slideshow speed. That is, if you want one image every second, use 1, if you want one every two seconds, use 0.5, etc.


How can I change the movie format from .MOV to .AVI in canon 650D I have Canon 650 D which I use for Video Shoots mostly,my question is:

How Can I change the video format inside camera setting? is there any possibility to do that ?
the reason because my Video editor doesn't support .MOV files for which I have to convert it into different formats like WMV.

I dont want to compromise with the quality of video

Help me out!

Thanks.

It is likely not possible to change in camera.  For power and efficiency reasons, cameras generally use dedicated encoder hardware to encode the video in real time (this is why your camera can encode h.264 video live, but when you try to encode it on your PC, it takes longer, even though your computer is far FAR more powerful.)  The caveat of this is that there are a limited number of options for how it can store the file.

Many Canon cameras record as an h.264 stream embedded in a MOV file.  While this isn't super convenient in your case, it also isn't the end of the world.  MOV and AVI are both simply container formats.  They store a particular type of stream within them that is based on a codec.  Since both MOV and AVI support an h.264 stream, you should be able to use a software package of your choice to take the h.264 stream out of an MOV container and store it in an AVI container and then your software should work fine with it.

I believe that QuickTime Pro offers a Save As option that will go to m4v or mp4 (which is more of a raw h.264 stream) if your editor supports either of those options.  It might support Save As an AVI as well, but my memory is a bit fussy on that since I haven't had to do such conversions in a while. (My editing software supports both.)  There are literally any number of other tools (including free ones) that can do the same thing as well.


Is color banding usual problem in commercial released movies? for very long time I have used two machines - one with good monitor for work and one with "ordinary" monitor for fun/movies/games.

Recently I unified this with high end mobile workstation with very good display with almost full sRGB coverage.

I immidiately noticed significant color banding in Youtube and movies. For Youtube I am sure that this is caused by compression and color space conversion.

But is this usual to happen in standard commercial movies? Especially animated movies with very dark scenes/moon light looks really bad on my new monitor. I compared same movies with old monitor and it looks that its limited color space sort of "smooth" these artefacts  out.

Are movie studios really that desperate to save streaming bandwidth and disc size to hope that there are not many people with eagle eyes who will criticize those few dark scenes in movies?

I know this is sort of subjective question, but hope someone have other/another opinion from experience.

It really depends on the distribution medium. Many are very low quality.

Most consumer distribution is 8 bit, but when a studio masters a DVD, they'll put a lot of effort into making that specific content look good. That doesn't happen for streaming.


Tool to clip segments of a video newbie here,

I want to remove some segments of an MP4 video I have. Which easy to use tool would you recommend. Preferably free.

I'm using Windows.

You can always try this one for example:

http://www.dvdvideomedia.com/video-cutter-joiner/video-cutter-joiner.html

But as will all "free" software, be aware during installation if you need to opt-in or out of any added software, tool-bars and so forth.


Automated Timing for Video Subtitles I have got a video clip and a 100% accurate text file (containing subtitles). Is there any way where I can convert the text file into a timed SRT subtitle file?

Thank you very much.

There is no professional tool that does this, as far as I know. It is never done, presumably because it would not be good enough and would need to be corrected by a human anyway.

There are of course many subtitling applications into which you can import your transcript and then do the spotting by hand. And they have varying features to make it easier/faster/more precise.

However, Youtube does offer automatic timing of transcripts. You may want to try it.

Using that, you could:

upload your video to youtube
upload your transcript
wait for their software to do the automatic timing
download the youtube captions
... then probably still do manual corrections.


GIF individual frame timing I have a GIF that uses variable framerates throughout. It plays back correctly in web browsers, and opening it in GIMP shows the time for each frame. If I import it into Premiere CS6, it plays at a constant average framerate.

Is there a way to preserve the correct frame timing without cutting and splicing several copies of the source GIF?

That does sound like a tricky issue. Have you tried opening the GIF in PhotoShop using video to layers (file > import > video to layers)? If so, did the timing appear accurate? What are you ultimately trying to do with the GIF?

http://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/editing-video-animation-layers-photoshop.html


How do I resize a image preserving aspect ratio in After Effects? In my compossition I imported an image, I would like to scale the image in real-time (I mean using the mouse to select the image, center it in the composition and resize it to see the results in real-time because for me is more productive to do it in this way, instead of manually specifying width and height wherever) preserving the aspect ratio of the image.

In Photoshop, this can be done by clicking in a corner of the image element then holding the CTRL key while using the mouse to resize the image, so the image is scaled preserving aspect ratio, however, I can't reproduce this behavior in After Effects, if I do click on a corner of the image, nothing happens.

If this is not possible to do in the same productive and easy way than Photoshop, then how I could do it (in the less tedious way)?.

Click on a layer name. You should see the control points on its border. Click on one of the border points but don't drag it yet. Hold down Shift key and then drag it. Release the mouse button when done and then release the Shift key.


Video rendering time is measured in man-hours. How is that calculated? I know that man-hours are used as a unit to measure time in things like modelling and other work actually done by people, but I also hear man-hours used to refer to graphics rendering time.  How is that measured?  If a video takes 200 man-hours to render, for example, what is that measured against?  Obviously a person could not be expected to perform the mathematics necessary for rendering an image, but all definitions of 'man-hours' that I've been able to find refer to expected output of a human worker in an hour.  How is that measured for things like video rendering which simply can't be done by a human?

I've never heard that term used for rendering before, but it is most likely referring to the number of hours of computation needed for a single CPU or GPU to process it.  In most video and 3d applications, it is possible to parallelize the rendering of the video itself (though not necessarily the encoding.

Thus, a job that would take 200 "man hours" (more often called CPU hours when I've heard it used) would only take 20 hours if you had 10 CPUs working on it.


Why can't I select my grouped video clip to reposition it within the frame in Premiere Pro? In my Premiere Pro CS6 sequence, I have a centered video clip with an image overlaid on top of it. I'm able to reposition the image just fine by double clicking it and then dragging it around.

When I try to do the same to the video clip, however, it won't even select, let alone move around. I've tried making a new sequence (both preset and custom), I've hid the other video lines in the sequence so only the line with this clip is shown, and I've even tried deleting all the non-video items on the sequence.

The video clip I'm trying to reposition has been split into three separate clips with the Cutting Tool and then Grouped back together (I had to remove a few seconds of audio when someone's phone rang).

How can I fix this issue so that my video can be repositioned within the frame?

The video clip I'm trying to reposition has been split into three separate clips with the Cutting Tool and then Grouped together.

This is the key to your problem (emphasis mine).

In Premiere Pro, you cannot move a video clip around within the frame in your Program Monitor view if it has been grouped together with other timeline objects. The application would have to reposition each grouped item with relation to the clip you are trying to select and reposition. This kind of chained action simply isn't supported, so it just prevents you from selecting the clip within the Program Monitor to begin with.

You will have to select each of the grouped video clips on your Timeline, Ctrl-Click to bring up the context menu, and then select Ungroup:

You will then be able to reposition your video clips within the frame. You can re-Group the video clips when you are finished, if you like.


Premiere Pro: Possible to add several images on one video track? I have this image

that I want to put on top of my video, like this:

And I want to fill the entire screen with multiple copies of this image. However, the only solution I've found so far is to create a new video track for each image. So if I want 100 images, I need 100 video tracks. Is there any other solution to this?

Premiere pro:

If you want a hundred images at the same time, you need 100 layers. Often people will make a "pre-comp" which is a nested composition. You create a composition with only the images, then insert that composition into the main timeline. Any changes you make to the pre-comp will carry through even after you've laid it into your main video timeline. So your pre-comp will be the messy one, and your final comp will be nice and neat.


Gstreamer 1.0 rtspsrc to rtp (audio and video) Hi I'm currently trying to use gstreamer-1.0 to consume rtsp source and provide RTP streams for audio and video in the streams (for Janus Gateway). I have a working solution with ffmpeg so basically would need help to translate this to working gstreamer pipeline.

ffmpeg -rtsp_transport tcp -i rtsp://ip:port/h264.sdp \
-an -c:v h264 -profile:v baseline -preset ultrafast -tune zerolatency -vf "fps=20" -bsf:v h264_mp4toannexb  -f rtp rtp://localhost:8004 \
-vn -acodec copy -f rtp rtp://localhost:8005

Currenlty I have only this:

gst-launch-1.0 rtspsrc location=rtsp://ip:port/h264.sdp latency=0 protocols=tcp ! rtph264depay ! rtph264pay name=pay0 pt=96 ! udpsink port=8004 host=localhost

but this is not transcoding, and by itself the stream is not playable (strangely it works if I start the ffmpeg example to see video and then run gst but this is beyond the point here), so I would like to have x264 transcoding (re-encoding?) to baseline profile with minimum processing power required.

Ok I've found the solution that works, it was here all along but needed some changes (link only since it's link to the stackoverflow)


best alternative to QuickTime .mov My company is stripping away QuickTime enterprise-wide, due to Apple dropping support for the format.  I use After Effects and Premiere, and others in my group are on Avid Workstations.  Occasionally when I create a video, I'm handed .mov files exported from Avid Media Composer and Sorensen Squeeze to work with in Adobe software, usually as QuickTime uncompressed.  Now that we are unable to work with QuickTime, going forward, what's the best codec alternative to import clean footage to work with?

Apple is dropping support for the player, so no new releases, but the format remains and can be decoded by recent versions of CC without needing Quicktime to be installed. See

http://blogs.adobe.com/creativecloud/quicktime-on-windows/

  Adobe has worked extensively on removing dependencies on QuickTime in
  its professional video, audio and digital imaging applications and
  native decoding of many .mov formats is available today (including
  uncompressed, DV, IMX, MPEG2, XDCAM, h264, JPEG, DNxHD, DNxHR, AVCI
  and Cineform). Native export support is also possible for DV and
  Cineform in .mov wrappers.

http://blogs.adobe.com/creativecloud/apple-quicktime-on-windows-update/

  Today we’re pleased to announce that Adobe has been able to accelerate
  work that was already in progress to support native reading of ProRes.
  This new capability is fully licensed and certified by Apple, and
  barring any unforeseen issues during pre-release, these fixes will be
  included into an update to the relevant products in Creative Cloud
  shortly.


Converting MLV to Prores I have some Magic Lantern Raw footage that I want to convert to Prores 444 for use in this workflowenter link description here.

I understand the process, other than the use of LUTs.

In the process, an application called MLRawViewer is used to convert .mlv files to ProRes444 files. In this conversions process, a LUT is selected. My confusion lies in the selection of the LUT.

I want the ProRes file to be as flexible as possible for grading later in the process, and I have no desire to use a LUT to give the footage a particular look.

So which LUT should I choose? What should inform this decision?

I'd pick something that looks flat and unsaturated.  Those are usually the ones designed to retain detail.  If you see clog or slog2, those are good.  Rec 709 will throw out info, so don't use that.

  What should inform this decision?

Trial and error.  A lut is really just a starting point for your grade.  Try some different ones out.  If it absolutely butchers the color, then it's probably not a good place to start.  If you see clipping or banding, then you've chosen a lut which was meant for a different situation.  As you try each one, look at the trace on a waveform monitor and vector scope.  If anything goes out of bounds, pick something else.  Do you notice any kind of granularity, banding, or stair-stepping in the traces?  Look for one that's more even.


How to put a hole in a wall (VFX) This is a really basic VFX question. I just downloaded Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve (with fusion) and I was interested in trying out VFX. I thought it would be a cool idea to try to put a hole in the wall of my house in a moving handheld shot. I just don't really have any idea how.

I'm not asking for specific buttons to press in the software, I just want to know a general order of events to achieve that goal. (Like what tracking to use, and how to display the whole in the wall in a spatially accurate way, etc...) It's a pretty basic project, I just need somewhere to start off. Thanks!

Resolve has a pretty solid tracking system built-in. I would recommend you track your footage first and make sure your trackers really stick to the wall. From there, you can go many ways.

The cheap and easy way is to just take a hole.png and attach it to the trackers, so it sticks to the wall. This might look bad though when moving around the wall, since the geometry of the .png will not change.

The more advanced option would be to export the tracked data (I would recommend pftrack for that) and importing the tracked camera into any 3d-software you like (such as cinema 4d, modo, 3dsmax, etc). There, you can create a 3D-Model of said hole by grabbing the texture from the original footage on the edges and then just blend into concrete/brick-textures you can find online for the parts that penetrate the wall. By now beveling inwards and shaping the mesh a bit, you should quickly come to a promising result.

For the next step, it is very important that you study the light from your scene and try to recreate it in 3D as accurately as possible. Lighting, the angle and color of it makes or brakes your 3D-composition.

When you're done with that, you can render out a sequence as long as your original clip from the perspective of your tracked camera. To get ultra-accurate results, you can also match the focal length and distance as well.

If you now take your rendered 3D-hole and lay it on top of your original footage (plus some blending and color grading to make it sit right in the footage) it should stick perfectly to your wall.

Hope I was able to help, if you have further questions please ask. Have a wonderful day :)


How to combine multiple audio tracks without sounding blasted? Was going to make a combination of 9 covers of people singing the same song. I have it synced already and it is on sync, problem is its just sound like literal ear ache when played.

How to fix?

When you record each track, make sure that the level never goes up to zero on the meter.  If it hits zero, it means that the recording is clipping.  Clipping is when the computer can no longer accurately record the waveform. So instead of recording the shape of the wave, the upper and lower limits of it will be clipped in a straight line. So a tone sound like a sine wave would be clipped as shown below (the black line), instead of looking like the original wave (the grey line):

This results in a very distorted and unpleasant sound.
When you mix multiple tracks together, the combined sound is louder than a single track on its own.  So you will need to make sure that the overall level of your project is also not clipping.  If it clips, you will see the meters in Premiere go red like this when they are clipping:

You need to make sure there is no clipping anywhere in your signal chain, from recording to mixing the final audio.
Assuming the source material isn't distorted, you probably just need to reduce the level of each track in Premiere using the Audio Track Mixer (go to the Window Menu and select Audio Track mixer, and the name of the sequence you're working on).
The Track mixer adjusts the audio on each track.  It is different from the clip mixer, which adjusts audio on each individual clip.
So you might have many clips on a single track, and instead of adjusting each one separately, you can just adjust the whole track once.


Does amount of display's pixels affects computer's performance on lower resolution settings? Let's say I have 1080p display, if I would set 1080p in OS settings then overall performance would go down (noticeably if laptop is low-specs).

But what gonna be if set system to 720p (fine for my laptop), but with the same 1080p display.
Will I loose performance in that case ?

I just had idea: what if watch 1080p movies on such display, but set lower resolution for another tasks.

Setting your graphic card to work at a lower resolution will provide a small increase in performance in the case you described.

For example:

1920 * 1080 = 2,073,600

1280 *  720 =   921,600

2,073,600 - 921,600 = 1,152,000, or 56% fewer pixels.

If you spend all your computer's time working to create text to fill the entire screen with new information then you would be able to do that almost 180% faster - but that is an extremely rare use case.

One way to understand how that's a rare use case is: when you look at this webpage it's the graphics card that updates your screen (and not your computer's CPU), for 1/10th of a second your computer will be faster and for the remainder of the time you will gain no speed increase (and suffer with lower resolution).

A more realistic way to estimate is that if 10% of the CPU's effort went into creating a screen full of text, each second, then you would speed up that 10% by almost 180%. Put another way, your computer would be 8% quicker if all you did was have text go flying past your eyes all day.

It's not a good tradeoff to suffer too low a resolution for a small increase in performance.

Don't confuse the above with watching videos. Watching videos involves decompressing a highly compressed data stream, most of the effort is running the algorithm to undo the compression; writing the pixels to the screen is the easy part. In fact a lot of compression algorithms rely on the fact that not every pixel changes constantly, deciding what can be skipped and what needs to be updated, along with how to reduce the data stream's size, represents most of the effort.

Going from 1920x1080 to 3840x2160 is a much bigger jump, and in fast paced video games where everything is constantly changing indeed there's a lot of effort going on in the background to create new data to display (or decide if it would not be visible, and not display it).

Yes, you'll get a bigger jump in performance going from 4K to 1080p in a gaming scenario but at a huge loss in resolution (and enjoyment); it would really be a waste of money to buy a 4K capable computer and run it at 1080p and a waste of money to go halfway and have the components but not enough horsepower to run them - thus the big market for upgrades.

Your savings going from 1080 to 720 will be much smaller, and likely only increase your frustration with too small a screen, over any small increase in CPU performance.

If you had a 4K laptop and kept is at 1080P, and only bumped it up for watching videos or playing games, you would have more CPU power available, but that's not the difference you are asking about (you only want to go from 1080 to 720). AND since you're not doing intensive work at the lower resolution the savings gained is even smaller.

I hope that was clearly explained.

As a personal example: I want my cellphone to operate quickly, to save power, and I have a tiny screen that can only display up to a certain resolution; I'm not going to be able to see over 4K if I wanted to.

I run it at 2K all the time (and with Android there's no auto-switching resolution based upon what you're doing). I get an average of 20 hours per charge and my phone benchmarks as the fastest.

I don't need to go to 720p to squeeze more life out of the battery nor would I want the beautiful screen to operate at so low a resolution.

With such a fast CPU (SD845) I don't worry about scraping a small increase in performance out of my phone (and in my case my gain would be greater than what you are asking about).


What free video editor is best to stabilize video and fix choppy ones? I shoot at 30 fps using iPhone 11 Pro and a gimbal (I can't upgrade for now). I still have some stability issues and the video gets a little choppy. So what is the best FOSS video editor to solve this cos there're just toooo many of them - Resolve, Shotcut, Olive, Blender, etc.
I currently use Filmora and I wanna change. So, something not too complicated is appreciated. Thx guys!

Resolve has pretty good stabilisation tools. Blender is more about 3D work and has a steeper learning curve in my opinion. Haven't used the other two.


YouTube Network Partnership Needed for Minecraft Tutorials? Copyrights around video games videos are complex.  If I want to create and post tutorials for a video game on YouTube (specifically Minecraft), do I need to have a partnership with a YouTube Network?

For Minecraft you don't need to be on a Youtube Network.

Mojang says you can monetize your Minecraft Youtube videos.

Even if you use the game's music in it (however you can't use the music outside the video).

The Minecraft EULA says:

  If you upload videos of the game to video sharing and streaming sites
  you are however allowed to put ads on them.

And the Mojang brand guidelines says:

  You are allowed to put footage of our game on YouTube or any other
  website. In fact, we like you doing so.
  ...
  ...
  you may make money using your videos of our game by, for instance,
  through ad revenue, as long as you also add your own unique content
  to the video, such as audio
  commentary.


How to perfectly combine clips Sorry if this is posted elsewhere, but I can't find it.

I'm a novice video editor. I videoed my niece's wedding. For some reason, my camera split the ceremony into 3 clips. I imported them into Premiere Pro 2015.2 (Creative Cloud) and added them to the timeline. It put them back to back to back. The problem is where it switches from one clip to the next, there's a small gap of silence noticeable in the audio (music is playing in both the spots, which compounds the problem) instead of smoothly transitioning from one clip to the next.

I've searched high and low and can't find a way to make the transition seamless (if that's even possible). Can anyone provide guidance? Remember, I'm a novice at this.

Thanks!
Kirby

First, check to make sure that neither you nor the app have created handles on your clips. Handles are a few frames at the beginning and end of a clip that are used to overlap with another clip when doing a crossfade or other transition.

If you're sure that the in and out points of the clips really are the first and last frames of each clip, then you're probably out of luck. (See below for 1 possible solution.) Why does this happen? Without knowing the camera you used, I can only guess. There are 2 reasons that cameras will break clips into smaller pieces:

U.S.E.U. Tax Code - When importing a camera from another country, if the camera can record 30 minutes or more (I think - don't quote me on the exact time), then it is considered a video recorder and is taxed at a higher rate than a still camera. To skirt this issue and keep prices low, many low-end cameras will limit their record time to 1 frame less than the minimum required to be considered a video camera. Many will even automatically create multiple clips that are no longer than the limit. Here's a link that explains it
File System Limits - Older file systems (particularly DOS's FAT file system which is used by lots of cameras) may have a maximum file size limit of either 2GB or 4GB, depending on the implementation. If your clips are long enough to be bigger than 2 or 4GB, some cameras will split the clip into multiple files automatically.

So it could be the camera auto-split for one of the above reasons. The thing is that some cameras will drop frames during the splitting of files, and when they do, there's nothing you can do to get them back. You might be able to create in-between frames using a tool like Re:Vision FX Twixtor, or a similar product.


Why Premiere Elements exported project is "jumpy"? I use Adobe Premiere Elements 12 under Windows 8.1. I have 14 MP4 clips that I cut, join and add transition effects... Something simple.

All the 14 clips are MP4s of the same resolution (640*480), 11 are at 15 fps and 3 are 10 fps. The total running time is around 3h20m.

I want to export the project in 4:3 480p (640*480) at 29.97 fps in MP4. I put all the quality settings at maximum (the export take 6+ hours on a brand new high-end system) but the result is always bad. I see a "jumping" white line at the top of the video. The "animation" is smooth but the details are jumpy.

I found out that if I export in 15 fps instead of 29.97 the movie is OK when it's playing the parts of the 11 clips that the source are 15 fps but the parts of the 3 clips at 10 fps have the jumping problem. It seems the problem originate in the fps upgrade.

In the past I exported this project at 29.97 fps without any problem but at that time the 3 10 fps clips were not integrated.

How can I have an output that is not jumpy?

Make sure you turn each clip's setting to deinterlace on. If Elements has flicker removal, turn that on as well. Make sure you scale your clips to the right size. But if your source is 10 FPS, converting it to 29.97 is not going to create extra frames, unless you use a plugin or effect like frame blending or twistler. You will simply be playing back 10 FPS at 29.97, meaning each original frame will appear for (approximately) 3 frames at 29.97. 10 FPS is jumpy. 24 was set as the standard a century ago, after 18 FPS had been used for some time and was ruled too hard to watch (flicker). Thus why all the old sports movies look like they run fast... because they play them back at 24. Hope that helps.


Creating a split screen video of a multitrack recording It's fairly common to see videos in which, to accompany a piece of music created using overdubs, we see a split screen showing the artist performing each overdub.

What functions, in which software, may be used to create videos like this?

Is it a matter of mixing the audio separately, then manually synchronising the video, or is there software that automates the process?

Answers for any software are welcome, but budget answers (iMovie, Movie Maker) are welcome, as well as any software designed for this specialised purpose.

WAX is an freeware video editing program.

You can create a split screen effect with either a source image or AVI video file. Import then source files into the MediaPool (Project -> Insert Tracks) then position them on seperete layers on the timeline.

From the MediaPool change to the Plugin Presets tab and drag the desired split screen effects over the video/image you wish to apply.

[Full Size]

[Full Size]

I've shown an example above, in the second screenshot you can see I played with some of the settings to adjust the width of the split screen. You can also change the size and position of the video.


FFmpeg on windows cut and fade question so i am using the following code to  in a windows .BAT file to cut up a video at X time:
bin\ffmpeg -hide_banner -loglevel 0 -i "%video%" -c copy -map 0 -f segment -segment_time %segment_time% -reset_timestamps 1 -segment_format_options movflags=+faststart out%%03d.mp4

No issues there.
I then add a fade in and fade out to those segments using the following code:
for %%a in (out*.mp4) DO bin\ffmpeg -hide_banner -loglevel 0 -i "%%a" -vf "fade=t=in:st=%segment_fade_in%:d=%segment_fade_duration%,fade=t=out:st=%segment_fade_out%:d=%segment_fade_duration%" -af "afade=t=in:st=%segment_fade_in%:d=%segment_fade_duration%,afade=t=out:st=%segment_fade_out%:d=%segment_fade_duration%" -async 1 fade_%%~na.mp4

again NO issue here at all
what i am finding is that it takes a lot of time to add these fade in and fade outs.
So i was thinking of then cutting each of the segments,  for say 2-3 seconds at the front and end of the video file adding the fade in or the fade out and then just concat them back together.
not asking for the code but a method that would not take me days to work on only to find it wont work. looking to see if anyone has done similar to save time
on videos over 20-30 seconds or less its not that big of deal but when the videos in the folder are 5-24 minutes it has to be way faster to cut them up.

I would like to answer my own question.
One thing tho is the file is quite large (370+ lines) so i have added it to pastebin
FF Fader on Pastebin
A few Notes:
I had errors popping up if the cuts were certain lengths like on a 30 sec video and I wanted over 10 sec  cuts it would work but toss up errors such as
Invalid number.  Numeric constants are either decimal (17),
hexadecimal (0x11), or octal (021).
Invalid number.  Numeric constants are either decimal (17),
hexadecimal (0x11), or octal (021).

this error would be cause form the calculations at lines:
218 to 229
lines 218 - 229 were added by another issue i found was if you did a 6 sec segments, the last cut was shorter than 2 seconds  so if that was the case i would need to concat that way cause it was concating (sp?) that last clip twice
If that is not correct way of answering the question here, please help me fix it b4 down voting me etc.  I am new here
I would love some input and if you see where it can be cleaned up that would be great too
EDIT:
Wanted to add that taking a 30 second video and cutting into 3 segments, then cutting those 3 segments into 3 sections.  add the fade in and fade out and then combine them all back into segments  took right at 30 seconds or less!
That is pretty awesome! I think maybe using "threads" on ffmpeg could speed it up  but I am not sure you need it any faster than that.  If you have a idea to speed up ffmpeg more let me know in the comments.


Canon 800d/T7i clean-hdmi? I've just bought a Canon 800d to use that as live cam recorder (using elgato game capture).

The problem is that the hdmi output has the focus box and I've managed to remove that only in manual focus mode, but I'd really like to have auto focus.

Do you know any solution?

I think that magic lantern is not yet compatible with the 800d.

Download Sparkocam and your problem will go away. I am using a T3i and a T6i for the same live steam. Your other option is remove autofocus from the lens and switch it to manual


Tool to transcode Canon PF24 MTS files to native 24p? Many Canon AVCHD camcorders record 24fps in a format they call PF24, which essentially disguises the 24 fps in a 60i stream by applying 3:2 pulldown.

Unfortunately they do this so well that to my knowledge editors can't detect it automatically and apply the reverse transformation. I have verified that this is true for Sony Vegas Pro 10 on Windows and FCPX on OS X, which treat these files as regular 60i material. When these clips are added to a 24p timeline they get the regular deinterlacing treatment, which looks awful.

Are there any tools (command line preferred) that can take a .MTS file with PF24 material and perform the inverse telecine process to convert to native 24p with minimal quality loss?

The usual tool recommended for this is JES Deinterlacer, which apparently has an adaptive method of finding and removing the 'smear' frames. I haven't used it myself.

The reason this is an issue is that the field cadence used for PF24 is (stupidly, IMO) different from the typical telecine cadence, which is what most 'inverse telecine' algos detect and remove. So applying standard inverse telecine just adds another layer of mess-up to the video.


Adobe Premiere CC 2017 - decelerate video and audio (without excess of bass sound)? I am a beginner at using Adobe Premier CC 2017. I have several videos that i want to slow down, especially the audio, to make the video easier to understand. I used the Speed/Duration effect and changed 100% to 75%, but that changed the pitch of the audio. It made it much lower with a lot more bass. So, I have tried applying an equalizer to correct the audio but I couldn't get it to sound normal.

I think you can change the speed of audio without changing the pitch in Adobe Audition, but I don't know how to use Audition, especially with needing to sync the audio with the video. Is there a way to do this just using Premiere?

In the SPEED / DURATION menu that you can find in the context menu (RIGHTCLICK on a clip), check the MAINTAIN AUDIO PITCH checkbox. This will counteract the usual pitch shift resulting from the audio stretching.


convert audio to libopus with ffmpeg I'm totally new to ffmpeg and use it on windows.
I want to encode the audio from a mkv video to opus, using

ffmpeg -i abc.mkv -map 0:v -c copy -map 0:a -c libopus -b:a 128000 xyz.mkv

but I get the error:

invalid encoder type "libopus".

What am I doing wrong?

Just -c on its own will set the encoder for all types of streams: video, audio..etc. libopus can't encode video, obviously. You need to attach a stream specifier to limit it to audio, so

ffmpeg -i abc.mkv -map 0:v -c copy -map 0:a -c:a libopus -b:a 128k xyz.mkv

See the section on stream specifiers and also this answer on how multiple codec settings in a command works.


Problem setting different framerates with FFmpeg map option I am facing a problem to set video streams framerates with FFmpeg when using the map option.

Here is what I want to do:

Given an input video file of 60 fps, I want to generate an output file containing two video streams: one with 60 fps (as the source) and the other with 30 fps (half the source's framerate).

I executed this command:

ffmpeg \
  -i input_60fps.mov \
  -map 0:v \
  -map 0:v \
  -crf:v:0 23
  -c:v:0 libx264 \
  -s:v:0 640x360 \
  -vf:v:0 fps=fps=30/1 \
  -crf:v:1 23 \
  -c:v:1 libx264 \
  -s:v:1 1920x1080 \
  -vf:v:1 fps=fps=60/1 \
  -f mp4 \
  out.mp4

This gave me the wanted output file but with streams of 60 fps!!

Am I missing something? I did many tests, I am wondering if FFmpeg has a problem to set different framerates when using the -map option!!

Waiting for your help! Thank you …

-vf does not accept stream specifiers. You can use e.g. -filter:v:1 for that.

However, you need not use the fps filter at all; output -r will do.

ffmpeg -i input_60fps.mov -map 0:v -map 0:v -c:v libx264 -crf 23 -s:v:0 640x360 -r:v:0 30 -s:v:1 1920x1080 -f mp4 out.mp4


Mixing multiple streams into one, posible? How you can I implement a virtual mixer from different streams. When a streamer downloads an obs, it broadcasts the stream directly to the streaming site. Is it possible to make the stream go to another computer, where there will already be a mixing of several streams. I want to do something like 3 people turn on obs or similar software and stream to my computer, where, for example, I mix them in Vmix and send the final image to the streaming service. Is that possible?

What you are looking for is a mixer, like the Black Magic ATEM. This type of gear is expensive though and usually only used by TV-studios and professional broadcasting services, so I would think twice before buying one.
An alternative is hard to come by, since you need HMDI or (preferably) SDI inputs that get mixed, which you cannot simply do on a PC or Mac.


Why does After Effects not enable me to work with 60FPS? For a short student film, I'd like to be able to work with shots that are 60FPS. For some reason I dont see this option:

Those "options" are just convenient presets. Just select Custom and input the frame rate and any other parameters you want.

Of course, if only some of your shots are 60fps, and your final output is 24 or 30 fps, then set your comp settings to the desired output values, and interpret your footage as 60 fps (if it isn't sensed by AE automatically).


How to make a video of an iPad (or other tablet) screen I have been making some movies of my iPad for promotional videos and they all range from bad to worse in terms of video quality. I have used compact cameras and camcorders with pretty similar results.

Most of the stuff I shoot is AVCHD 1920x1080 at 30fps. The camera is positioned to take in the whole screen of the iPad and little (or nothing) else.

The other day I borrowed a Canon REBEL T2i, thinking that the results were going to be fantastic. They were not. There is a weird strobey effect (NO idea why that would appear more with this camera shooting 30fps than with any other one), and the clarity is not great. In fact, it may look better with a $250 Sony pocket camera I have.

Which got me to thinking: I really haven't the slightest idea what I'm doing.

Should the room be dark or light? Or should there be light coming from some specific direction?
Should the iPad's brightness be high, medium or low?
Should the camera be as close to the iPad as possible, while still being able to get focus, or a few feet away?
Since the DSLR has SO many manual settings, what adjustments should I be trying to make?
Since the DSLR has interchangeable lenses, what kind of lens is really appropriate for this sort of thing?

I could go on, but I really don't even know the questions to ask. A bit of guidance or orientation or some links to read (that are not 400-page books, unless they are titled "How to Make a Video of a Tablet") would be appreciated.

From what I recall

The room should be dark, so the tablet is the light source.
Experiment with the brightness, but usually low is the way to go.
Camera doesn't need to be extremely close, but the more zoom you use the more obvious vibrations will be.
Put the DSLR in manual focus and adjust it so the tablet is just slightly out of focus - this will remove the moire effect.
You want a short depth of field. This is achieved with a lower F-Stop (larger aperture opening).

I attended a session by Hendrik Kueck (creator of Color Splash) at 360iDev on this topic specifically. It was called "Effectively using videos to explain and market your app". You can buy that video online for $3.50. It goes into a lot more detail and explains everything really well (and may even correct me on a couple points.) It is a deal at 10x that price.


Maya batch render missing alpha channel I'm trying to export a scene to composite in Nuke.  When I "render current frame" and save the image from there, I get an image with an alpha channel, but when I batch render the images don't have the alpha channel.

I solved my own problem after some more trial and error. For awhile it looked like the fact that I was using Mental Ray shaders combined with general shaders was the problem, but that didn't really make sense so I kept tweaking. It turns out that an image plane I had tied to my camera was the problem. The image on the plane never rendered out, so I assumed the plane wasn't affecting the rendering, but it turns out it was showing up as a black plane when rendered. I deleted the plane for my render and it works fine now.


Advantage of HLS/HDS over direct bytestream I've been becoming familiar with a lot of streaming protocols in the past few years, but now that I ask myself, I don't know what are the advantages of protocols such as HLS or HDS which chunk the stream compared to a direct-from-memory bytestream like HTTP octet-stream, RTMP or RTSP can do for example.

I would think that the I/O necessary to produce the fragments makes it less efficient and, for HLS, TCP already insures data reliability, so is it not redundant to use an MPEG Transport-Stream over TCP?

CDNs. CDNs make delivering small static HTTP objects much cheeper due caching efficiency, supply and demand, and stateless servers (hence more viewers per server). Second is live video. HTTP does not really work well given a file of infinite length. Hence breaking the stream into segments to make the CDNs job easier.