Reducing the size of content within a composition in After Effects I'm having playback issues with a video I've rendered in After Effects. I need to adjust the composition and all the content to a smaller size. However, when I adjust the comp size the footage stays the same. Is there a way to reduce the whole lot together?

Thanks

You can scale down everything in your composition by pre-comping everything and then shrinking the size of that pre-comp. I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "when I adjust the comp size the footage stays the same". If you mean that when you change the composition size, the footage extends beyond the new border of the comp, then pre-comping and scaling down the pre-comp should fix this.


Modify the scale depending on the order of the keyframe values I want to make a Dorkly animation (

            ), that is, 8-bit puppets opening and closing their mouths. The difference I want to add is when the mouth is open the puppet get stretched (scaled) in the Y axis and when is closed the puppet returns to its original size. I have managed to get an automatic sync method so the problem now lies with the scale thing.

I've assigned a null that responds to the values adopted by the mouth so I ordered it when the mouth is open, stretch the puppet. To do this, I've used the following expression:

x=thisComp.layer("SIDE MOUTH GREEN").effect("LJ - visemes - MSD")("viseme nr.")
if(x==1)[148,199];
else if (x==3) [148,199];
else if (x==7) [148,199];
else if (x==10) [148,199];
else if (x==11) [148,199];
else [148,189];

The problem is as follows. When there are two consecutive sounds that are equivalent to an open mouth (FOR - GO - tten), the puppet doesn't move and that's a pretty dull stuff. What should be said to AF is: if after an open mouth value goes another open mouth value, on the changed value disable the stretching for X time. What'd be the expression that would be needed to achieve that?

I know I could do it manually but I want to broaden my skills.

To shorten what you've already written you could pack all the open mouth values into an array and then find if the x value is in it:

var scaleYVals = [1 , 3, 7, 10, 11];
(scaleYVals.indexOf(x) > -1)? [148,199] : [148, 189];

The second line uses the ternary form of if (foo){bar} else {baz}, which can be written as (foo)? bar : baz. IndexOf returns the index of an element of an array, so if the value of x (bad name for a variable except if you're referring to an x coordinate, BTW) is 7 then indexOf will return 2. If the value is not in the array it returns -1

The problem with looking at the previous mouth shape is that you could still end up with no movement: say there was a sequence: open, open, closed. If you disable the stretching on the second open mouth you'll have the sequence stetched, unstretched, unstretched. It also greatly complicates the expression.

How about you make it so that the stretch happens at the beginning of the open mouth and then goes back briefly before the next phoneme?


Does youtube store different video files for different bit rate? First of all, is the technique called "resampling" ?

Does youtube make live resampling for every user ? Isn't it too cpu costly ? So far what i know about codecs is that it has to go through many encoding steps ( compression, motion prediction etc etc ). All this things happens live ?

Or it encode and save different video files for different bitrate, so that when a user changes bitrate it servers that file.

Isn't that a disk space destroyer too ?

Does youtube store different video files for different bit rate?

Yes

  is the technique called "resampling" ?

No

  Does youtube make live resampling for every user ?

No

  All this things happens live ?

No, not on youtube. But Yes on twitch.tv

  Or it encode and save different video files for different bitrate, so
  that when a user changes bitrate it servers that file.

Yes

  Isn't that a disk space destroyer too ?

Yes


Can I use a Linux Render Farm with a MAC Workstation running Adobe Premiere? I am building a render farm running linux and I would like to be able to send my adobe projects to it for rendering from a mac workstation. I see that it's doable with a windows workstation(Build linux render farm in order to render adobe premiere projects). Is there anyway to send it from a mac or am I going to have to get a whole new windows workstation(not in my budget!!)?

There are two steps, broadly speaking, to rendering a project in a NLE such as Premiere.

First step is for the NLE to generate the uncompressed final composite image for each output frame. This is undertaken/managed by the rendering engine of the NLE. And the second is to encode these generated images using a codec into the final video output file.

For the first step to be parallelized or offloaded to other processors, the app has to support such a facility, in the form of piecemeal division of rendering tasks to compatible renderers installed on the slave machines and final assembly of their results. I haven't seen anything to indicate that Premiere does so, even across a Windows/OSX farm.

For the 2nd step to be parallelized, the encoder has to support such a facility. The post you link to has an answer which suggests that frameserving from Premiere to ffmpeg can accomplish this. Except that the solution doesn't demonstrate any parallelization. It simply uses ffmpeg on the source machine to relay frames to a single ffmpeg instance running on a linux machine for encoding. The point of a render farm is to split and distribute the processing load across multiple machines for quicker output. That solution, in all likehihood, simply adds latency for no useful reason.


How do I record a computer monitor without banding/flickering with a Canon t2i/550D? As you've probably guessed, when recording video with a computer monitor in frame I am getting banding. I'm aware that this has to do with refresh rates of the monitor vs the scan rate of the camera or something like that. I've read that most cameras have a feature to adjust for this - synchro scan, clear scan or variable scan is what I've seen it referred to as. However, I can't find anything on what or how to do this with my Canon t2i.

I've seen a number of videos where people do this with a t2i, so I'm sure it's possible, I'm just not sure how to set the camera up properly.

Here is a video using a t2i to record a computer screen without banding.

I've noticed that I can adjust f/stop and shutter speed to get varying results when put in to Tv mode. I'm having trouble getting to a setting that has minimal/no banding and isn't either under or over exposed.

While reviewing the Instruction Manual for the Canon 2Ti EOS 550 on page 127 you will find information on how to manually set the shutter time. Here is the pdf download for the manual:
http://gdlp01.c-wss.com/gds/9/0300003169/01/eosrt2i-eos550d-im-en.pdf

There is wide range of 1/4000 to 1/30 of a second to work with depending on your frame rate.

For 50 fps or 60 fps the range is 1/4000 to 1/60.

For 24, 25, & 30 fps the range is 1/4000 to 1/30.

I suggest that you try different shutter times at your preferred frame rate. I know this is not definitive, as I don't have this camera, nor have I tested this. However, the flicker you are referring to is as you suggest a synchronization issue; you are trying to have the camera capture at a rate that synchronizes with the display. Another thing you can try is change the display frame rate, if you have this option on your monitor.

Hope this helps,


How to easily extract start/end times of several clips within a video? I very often get videos from which I need to extract about 1 to 5 clips.

Currently I watch those videos in VLC and take note of the start/end times that each of the clips span. I feed that into ffmpeg, which I use to extract the clips to separate video files.

Whereas this works fine, it's kind of tedious to be playing the video and stopping, taking note of the start time, continuing, taking note of the end time, and so on.

I would like to find some tool where I can watch the video and when there is a span of interest, just move to the right frame, press a key and have the start/end time automatically saved for me. I don't mind about the specific output; I can process it later with a script before feeding the start/end times to ffmpeg.

I know with VirtualDub, Avidemux, etc., you can extract the video directly (clip by clip), but what I want to extract is the times of these interesting clips and do the actual extraction all at once with ffmpeg.

Is there any tool, if possible for Linux, that I could use to easily extract these times? Maybe any functionality or plugin for VLC or other player? Or any tool normally used for creating subtitles or some other synchronisation task?

As an initial approach, gnome-subtitles seems to be an interesting option.

sudo apt-get install gnome-subtitles

One can marking the beginning and end of each clip as one dialog entry in the subtitle file, which can be saved as srt and later transformed to be used with ffmpeg.


How to make video with a scrolling graphic? I want to make video like this

I am noob in video making...give some direction to start

You create the whole graphic as a still image - for the above, likely a 1080 x 28000 px image to start with.

Then I'd import the image into either Premiere or After Effects based on what you're more comfortable using.

Then you set a keyframe on the initial position of the graphic - then move the graphic horizontally to the left, all the way to the end, move your timeline to the end of the project and drop another keyframe for the ending position.

Then you'll likely have to tinker with the project length and keyframe positions to fine tune the timing of the virtual camera pan.

There's a ton of tutorials available to accomplish a simple task like animating an image:


Life-size building floor plan I need to develop a life-size building plan, I will prepare a floor plan from any Autocad software and later send it to 6 different projectors to get a Life-size building floor plan so that the end customers can have a walkthrough of their house. it will be a 2D effect only.
Which software can help me send my floor plan to 6 projectors?
How will this entire thing work. Please share some views

You need to use video projection mapping software, and 3D rendering software. Mad Mapper is a well known projection mapping application.
Blender or Cinema4D would do the 3D rendering.


How to handle Rode VideoMic Pro during transport? Unlike, for example, Zoom H5 which is shipped in a rock-solid plastic box, Rode VideoMic Pro is shipped in a cheap plastic piece which holds it in the box. The piece is much bigger than the microphone and is difficult to handle, since its only purpose is to be used during the original shipping.

Since I need to transport the microphone in my bag, one of the concerns is that I can't just put it directly in the bag together with lenses and camera, because it is too fragile for that.

What I have tried:

I went to nearly every supermarket in the town, searching for the box of appropriate size with no success.
I searched on Rode website; they doesn't sell any boxes for their microphones.
B&H accessories don't contain anything related to transport.
A search on Amazon was also unsuccessful.
Companies which make custom-sized boxes are mostly centered on large boxes for shipping or storage. There is MyCaseBuilder which is great, but I live in Europe, so $50 shipment plus taxes is too expensive.

I hardly doubt I'm the first one encountering this issue. How other people solved it?

The original packaging of Rode VideoMic Pro looks like this:

By comparison, here's a box for Zoom H5:

I am owner of Rode VideoMic Pro and have to say I just throw it in my bag together with dslr and lens. Wind cover gets a bit deformed sometimes, but it gets into original shape in five minutes after taking it out of the bag. I have one of the cheaper Lowepro bags and I can fit in my Nikon D5200 with one lens on, second lens and said microphone just fine. Mic fits vertically to the corner of the bag next to the second lens. I have been carrying it like this around for almost a year and I haven't encountered any issues.

I would therefore suggest to just throw it in the bag nicely, if it wont wiggle and bump around during carrying, it will be just fine without any dedicated case.


Kdenlive rendering problem - white video I'm doing some editing and I'm trying to render my video but regardless of the output format what gets rendered is just a white screen, still video with the length of my project.

I'm using
Kdenlive
Version 19.08.2
on Ubuntu 18.04

Perhaps there is already a solution to this problem but I'm having a really hard time finding the correct wording to look up..

I had this issue with moving files outside of Kdenlive. It did find them using a recursive search, but the video was white. I have deleted them from the project and added them again. This fixed it in my case.


Premiere 6 - how to add black between clips in a sequence automatically We have regular fulfilment jobs for clients which require us to insert a few seconds of black between each clip in a contiguous file. It's not a great deal of effort to do it once or twice but when the jobs are larger, consisting of 50+ short clips, it seems like some time could be saved if there were a way to get the sequence to automatically and consistently add the black clip every time a footage clip was added.

Can anyone think of a clever way to do this? Would handles help here?

Very grateful for any thoughts!

Thanks.

A workflow involving Adobe Bridge is as follows. If you have Premiere Pro, you probably installed Bridge, if not, please do install.

Put your batch of clips in a folder. I would use a directory structure like Client Name > Jobs > YYYY_MM_DD > Footage etc.
Find your footage in Bridge.
Select all your footage, then under Tools menu select Batch Rename (Shift + Command (Control) + R

In your Batch Rename settings, change destination folder to something like Renamed, next to your footage folder (to keep everything organised). Under New Filenames just select Sequence Number, add 1 and select Three or Four digits. This will rename your files 0001.mov, 0002.mov etc.

From Premiere, render a black video with a length you wish or a black
frame with the same resolution and pixel aspect ratio with your
footage. You will need to duplicate the black footage as much as you
need. Rename them with Bridge, this time add a letter a to the
end of filename, and rename in the same folder.

Back in Premiere, import all the footage in your footage folder, including blacks. In your bin panel, sort them by name, they should be sorted in the following order: 0001.mov, 0001a.mov(or png), 0002.mov, 0002a.mov. Select them all and drag to your timeline. They should be placed as you wish, a video clip followed by a black clip.

If you are using still images as blacks, adjust their default length in Premiere's Preferences > General > Still Image Default Duration option.

If the videos are always in the same specs, you can re-use those blacks, by duplicating and renaming again.

Still not the shortest way, but kind of better??


Network Stream reloading in a loop (Nginx/RTMP Streaming Server) As the generic title suggests, I do not know exactly how to explain my problem, neither do I know what could cause it. Hopefully this ends up to be the right place looking for help, as I do not find related issues and I am tired  of troubleshooting the unknown after many hours now. So I hope for hints now that point me to the right direction.

What I am trying to achieve is to build a working streaming server for video broadcasting.

What is working so far:

I set up a hls streaming server with nginx. Pushing the data via RTMP works fine (meaning: data gets created on the server). I can navigate to the stream location in the browser and download the .m3u8 playlist there.
At this point I was very excited..

What I'd expected:

Connecting to the server in VLC plays back the stream.

What actually happens: (or: the desperate attempt to explain the issue shortly)

Opening the stream causes VLC to "constantly reload the stream", without actually loading/playing it. It seems like the data chunks get loaded, but before they get played, VLC reloads (or maybe loads the next chunk? Or does not load data at all?). Anyway, I never see a picture.

Because I cannot explain this very well I will leave instructions on how you may test the server yourself (at least for the next days, using OBS) and see what I mean (or report back a different behavior):

Feel free to open OBS and connect to:

Server: [expired]
Streamkey: debug

Start streaming
   and connect to the server at [expired]

I will gladly add missing configuration details if you request them in the comments. For now, I want to keep the question clean, and get an impression what you think may cause this behavior.. Codecs? Missing HTTP-Headers? Wrong configuration (chunksize/keyframe-rate/..)?

I highly appreciate your effort and will leave the streaming server open for demo purposes for a while. Please understand that for several reasons this server won't stay publicly accessible for a long time (a few days max).

-- Edit: For the technically interested, you can find the configuration files in this stack overflow question

using vlc -vv helped me to track down the issue. It was a missing character in one of the configuration files that caused vlc to not connect to the server.

Sorry for the noise.

(If you are interested in the resolution, check the stack-overflow post linked to in the question)


ffmpeg, first second of cut video part freezed I use this to cut a part out of a mp4 file:

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vcodec copy -acodec copy -ss 00:36:18 -to 00:39:50 output.mp4

It works good but the video image is always freezed in the beginning for 1 second.

Doesnt matter which video file I try and cut a part out of, it takes like 1 second before the video start.

Heres an example:

Why?

The order of the parameters is very important on ffmpeg.
Try this:

ffmpeg -ss 00:36:18 -i input.mp4 -vcodec copy -acodec copy -to 00:39:50 output.mp4

It seems that setting the -ss parameter before -i sets a keyframe at the beginning of the newly generated video.
Or so I understand from the Wiki page here.


What is the most appropriate approach/tool in the Adobe CC suite for creating animated diagrams for use in a technical video? I'm working on a technical video (in Premiere Pro) describing some work we've done in an academic setting, akin to a presentation one might give at a conference. There are recorded video elements that I'd like to overlay with animated diagrams describing how things work.

What's the best way to achieve this kind of thing? I ran across a video tutorial that creates a simple animation using the title creation features of Premiere Pro, but that seems like the wrong tool.

I've got an active CC membership to work with. Maybe I could create a diagram and animation in Animate (previously Flash) and export it as a video, with alpha channel, to overlay. I have limited experience with Flash from years ago. I assume After Effects can do this sort of thing, but I've never worked with it myself. I'm very comfortable in Photoshop and Illustrator since most of my work in CC involves photography and still technical drawing/writing.

After Effects is probably your best bet, as it integrates seamlessly with Premiere and Illustrator.

Create your diagrams in Illustrator, import them into After Effects, and convert them to shape layers. You can then animate them, and add the AE compositions to the Premiere project.


Desaturate shadows in Lightworks I'm using Lightworks as my main video editor (I use Blender occasionally), and use it to color grade too. I want to desaturate my shadows using either Lightworks or Blender, but I can't find that tool. Is it there, and if it's not, is it on something else I can use on my Linux system (not Resolve, needs very specific hardware i can't afford)? LUTs that do this are an option too!

Thnx ahead :)

In Lightworks, there's the selective color correction tool.
By moving the sliders like this you can select the shadows (luma slider) and desaturate them:

By  clicking "Reveal" you can see which parts of the image are going to be changed.
With much thanks to the guys at the Lightworks forum.
Source: Lightworks forum: Desaturate shadows


Converting a PDF slide show to a video file I have a LaTeX Beamer presentation that I output into a PDF slide show. I want to turn into a video file (with the ability to add sound later) so that I can generate animations from Beamer . How can one do this? I've tried importing the PDF to iMovie, but the quality of the frames drops dramatically.

Convert the presentation to a series of image files. The classic image format for that is a TARGA sequence. But you can use any format that your LaTeX tool chain can output and a video generator can import. For generating the image sequence, there are several vector and raster formats that LaTeX can export. You can then use ffmpeg to turn the image sequence into video.

As a reminder, be sure to set the aspect ratio of your presentation appropriately.


We have two teams across Asia and Europe, and plan to show a movie. Is there a way to connect them users to a common platform? We want to see if there is a way where the users can login to a common platform and view the movie at the same time.

Is there any open source platform where they can join a movie screening online? Similar to how gotomeetings are done.

YouTube and Twitch are the most popular platforms for both Live Broadcast and not live broadcasts.

I'll recommend live streaming the video and making it private on twitch to prevent any copyright case.

For YouTube streaming you have to have some conditions fulfilled.

YOUTUBE TERMS FOR GOING LIVE


FFmpeg - Folder Convert I am use FFmpeg v4.1 .

How can I convert all '.mp3' files in the "ab1" folder to the "cd2" folder with the same file names as '.mp3'?

The process I'm going to do is:

-acodec libmp3lame -b:a 192k -ar 48000 -map_metadata -1

You can use a bash for loop.

cd ab1
mkdir cd2
for f in *.mp3; do ffmpeg -i "$f" -c:a libmp3lame -b:a 192k -ar 48000 -map_metadata -1 "cd2/${f%.*}.mp3"; done

This assumes your OS supports bash shell scripting.


cuvid - slow performance when used 4 devices Has 4 nvidia devices:

nvidia-smi topo --matrix
        GPU0    GPU1    GPU2    GPU3    CPU Affinity
GPU0     X      PHB     SYS     SYS     0-5,12-17
GPU1    PHB      X      SYS     SYS     0-5,12-17
GPU2    SYS     SYS      X      PHB     6-11,18-23
GPU3    SYS     SYS     PHB      X      6-11,18-23

Legend:

  X    = Self
  SYS  = Connection traversing PCIe as well as the SMP interconnect between NUMA nodes (e.g., QPI/UPI)
  NODE = Connection traversing PCIe as well as the interconnect between PCIe Host Bridges within a NUMA node
  PHB  = Connection traversing PCIe as well as a PCIe Host Bridge (typically the CPU)
  PXB  = Connection traversing multiple PCIe switches (without traversing the PCIe Host Bridge)
  PIX  = Connection traversing a single PCIe switch
  NV#  = Connection traversing a bonded set of # NVLinks

We want to re-code h264 videos to lower resolution.
When we run 2-3 processes per 0 and 1 devices:

ffmpeg -v error -y -hwaccel cuvid -hwaccel_device 0 -c:v:0 h264_cuvid -gpu 0 -i /mnt/worker/6797/be2c96e8f0fd7/objects/133607/fb3/8279fb61a4d0bf66c3f871bdb30e5fb3/1530758904.34570.data -map_metadata -1 -map_chapters -1 -map 0:v:0 -map 0:a:0 -c:v:0 h264_nvenc -gpu 0 -b:v:0 650000 -filter:v:0 scale_npp=-2:360 -c:a:0 aac -gpu 0 -b:a:0 96000 -ac:a:0 2 -max_muxing_queue_size 9999 -movflags +faststart -f mp4 /home/uploads/tmp/out.mp4

all works fine

nvidia-smi dmon -c 1
# gpu   pwr gtemp mtemp    sm   mem   enc   dec  mclk  pclk
# Idx     W     C     C     %     %     %     %   MHz   MHz
    0   102    48     -    20     9    14   100  3304  1189
    1   105    54     -    25     9    17    99  3304  1201
    2    15    27     -     0     0     0     0   405   135
    3    15    27     -     0     0     0     0   405   135

but when works 2-3 processes per each device, then performance gets low.
Summary compared to 2 devices:

nvidia-smi dmon
# gpu   pwr gtemp mtemp    sm   mem   enc   dec  mclk  pclk
# Idx     W     C     C     %     %     %     %   MHz   MHz
    0    89    45     -     8     3     5    37  3304  1189
    1    92    50     -     9     3     6    30  3304  1201
    2    76    42     -     9     3     6    29  3304  1201
    3    87    44     -     9     3     6    33  3304  1189

htop,top,iftop,atop show nothing overloaded

Sometimes performance rises higher, or drops below (i`m suspect it depending on input files)

How to I can utilize all decoders ?

NVidia boards has a limit number of concurrent encoding tasks, according number of encode engine chips on board. Look at specifications of boards you are using.
Even if you have a board with unrestricted number of sessions to it, you will have a speed degradation, because of some task pipelining on host side.


Is it possible to add easing to a looping, time remapped precomp in After Effects? I have a 1 second precomp that is a rotating wheel using LoopOut(). Using Time Remap this animates during my entire main composition which is about 20 seconds.

I'd like to include an ease in so that the wheel starts turning gradually before rotating at a constant velocity. Doing this to the first time remap keyframe is obviously wrong, as the ease then happens every second. Is there a way of doing this without making the precomp 20 seconds long? (I found a longer precomp was slowing down the rendering.)

Add an expression control slider to the layer (Effects>Expression Controls>Slider Control). This will be what we use to control the rotation of the wheel.

now add this expression to the time remap property:

effect("Slider Control")("Slider") % 1

You could also drag the expression pickwhip from the time remap property to the slider property, and then type % 1 after the result.

The % 1 is the modulus operator, it returns the remainder when the first term is divided by the second, in this case the part after the decimal point, so if the slider is at 12.34 it will return 0.34.

Now you can animate the slider using whatever easing you like.


Premiere Pro - How to make a slideshow/compilation I have a bunch of videos and pictures. I want to make a compilation with them. I just don't want it to be worse than movie maker. I am looking for these moving effects that you can play while the video is changing ( http://prntscr.com/29coci ) I already have experience in After Effects and Photoshop CC

Premiere Pro has a number of default transitions under the "video transitions" tab in the effects pane (usually located in the bottom left of the window). Are those what you are looking for? If you have experience with After Effects, you could also use AE's more robust effects library to animate interesting effects for your videos.

Based on your included image, it looks like you might be interested in wipe transitions.


How can I recreate this overexposed effect from the last scene in 'The Lighthouse'? Spoilers Warning

I just finished Robert Egger's film 'The Lighthouse', and one shot in the final scene really inspired me cinematically.  Winslow, face covered in blood, finally goes up to the top room in the lighthouse, and the light opens up.  The shot is from the POV of the light, with Winslow staring in at the camera.  The light continually gets brighter and brighter to the point of heavy overexposure in the eyes and mouth as he screams, making him look like a film negative.  This is an effect that I really want to recreate for a specific shot in my project, and I don't know how to achieve it.

Was it done by increasing the brightness of a light manually, with the overexposure being completely natural?  Or could I just increase the levels?  Which way do you think is best?

You can tell by the shadows that light's illumination was increased. However, you can acheive a similar result (though not perfect) by just keyframing the 'Curves' effect in After Effects. (I had better results with 'Curves' as opposed to 'Levels') See below:

The curves were keyframed from default to:

The top point is to blow out the whites, the middle point lifts the greys slightly and the bottom point keeps the blacks from getting brighter.

Now, you'll notice that this has lifted the red values a little more than I'd like. This could then be fixed with a 'Tint' effect or by bumping the saturation way down with a 'Hue/Saturation' effect. Or even by messing with the individual RGB colours within the existing 'Curve' effect.


Importing XML into Premiere Pro - numbered stills / image sequence I'm trying to make life a bit easier by generating an XML file to quickly import a number of image sequences into a Premiere Pro project (PPro 2017.0.2 in case it matters).

It almost works - but when I import this XML file into premiere, it imports the first file in the sequence as a Still Image rather than an image sequence.
The path to the file is correct, and the first frame does show up just fine.

It feels like it's only a small change that's required, but I have not been able to find any information on it anywhere.

Since the (sample) XML is very short, I also included it here (the real file has a few hundred clips, they all behave the same way).

I tried manually importing an image sequence into premiere and exporting the result as FinalCut XML, but if I re-import that file, it also gets imported as a Still Image, so no help there.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xmeml version="4">
  <bin>
    <name>mpf_07 Images</name>
    <children>
      <bin>
        <name>Preview</name>
        <children>
          <clip id="mpf_07_01">
            <duration>229</duration>
            <in>0</in>
            <out>229</out>
            <name>mpf_07_01</name>
            <media>
              <video>
                <track>
                  <clipitem id="clipitem-Preview-mpf_07_01">
                    <name>clipitem-Preview-mpf_07_01</name>
                    <file id="file-Preview-mpf_07_01">
                      <name />
                      <pathurl>E:\mpf_07_01.0101.jpg</pathurl>
                      <rate>
                        <timebase>24</timebase>
                        <NTSC>FALSE</NTSC>
                      </rate>
                      <duration>320</duration>
                      <timecode>
                        <rate>
                          <timebase>24</timebase>
                          <ntsc>FALSE</ntsc>
                        </rate>
                        <string>00:00:00:00</string>
                        <frame>0</frame>
                        <displayformat>NDF</displayformat>
                        <reel>
                          <name />
                        </reel>
                      </timecode>
                      <media>
                        <video>
                          <samplecharacteristics>
                            <width>2048</width>
                            <height>1126</height>
                          </samplecharacteristics>
                        </video>
                      </media>
                    </file>
                  </clipitem>
                </track>
              </video>
            </media>
            <rate>
              <timebase>24</timebase>
              <NTSC>FALSE</NTSC>
            </rate>
          </clip>
        </children>
      </bin>
    </children>
  </bin>
</xmeml>

To clarify, this is the setting when using the Premiere UI to set it up, everything else works except Premiere doesn't see the Bin as an image sequence, but rather as a still image:

The answer is that this is not possible - at least as per the time of writing this answer, since the concept of "image sequence" does not exist in the XML spec Premiere utilizes - namely, XMEML version 4, also known as Final Cut Pro 7-style XML.


Would it be legal to use Cott-produced, generic beverages in a film? Walmart sells a line of beverages manufactured by Cott with very generic labelling, for example:

Cott Grape soda image

Since these drinks bear no brand name, I know there are no trademark/brand issues there. There are also no trademarked logos (with the exception of a very small Royal Crown logo by the nutrition facts which would be easy to not show on camera).

Here's what I'm wondering: Could the printed format on the can be protected by some sort of copyright/trademark or other form of intellectual property protection? If so, how can I find out?

I received an answer from an actual lawyer:

  Context matters. As a general matter, it is perfectly "legal" to use anyone's logo or brand indicia in a film, without permission, as long as it is done in a manner which does not falsely suggest the endorsement or sponsorship of the film or the producer's products by the trademark owner. For example, it is entirely possible to have your hero drink Beefeater or 7-Up in clearly identified containers. No permission is required. It is not really clear what interest you may think is being protected, but trademark law doesn't preclude all use of the trademark owner's mark by others. Sometimes, in an excess of caution, such permissions will be sought. They are nearly universally granted.

From Hilary B. Miller on Lawyers.com


Does alpha matte version of a clip allows to change the pattern I'm a beginner in this field and I have to buy this clip from shutter-stock.

This clip comes with some pre-rendered patterns and has an alpha-matte version.

My question is : I want to use different pattern for the ripped paper, how can I achieve that ? and can the alpha-matte version used for this purpose ? if no .. it used for what ??

Changing the pattern of the paper will be too difficult, because you would have to map the pattern around the roll, too. But you can change the color with some Hue/Saturation/Value effect.

So, what are the black/white alpha-matte sections for? The author had to append them at the end, because in the process chain at Shutterstock the video could be transcoded and the alpha channel could get lost. In your own video editor you will have to cut these black/white sections out and re-apply them as alpha clip over your color clip. How to do this can be different in After Effects, Final Cut Pro, ...

But now the most interesting part. Why did the author append two alpha-matte versions, which seem to be equal?

Only after calculating the difference between the two versions I saw it. In this picture gray means that the pixels of the two images are equal, and black or white means that there is some difference.

This means that the first alpha-matte is for the paper including the white ripped edge, where-as the second one is for the paper surface without the ripped edge. If you want to color the paper, apply the effect just together with the second alpha-matte, and the edge will stay white.


What PC software offers speeding up video & sound together at 20x+? I'm new to video editing, and I'm trying to find the right software to fit my needs.  I am interesting in creating videos where I want to speed up both the video and the sound together to rates of over 20x.

For example, here is the link to a YouTube video that is similiar to the style movie that I want to make.  This person used iMovie to create this video.

I started with the standard GoPro Studio, but whenever you speed up video with that program, the sound is lost.

I then moved to CyberLink Power Director, and with that program, the sound is not able to be sped up over 8x I believe when attached to the video.

I heard about Sony Video Studio, but it looks like you can't speed up the video past 4x in that program.

I do not want to break the sound apart from the video and try an pair it back up after speed up both the sound and video individually.  I also do not want to speed up the video/sound a small around, render the video, and then speed it up again, as that create a lot of redundant work.

Ideally, I would like to find the PC version of something like iMovie that has this capability.

I think Premiere can easily reach 80x. And you can go past that putting sequences one into the other


Simple video editing software that can handlethis I have around 2000 images (png) that take up around 3GB. I wanted to make a very simple video where each image is displayed for somewhere between 0.1-0.01s

I read online that I should use movie maker. Tried it, but it seems the program can't handle it. Googled quite a bit, and even with some workarounds it still can't handle it.

Went online in search for an alternative (a question here actually) and tried hitfilm. That froze.

So my question is the following:

Is there a free video editing tool that can handle this:

Free
Make a video out of about 2000 images (that can handle this much)
No watermark
Can set image duration to around 0.1-0.01s
I can set fps (or it is high enough to not loose some images)

I'm looking for something simple and that doesn't take that much

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

If your images are sequentially numbered i.e. img0001.png, img0002.png...

then

ffmpeg -framerate 10 -i img%04d.png -crf 20 -pix_fmt yuv420p output.mp4

If they aren't sequentially numbered, then you'll have to create a text file of the following format:

file 'ThisOne.png'
file 'ThatOne.png'
file 'ThenThis.png'
...

You can use dir /b /on > list.txt to get the names in alphabetical order into a text file. You'll then have to prefix the file and add the quotes.

Then

ffmpeg -f concat -framerate 10 -i list.txt -crf 20 -pix_fmt yuv420p output.mp4

Each image's duration is the reciprocal of the framerate value, which you can set to any value but for compatibility reasons 8 - 60 is a good range.

The command also assumes that all images are the same resolution. If they aren't, they will have to be made so. You can insert the following option after the input value into your ffmpeg command:

-vf "scale='if(gt(a\,16/9)\,1920,-1)':'if(gt(a\,16/9)\,-1,1080)',pad=1920:1080:(ow-iw)/2:(oh-ih)/2"

This scales each image to fit within a 1920x1080 canvas while preserving proportion and then pads the scaled image to form a 1920x1080 frame.

The CRF value controls the visual quality. Lower value is better but makes larger file. -pix_fmt yuv420p is for producing a file compatible with most players.


4k vs. 1080p on a 1080p monitor Is it smart to watch a 4k video on a 1080p monitor versus watching it in 1080p (especially on youtube)? Is there any difference for the human eye?

No, there is no difference to the human eye (or exceptionally minimal).  Your monitor can't display higher quality than it is capable of displaying.  The only advantage you would have is if you were to zoom in on part of the image, you would have more detail when you zoomed in.

The exception to this is if the 4k stream uses enough extra bandwidth to reduce the number of artifacts present in the stream, but for a well configured stream this shouldn't be a significant factor.  For Youtube settings, that may or may not be noticeable depending on your sensitivity to artifacts and the type of content you are viewing.


Best quality conversion from VHS to digital domain (USA) I (like everyone else) have some old home movies on VHS, VHS-C and 8MM (and maybe a couple DV even...).  I'd like to get them on my computer so I can edit them and store them.

In the past, I've used an old stand-alone DVD recorder that has an internal HD in it.  So, I'd record VHS to my DVR via the SVHS video cable, and then edit them on the DVR and burn to DVD.  Fine.  No problems.  But, I noticed most of the DVDs are blocky and have color banding issues.  The quality just isn't that great.  In some ways, the VHS actually looks better.

What I want to do is find the best way (in a consumer sense) to convert these to digital.  I've heard of people using Hauppauge PVRs, I've heard of people using video capture cards, I've heard of FireWire though I'm still not sure what exactly that is...

I plan on buying an entirely new setup for this.  I figured I might take a look at AlienWare since they're built for gamers and would likely be the best "off the shelf" box to start with.  Can someone give me some input as to where I'd go from there?  I don't want to spend $10K doing it, but if it costs $3K I'd consider it a good investment.

Please tell me you didn't spend thousands of dollars. You can get the hardware you need in under 50.

I rip my VHS tapes with a PVR card as well, the Hauppauge (WinTV) are good ones.

I just use an RCA cable from my VHS player into the TV card, and record the input using V4L tools on Linux.

You'll need to use v4l utils to set the proper input on your card, and then use ffmpeg to copy the stream directly.

Here, I know what the length of the video is, and do a straight codec copy:

ffmpeg -i /dev/video0 -vcodec copy -acodec copy -t <hours:minutes> vhs.mpg


How to overlay an image over video in percent I want to overlay an image on top of a video and have reached these two links:

How to overlay/place an image on a video in ffmpeg [duplicate]

Add an image overlay in front of video using ffmpeg

And this is my command:

ffmpeg -i flower.mp4 -i rose.png \
-filter_complex "[0:v][1:v] overlay=W-w/2:H-h/2" \
-pix_fmt yuv420p -c:a copy flowers.mp4 -y

But I have not reached the thing I want yet.

I want the image be placed in top right with 10 percent space from right and 3 percent from top, or 10px from right and 5px from top right.

How to reach this to work with my desired percent?

There are some other videos with different scales, so I cannot use fix x and y for all of them.

Thanks in advance

Use

for 10% space from right, and 3% from top,

"[0:v][1:v] overlay=x='0.90*W-w':y='0.03*H'"

for 10 px from right, and 5 px from top,

"[0:v][1:v] overlay=x='W-10-w':y='5'"


Motorized tripod head with zoom I am looking into a motorized tripod head to use with a standard camcorder and am wondering what people normally do for zoom?

The camera I am using is a Canon HF R56. (I am not interested in the CT-V1)

Cameras which support external control of zoom, focus, and iris normally have a port for this purpose.  LANC is the most common, but it appears that your camera doesn't have a LANC port.  According to the documentation to which you linked, the camera supports "remote control & streaming" via WiFi.  If it is at all possible to control your camera's zoom remotely, then it seems that WiFi would be the most likely method.


How can I rotate in steps with After Effects? I want to animate a representation digital counter. It is a segmented circle, and each time the counter increments it should move one step forward.

My plan is to start with a graphic with all the segments visible, and then use a mask to block out the "selected" segment - it should look like a digital sweep around the circle.

I can do this with rotation quite easily, but it will be "analogue", in that it will reveal parts of the segment rather than make a discrete change. How can I make an object rotate snappily by x degrees every second, rather than smoothly rotating?

Only way I can think is to use expressions, and set a stepped value, but is there a better (simpler) way?

Figured out how to do it with expressions. You need to know the time taken for a full rotation and the number of degrees you want to increment.

degrees = 6; // Number of degrees to rotate by
fullRotationTime = 60000; // Number of milliseconds to complete a full 360 degree rotation

steps = 360/degrees; // Number of steps in one rotation
divisor = fullRotationTime / steps;

ms = 1000*time; // Milliseconds since start
degrees*(Math.floor(((ms)/divisor)%steps))

This example will "tick" once a second for 60 seconds.


AVI Capture in VirtualDub: MP3 Compression I would like to capture my old VHS tapes to my HDD. I already was successful installing the xvid codec which gives me an acceptable video compression.

But somehow I am not able to set audio compression. In the VirtualDub Audio menu I can choose compression. It then shows me a list of available codecs, among them I can select MPEG Layer-3. But when I go back to check the settings it is not selected anymore and it definitely is not set as compression, since I can see in the stats while capturing: Compression ration 1.0:1.

I also tried to download LAME 3.99.5 ACM codec for Windows 64 Bit and I was able to install it (though it was a bit tricky).

I am on Windows 10 64 Bit. Any suggestions?

After you select LAME codec you also have to select the format. Did you? Note it can only support limited set of sample rates and mono/stereo.
There is something weird about compression ratio. Looks like it shows incoming compression (when audio is already compressed by capture source).


putting 24/7 live radio on website I am trying to figure out how to put a live radio player in a website, for broadcasting from my home studio. I also want to open it up so other people can also broadcast to the website from their homes with minimal setup (maybe through skype?). Not massive amounts of people - it will be just a friends thing to start with. Other features I'd like to implement are being able to switch between live broadcast mode and playing files hosted on the server (or elsewhere, e.g Soundcloud), as well as live broadcasts being automatically recorded and made available for downloading.

I don't know if there's anything out there that does all of that, even though it seems a fairly standard set of requirements, but if there isn't I'd also like to ask for suggestions of how I could piece all this together, since I've no idea how live audio works!
If there really is nothing like that, maybe I could start an open source project and make it happen.

Lithiumhosting is a great provider of streaming audio over the internet. They are pretty cheap too. I use their webservers and I am very pleased with their service!

As to what softwares you should use. It depends on how much money you are willing to put into it. A good way of doing it would be to use an analog mixing board and send the audio into the streaming computer. But you could as well do it on the computer. Again, it depends on how much money you are willing to put into it. Go to Google and study each software in depth. There are dozens of them.

Good luck!


Do I need to configure CUDA in my graphics card for using CUDA support in Pinnacle studio? The title explains a lot. Still, I wanted to ask in order to use

If CUDA is supported by your graphics card it should be enabled by default.

To confirm:

Open NVIDIA Control Panel.
Check that CUDA is enabled in global settings.

Check Application specific settings. Make sure that Pinnacle Studio is selected in the drop down list (where I have Chrome in my example screenshot)
Then make sure Pinncale uses global settings, or directly enable CUDA
finally check if Pinnacle has it's own CUDA settings (I don't know about that.)
if you have still problems, you should contact Pinnacle support


Overlay video with picture with transparent parts In Davinci Resolve, how do I overlay video with picture so that the video can be seen in certain part of the picture?
Here's an example:
Suppose that I have a picture of living room, for example this:

Now I would like to create an effect where the video is playing in that TV. It's simple to cut pixels away in Photoshop to create a transparent part in picture but how do I do it in Davinci Resolve?

In a nutshell, it's the same as you would do in Photoshop.  Resolve has all of the same blending modes as Photoshop does.  In fact, any blending mode is just one of a limited number of ways its mathematically possible to combine one image layer with another.
The main difference between compositing images in Photoshop and Resolve is that in the latter, movement presents additional challenges.  So more accurately, yes Resolve is like Photoshopping an image, but it's like doing it 24 to 60 times every second.
The easiest way to accomplish this depends on your footage.  In the above image, yes, you could cut out the TV screen and plop something into the hole.  But it would probably look bad if that was all you did, and the same is true for Photoshop.  To get a good result in Resolve, think of how you would get a good Result in Photoshop.

You would skew the image you're trying to insert to match the
perspective of the Television's frame.

You would feather the edges of the selection to match the camera's
focus.

You would use an additive blending mode, so that it look like the TV
was emitting light, and you would balance the contribution of the
glare on the front of the TV, depending on how bright you wanted it
to appear.

You might add "spill" as if the TV were adding light to the room
(maybe not in this case, because the room is bright).

But with a moving image, especially if the camera is moving, you also need to "matchmove" or "cornerpin" the image you're inserting, so that it appears locked to the screen.
For the sake of simplicity, lets say that your camera is still and you don't need to track, matchmove, or cornerpin.  If that's the case, then 99% of what you need to do can be accomplished in the inspector panel of Resolve's Edit Page.  There are alternative methods for both the Fusion and Color pages, but the Edit Page is the most straightforward for simple tasks.  The process would go something like this:

Import both pieces of your footage into the media pool (cmd/ctrl-I)

Drag the background image (livingroom scene) onto V1 on your
timeline.  Drag the foreground image onto V2.  Think of the vertical
stack of timeline layers in Resolve like Photoshop's layers.  Like
Photoshop, Resolve "sees" the stack from the top down.

Adjust the size, position, and perspective of the foreground layer to
match the perspective of the TV frame.  In Resolve, select the
foreground "V2" clip, open the inspector panel, and adjust the zoom,
position, rotation, pan, and tilt attributes until your image lines
up.  You can also crop the image a tiny amount, and use the "soft"
slider in lieu of Photoshop's "feathering" controls.

Adjust the composite blend mode in the inspector.  "Add" or "Screen"
are usually good for this type of additive, emissive light.  Adjust
the "opacity" slider to taste.

You can also add effects, similar to Photoshop plugins, by dragging
one from the "effect" tab onto either clip in the timeline.  You
could, for example add a slight glow to V2's clip to help sell the composite.
Controls for these effects will appear in a new tab of the inspector
once you've applied one (the specifics of this tab's placement depend
on which version of Resolve you're using.)


Adobe Media Encoder CC 2017 Will Not Launch on Mac OS Sierra I click the app to launch it, it starts to load in the doc, it even creates preference files in Documents, but then it exits. No error, no splash screen, nothing. I've tried every single suggestion out there from deleting slc files to deleting preferences, uninstalling, reinstalling, deleting the logs and prefs under documents, holding shift down when launch, holding alt, cmd, shift when launching. What else can I do?

For some reason this is required to export videos from Premiere, is there no way to export videos without it?

When you choose Export Media from Premiere Pro CC 2017, there are options to either Queue the export request (which sends to Media Encoder, aka AME) or Export directly, which, as it says, directly exports media without going through AME.

Perhaps your Console log has some notes about what your system doesn't like about AME (or vice-versa).  On my system it launches without error (though it takes its time initializing all the bundles before it starts).


Ripped DVD Video Playback Stutters, original DVD does not I have a DVD of home video made from a VHS that I'm trying to rip so I can post it to YouTube. I've ripped a couple of videos using both Mac DVDRipper Pro and Handbrake to compare the output after I noticed some stuttering in my first rip. The videos from both apps have stutters in the same spots but the stuttering doesn't exist when I play the disc in DVD Player.

It's not often, sometimes every couple of minutes for just a moment. Other times it will go 5 to 8 minutes without any stutter. I've noticed momentary sound dropping out for these stutters in both QuickTime and in QuickLook, and also just now in VLC. It's nothing major but annoying and something I'd like to fix seeing as the source DVD doesn't have these playback issues.

Could extracting the DVD as a disc image first and ripping that solve the stuttering playback?

I'm ripping from the optical drive in my 27" iMac under Mavericks. Any help would be appreciated.

It sounds like the framerate of the rip doesn't match the framerate of the DVD. I would check if those match. The QuickTime Inspector can do this or a great tool called MediaInfo.


Lavalier vs. cardioid mic for low-budget amateur DSLR video recording? I have a Canon T5i DSLR, and I take occasional videos in parties, family gatherings, kids playing, birthday parties, etc. The internal mic is really bad, especially in noisy environments.

I am thinking of buying a cheap microphone to connect to the camera.

Which one you would suggest for an amateurish/multipurpose use: Lavalier or cardioid shotgun?

Stuff I am looking for: ease of use, noise cancellation, and enhancement of the audio record quality.

Thanks

It depends no how far away you are shooting from and how centered your subject will be.  You definitely DO NOT want a lavalier mic for your situation.  They do offer very nice noise reduction while not requiring a boom operator, but they still require setup and distinct micing of each speaker.  This will not work at all in your use case.

You absolutely want a shotgun mic, no question at all about it.  The question becomes, how focused of a shotgun mic do you want?  This is a trade off kind of thing.  The more focused the shotgun mic (moving from cardioid in to supercardioid and then hypercardioid on most mics, but some manufacturers label differently apparently).  The narrower the mic's sweet spot, the less noise you will get, but the closer your subjects will have to be to that sweet spot to be audible.

If you are shooting from a long way away or shooting pointed directly at someone, then a hypercardioid mic is the way to go to get the least interference and focus in the most on that spot.  If, instead, you are going to have a lot of people, all over the frame, and right up next to the camera, then you want just a plain cardioid mic on top that can pick up a wide space of sound, but it will also pick up a lot more noise.

Look at pick up patterns and try to visualize where people will be.  You ideally want them to fall in the coverage circle for the microphone if you were looking top down on the scene.


How can I stitch together several m2ts video files into one large file? I have recorded several community theater productions with a Panasonic TM900 camera. The settings on the camera were to record at 1080p @ 60 FPS.  However, I noticed that the camera produces  several video files (.m2ts).

While the included Panasonic HD Editor software plays the videos seamlessly that is not the case with other video players such as Windows Media Player.

I want to be able stitch together two or more m2ts video files without losing the quality of the original footage. What software should I use to do this? I do not need fancy editing capabilities though I would like to cut some scenes from the video such as during the play's intermission.

Open source software or at least free software is preferred but commercial software is not out of the question if it works well and it is easy to use.

I believe you can join MPEG ts (transport stream) files simply by joining them together.  In Linux:

cat file1.m2ts file2.m2ts file3.m2ts > joined_file.m2ts

In Windows/DOS:

copy /b file1.m2ts + file2.m2ts + file3.m2ts joined_file.m2ts /b

As long as the input files are split properly, and each new file begins with a key frame (and I would expect your camera does this), this should work just fine. And even if your camera is not careful about splitting right before a keyframe (again, I'd be surprised if it doesn't), as long as you re-join in the exact same order, it ought to work.


How to auto-tune the audio track of a video file to produce a modified video file I would like to auto-tune the audio track of an mp4 video file. I know I can convert the mp4 to mp3 first and auto-tune the mp3 file, but I want the output to be a modified video clip with the audio track tuned to a note. Specifically, I want to loop a <1 second video clip of my dog barking and auto-tune each cut to different notes to create a melody track that will remain in sync with the video track, so it looks like my dog is singing happy birthday. I can't be the first brain-dead dog lover to have attempted this.

Start by looping the video so that you get the timing right - so you end up with that single bark hitting the correct beats for the song.

For the audio, you'll want to then use a DAW or other tool to pitch shift each sample to the desired new pitch. All major DAWs have this functionality built in, or you could use the Pitch Shift effect in Audacity if you like a free option. If you don't know the notes for Happy Birthday, you can easily find them online.

Very quick and easy to do, and you don't need any expensive software or hardware to do it.

And you are right - you are not the first. There are hundreds of these online. Check out this example.


How to move logo relative video on program monitor in Adobe CC? How to move a picture like logo which is on one videotrack relative video which is on other videotrack in Adobe Premiere CC? In previous version it was easy to do double click on the picture in program monitor and was possible to move or transform picture like in "freetransform" in Photoshop. But it doesn t work in Adobe CC.

Assuming I understood your question correctly (which I'm not certain of, given your poetic writing style that appears to have transcended past the need for meager punctuation), you can still double click the image in the program monitor to get into the 'free transform' mode. I just tested it in the current version of Premiere Pro CC and it works as expected.
Alternatively, you can select the clip that you want to move/scale in the timeline and open the Effects Control panel. Click on this icon next to the Motion tab:

This will also enter the free transform mode that allows you to move/scale the clip.


Transcoding vertical video to an intermediate codec I used the Android SDK to record some steps for a tutorial video and am having some difficulty working with the footage. First of all, it's of a variable framerate and secondly it's in 1080:1920 - vertical 1080p.

I had hoped to use ffmpeg to transcode to DNxHD but I can't find the right video filter (scale? hflip?) to squeeze it into a resolution that DNxHD supports while retaining the aspect ratio.

I've tried:

ffmpeg -i "recording6.mp4" -vf "scale=-1:1080" -vcodec dnxhd -r 60 -b:v 36M "recording6_DNxHD.mov"

ffmpeg -i "recording6.mp4" -vf "scale=1920:1080" -vcodec dnxhd -r 60 -b:v 36M "recording6_DNxHD.mov"

ffmpeg -i "recording6.mp4" -vf hflip -vcodec dnxhd -r 60 -b:v 36M "recording6_DNxHD.mov"

ffmpeg -i "recording6.mp4" -vf vflip -vcodec dnxhd -r 60 -b:v 36M "recording6_DNxHD.mov"

The first fails because of an unsupported resolution, the second works but changes the aspect ratio, and the third and fourth also fail due to unsupported resolutions.

I realize there are other codecs which are more forgiving than dnxhd in terms of resolution, but I really don't want to lose any detail at this step. So if anyone knows of one which is similarly visually-lossless I'm open to trying it.

Any help you can offer would be much appreciated.

Assuming your editor can rotate videos, use

ffmpeg -i "recording6.mp4" -vf "transpose=1" -vcodec dnxhd -r 60 -b:v 36M "recording6.mov"

This will rotate the video, so the 1080x1920 video becomes 1920x1080.


Aspera Client availability for download A customer asked me if it was possible to use Aspera FTP instead normal FTP protocol to upload files to their machines.

Obviously I got their address, credentials and so on. The fun part started when I tried to download the Aspera client in order to upload the files to their servers.

It seems that the clients are on the aspera website, but if you want to download the file you have to provide the username and password.

Is this a misconfigured HTTP server or you have to pay even for the client in some ways? Tome sound weird because normally you pay if you want to implement the infrastructure not if you just want to connect to the remote server but who knows..

You probably want Aspera Connect, not the client, which you should be able to download without a password. Additionally, your customer should be able to supply you with the Connect installer that matches their server.


ffmpeg command to convert mpeg2 with ac3 audio codec to audible H264/ ProResHQ? I try to convert a mpeg2 video to mov with codec ac3 but when put ffmpeg -i 1.mpg 1.mov the audio don't convert.

¿Anyone know why?

Use

ffmpeg -i 1.mpg -c:v libx264 -c:a ac3 -b:a 192k 1.mov

in order to convert to a MOV file containing H.264 video and AC3 audio. I've used 192kb/s as bitrate for the audio and the H.264 encoding will use the defaults of CRF 23 and preset 'medium'.

To convert only video, and strip out audio, use

ffmpeg -i 1.mpg -c:v libx264 -an 1.mov


How make full width video screen of video photo
show my video who is not full in width,can I make somehow my video is like 2. photo, full width video screen without empy space left and right?

You are referring to resizing the video.If you are using Windows platform you can use Windows movie maker to do it.Add your media file and switch to Project Tab you can set the ratio. only the two mentioned are available.
Wide Screen(16:9) & Standard(4:3)

If you are looking for a fully customizable Space,the free program recommended program is Handbrake
.Download it,install and run the program.

Choose the particular video clicking on the source button and navigate to it.
Next choose the destination for the output
Click on the picture tab and choose None from the Anamorphic dropdown list
Then adjust your height and width (Make sure you untick "keep aspect Ratio")
Finally click Start then you will see the adjusted video in the folder you chose for the destination output.

Check the image:

You can reduce the resolution too(Reducing resolution) with this tool.

Thats it, Enjoy:)


x265: Is it possible to re-compress HEVC video without quality loss? My situation:

Transcoding 1080p bluray videos to HEVC. Audio untouched;
My rig is old (pre-2012) and to speed up the process I'm using --preset ultrafast;
From x265 documentation, I understand that video quality is independent of the preset used. And the slower the preset, the better the compression ratio it seems;
I'm using FFmpeg.

My Reasoning:

I want to start converting to HEVC now because the codec is good enough for me and the space saving is phenomenal;
I've seen people reporting a 35GB video compressed to 1GB or so with crf=18 and --preset veryslow. It sounds ludicrous but an experiment of my own shows about 40% additional space saving between presets ultrafast and veryslow.

The Question:

When I get a new rig with a more capable CPU (Skylake or later, I hear), is it possible for me, to "re-compress" my HEVC videos using eg. --preset veryslow, without quality loss due to encoding a second time?

In strict mathematical terms, no.

In terms of maintaining an acceptable image quality, yes. If you use CRF 18 and a preset like ultrafast now, you should be able to get a smaller acceptable file with preset veryslow later on.


Which cameras produce video that can be edited on a mac without transcoding? My old video camera is a Samsung HMX-H104. I love its time lapse video modes, but hate the fact that Samsung's bogus codec causes Quicktime (and also iMovie) to play Samsung recorded video at twice their actual horizontal resolution. The only way to make Samsung videos usable is to transcode them in Compressor.

I'm considering getting a new video camera - how do I ensure that I don't end up with another camera that requires transcoding?

Also, if I'm considering switching from iMovie to Kino, Blender or maybe FCP X should that influence my choice of camera?

Update - The codec problem with Samsung cameras goes beyond iMovie. Quicktime player 10 can't play the videos correctly either, and I don't want to optimize my camera choice for just iMovie.

One way is to ask the people in the shop you intend to buy from.
Or (if you plan to buy online), narrow down to a list of potential cameras then ask again here with specific camera names.

Another idea is, if you have a compatible memory card, go to shop, ask to try the camera then shoot some video with your memory card in.
Then you can bring your memory card home and try it out.

I've done this with a digital SLR so I could check out the image quality on my computer.


How do I change the audio on a H.264 MP4 without re-rendering the file? Is there any way to swap out the audio track on a rendered H.264 MPEG-4 without having to re-render the entire video project? Can this be done with Premiere, MPEG Streamclip, ffmpeg, or some other tool that I'm not familiar with ?

I have a long video project that took many hours to render, and I would like to swap out the audio (minor mixing changes) without having to re-render the entire video project. The new audio is exactly the same length.

Is this feasible? I'm primarily a Premiere user, but I'm happy to hear solutions for other tools.

ffmpeg is a good choice for this task. You can do this with this command:

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -i input_audio.aac -map 0:0 -map 1 -vcodec copy -acodec copy output.mp4


Add filter to prores file I have captured some Mini-dv home videos to .avi.
With ffmpeg I converted to prores v2 .mov files.
Now i need to add yadiff filter.(interlaced -> noninterlaced)
Is is possible to "update" my files with the yadif filter without write a complete new file ?
If not, how do I preserve my movie/audio quality/filesize while adding the yadif filter.
Is ffmpeg -i file1.mov -vf yadif -c:v prores_ks -profile:v 2 -c:a copy New-File1.mov the best way to do this ?
Or can I use the copy funktion for the video as I do for the audio?

/tnx in adv

Your best bet if you want to de-interlace and convert to prores without extra loss in quality is to do both actions at once.  Any re-encode, particularly if the encoding you are working from has had consumer level codecs and/or bitrates applied in the past, will cause (potentially significant) additional degradation.  Your best bet is to minimize the number of re-encodes needed by doing as much processing at the same time as you can and maintaining the highest possible image quality as long as possible in your tool chain.

It is unfortunately not possible to make many alterations to video without a re-encode.  There's a limited number of actions that can sometimes be taken, but something like de-interlacing is not included in that list.


Advice on lens for Glidecam I was asked to video a wedding. Here are my lenses: 50mm f1.8, 10-18 f4.5-5.6, 18-135 f3.5‑5.6. Camera is a Canon 3ti.

I'm thinking about renting a glidecam hd 1000, and my question is, will the 10-18 be good enough, or do I need a faster lens for better results since there might be times when light is low? For example, a canon 20mm f2.8 or 24mm f2.8 or Tokinha 11-16 f2.8 or even a 24-70 or 24-105. Also, does the IS play a big role here?

Thanks for any advices.

Two things come to my mind: If you never operated or balanced a Glidecam before you will probably have a hard time. When using a Glidecam IS will not make such a big difference but nonetheless there will be one. So better have IS.

I am assuming that you are using a DSLR like the Canon EOS 5D Mk III.
Especially the 5D has quite good low light capabilities. Faster leses are generally speaking good but keep in mind that you need to pull focus manually and that you need several meters depth of field. So you might be good to go with what you have.


Approximate render time in After Effects CS6 I'm working on a project with After Effects CS6. All videos I'm producing are quite similar to each other (both in terms of footage, montage, duration, resolution etc.). Currently it takes 6h to render (produce H264 file) 1h of 720p footage therefore rendering multiplier is 6.

I'm interested in approximate render time with upgraded configuration (with exact same software stack) in terms of rendering multiplier, or, in simpler terms - what would be my performance gain with new configuration? I'm not quite familiar how much CPU/RAM/GPU affects video rendering performance in After Effects so any help is appreciated.

If it helps, I don't use any special effects or plugins, pretty much just overlaying some images and text on top of multiple videos.

Current configuration

Core2Duo E6600 @ 2.40 GHz (Dual-Core, PassMark is 1,545)
4 GB of RAM
Nvidia GeForce 210 (512 MB)
OCZ Vertex 4 SSD 128 GB
Windows x64 with After Effects CS6

Potential new configuration

i7 4770 @ 3.40 GHz (Quad-Core, PassMark is 9,966)
16 GB or 32 GB of RAM
Nvidia GeForce GTX 760 (2 GB)
OCZ Vertex 4 SSD 128 GB
Windows x64 with After Effects CS6

Sadly this isn't really answerable in an exact way.  There is simply too many variables at play.  How much motion is in your source and final videos as well as how computationally and memory dependent your effects that you are applying will all impact the overall performance.  Your best bet for getting an idea of the performance increase is to look at what is currently resource constrained on your system.  Are you maxing CPU usage, memory usage, graphics card processing or disk access?  Increasing whatever you are constrained by will produce a significant improvement.

Based on your current configuration though I can try to take a guess, you are really underpowered in pretty much all categories other than disk access.  Dual core 2.4 ghz with 4gb of ram and a low end 512mb graphics card is nothing when it comes to rendering.  I'm actually a bit surprised it manages an hour in 6 hours.

To give you an idea of a comparison, my computer is a 2.93 ghz original i7 with 12gb of ram, striped SSDs and a Radeon 6970 (which sadly can't make use of the CUDA support).  I can comfortably render clips that are higher than 1080p quality with 2 pass VBR compression in just over twice the runtime.  With the CUDA support on the GTX, you'd probably see even more of an improvement.  For your 720p case, I make no promises, but it wouldn't surprise me if it would run faster than real time.  (Not to mention the fact your experience just using the software will be infinitely better.)


Best PC configuration to render Mid level Videos I have tried so many PCs but didn't find any reasonable PC for video editing. I want to Edit video on Adobe Premiere Cs6 for which I need a good PC Can any one guide me what will be the configuration to run the Adobe Premiere Smoothly without any trouble or Slow rendering.

Thanks

There's lots of things to consider for a video editing machine, and the program you're using isn't everything, there's also what you're editing. For example, you'll benefit from a more powerful GPU for playback and rendering of high resolution files, and more ram for larger video files. That said, I have a Dell XPS 8700 with an i7-4790 processor for editing short films and some vfx and animation, and it runs fantastic, and it's only a $700 computer.

When looking at specs you'll want at least a quad-core i7 processor, at least 8GB of ram, and some kind of dedicated graphics if only something like a GT 720.

When looking at a processor, go for more cores over a faster clock. An Intel Xeon might he a good choice at the more expensive end.

RAM is easy to upgrade, so I'd start with 8GB and add more if you find yourself running out. I personally never have suffered with 8GB. Clock on the ram doesn't matter that much, just get the cheapest stuff you can.

For the GPU you want an Nvidia GPU. More CUDA cores is what you want. Baseline you've got a GT 720 or 730. A little more and you've got a GTX 750ti. Want to be the fancy kid on the block, get a GTX 960. If you really want to show off, get a GTX Titan X.


How to overlay 2 videos using depth layers I'm trying to overlay 2 videos which both have depth layers (e.g. how far a pixel is away from the camera) using ffmpeg filters. (I have a few hundred of those videos so I'd like to do batch job out of this)

the video files are perfectly in sync with each other and their depth layers. The Files are saved in the lagarith lossless encoding (which ffmpeg can read). The video files are also using a greenscreen which I already filter using this command:

ffmpeg -loglevel info -hide_banner -i "%fst%" -i "%snd%" -filter_complex "[1:v]chromakey=0x00ff00:0.5:0.0[ckout];[0:v][ckout]overlay[out]" -map [out] -c:v hevc_nvenc -preset lossless -c:a aac "result.mp4"

This command takes video %snd% makes the greenscreen transparent and puts the result on top of %fst% and writes it to result.mp4

The issue is, that I'd like also include the depth layers into the merge process, so that the nearer pixel is selected from both videos (the pixel with the brighter depth layer pixel). (the greenscreen can be rendered transparent in a later iteration, so we don't have to worry about that)

For the depth layers the variables %fst_depth% and %snd_depth% are defined.

Does anyone an idea at what filter I should take look at or even a full solution for this issue?

Thanks in advance.

UPDATE:
I have partially a working solution:

@ffmpeg -i %fst% -i %snd% -i %fst_depth% -i %snd_depth% -filter_complex  "[2:v][3:v] blend=all_expr='if(lt(A,B),0,255)' [mask] ;[0:v][1:v][mask] maskedmerge [out]" -shortest -map [out] -c:v hevc_nvenc -preset lossless -c:a aac "result2.mp4"

The issue with this one is, that for some reason, the second video objects are missing most of the colors and are partially transparent for some reason. The weird blocky glitches got solved (depth map inaccurate), but the colors are still weird:

Example of a Video Frame:
Example of the according depth Frame (black near, white far):

The main issue was, that the Z-Layer was not accurate enough, as Gyan said. Addtionally the condition needed to be changed from lt(A,B) to lte(A,B).


Easy script for making and overlaying video counters? I wanted to make a family of videos like

and I was wondering if there were any easy plugins/scripts to be able to create and increment the counter while watching a video. I envision something that operates like a little html/java script that increments on a keystroke as you run through the video, that you can later style something like CSS. I obviously am not saying it has to be exactly like this, but in essence I want to know if there are any bits bits of software like that. If not I might just try making it.

In that case Adobe After Effects can do this easily, which probably also produced the effect in the video.
It's actually the only software where I know you can do this without too much manual labor. Other products usually only offer a timer effect which would be tedious to use for these kind of things.

Though if you want to do this based on just a single key press and don't want to set keyframes manually you will have to write a script for After Effects, this can be done either via Adobe ExtendScript which is a subset of JavaScript or alternatively Windows Batch and Apple Script. I'd suggest using ExtendScript, it has better documentation and is relativley easy to use.

Be advised that this won't be a task that you can finish in 1-2 days if you haven't worked with After Effects yet. Especially the scripting part. Do it manually first and then look how you can automate it via a script.


Adobe Premiere Pro - Select timeline region and remove it I'm new to Adobe Premiere Pro CC.
How do I select a region in the timeline using the keyboard and then delete it, like you'd do in Sony Vegas Pro?

This can be done very easily be setting In and Out points in the sequence timeline.

In and Out points can be set using the I and O keys respectively.

Once you have made your select, press the Delete key to remove the selection.

Make sure that the video and audio tracks you want deleted have 'track targeting' activated.

If you want to quickly remove the gap between all the clips, you can also right-click in the empty area and select 'Ripple Delete'.


After 5 minutes, audio dramatically goes out of sync for rest of video. Shifting that audio section around fixes problem only for a few seconds At the 5min:12sec mark in this Facebook Live video, there is a glitch/freeze. The audio goes out for a few seconds, and then comes back in. But when it comes back in, it is terribly out of sync. I have downloaded the video, and am trying to fix it. I will ultimately be uploading it to my YouTube account.

Unfortunately, shifting that section of audio around fixes the problem briefly, but it soon returns. In other words, it seems that the length of the video is now a different than it's audio track.I tried the advice in this video without success.

How do I re-sync the audio and video tracks?

You probably have mismatched framerates. This can cause audio drift. The solution for that would be to slow or speed the audio up slightly.


Frame stacking effect in After Effects If I have a locked-off camera filming an athlete moving through the frame, how could I stack the frames so that every new frame of movement was layered on top of the next?  Assuming the background remains static throughout, is there a clever way to do it without tonnes of rotoscoping?
For example, here's a (famous) sequence of a horse running:

And here's the kind of effect I'd like to be able to achieve, without keying/rotoscoping etc:

Note that I made this with a simple luma key, because the background is mostly white.

Think about what you're asking. When you did the horse you used a luma key to isolate just the horse. If the horse was running through trees or down a racetrack what would you want to happen to the trees and other stuff in the background? Would they go over the horse from the layer underneath? If so, how are you going to see the layer underneath?

There's no way of overlaying frames without the front layer being partially transparent - either transparent in part of the frame (masks or roto), transparent depending on their pixel values (transfer mode, or key) or with an overall opacity of less than 100%. If it's not transparent then you can't see the background, it's that simple.

If you can, shoot against a green screen and key out your foreground. This will let you layer it up to create a visual echo as you show in your example. That's the best way to do this, even though it's "cheating".

If chroma keying is not possible, and if only part of your frame is moving, you might be able to use a difference matte. Get an empty shot of your background and use that to matte out only the parts of the frame that have changed. This will work best with locked-off shots.

Failing that, have a play with various transfer modes. They're basically pixel level keys that work depending on the value of the foreground and background colour. I worked with a visual artist who produced some lovely dance videos using time-delayed layering kind of technique. She filmed the dancers against black, and rather than pulling a key we just used the lighten transfer mode - which is basically a way of keying parts of your image that are darker than the layers below (we were using hundred of layers in each comp, I did some scripting work to make the whole process a lot easier).

Otherwise, if transfer modes, chroma / luma keys or difference keys don't work, put on a pot of tea, turn up the music and get stuck in to the roto.


Software that exports into multiple formats and sizes? Sorry if this is a bit of a vague question. But does anyone know a piece of software that will take one or preferably multiple videos and turn them into multiple formats and quality?

So video.mp4 would result in:

video.mp4 compressed 1080p
video.mp4 compressed 720p
video.wmv compressed 1080p
video.wmv compressed 720p
video.avi compressed 1080p
video.avi compressed 720p

etc

If you are looking something that can do that at the same time and is reasonably well developed, then you are probably looking at avconv. It has the same base as ffmpeg, which has already been mentioned, but currently doesn't have a GUI (to the best of my knowledge, i've not gone looking, since i have no need for it).

Let's look at an example of how you would go to create a file format that you have described there.

avconv -i video.mp4 \
 -c:a libmp3lame -q:a 3 -c:v libxvid -s hd720 -q:v 7 video720.avi \
 -c:a libmp3lame -q:a 3 -c:v libxvid -s hd1080 -q:v 7 video1080.avi \
 ...

You can just go on and on adding bits, and it will do encoding in parallel (which is much more efficient approach than sequential encoding on the modern multicore systems).

I didn't give you an example of encoding into WMV, simply because i've never done that, and i have actually recompiled my avconv to disable this, but it is possible if you feel that it is important for your system.

Depending on your operating system the installation process will be different. On Debian and Ubuntu GNU/Linux you do that by just typing:

sudo apt-get install libav-tools

But it may be necessary for you to build your own binaries. To do so you need to get the original source code from libav.org and then run:

./configure --prefix=/home/USERNAME/.local --bindir=/home/USERNAME/bin \
  --enable-gpl --enable-version3 \
  --enable-encoder=ENCODER

USERNAME is your username, and you can change bindir if you don't have bin in your execution path. You can also enable any encoder that you will need by checking which ones are available and adding them via --enable-encoder. To check available ones, just run:

./configure --list-encoders

But in all likelihood you will have no need to recompile unless you are doing something strange.


Looking to write a DaVinci Resolve plugin I have a pretty specific requirement for a plugin to detect stillness. I'm shooting a lot of screencasts and the shooting process leaves lots of pauses, which must be removed in the edit.
I'm a developer, so a script to detect n frames where each frame is a duplicate of the prior, would be ideal.
Can someone point me in the direction of either a scripting API, or (better yet) a plugin that does this already .. or a plugin library I can search for one?
Thanks!

The Resolve scripting API comes with DaVinci Resolve Studio.  The most platform-agnostic way of finding it is through the Resolve "help" menu, under Help->Documentation->Developer.  This will open a folder in your system browser which contains scripting examples for LUA, PYTHON, OFX, and more.  The README.txt file in the scripting folder contains a list of commonly used API functions.
User julian_b has posted pretty printed versions of this text file on the Resolve user forums, but as he warns, those versions may not be the most current. Formatted Resolve Python API Docs
Also, you'll want to get your hands on the Fusion 8 Scripting Guide and Reference Manual.pdf .  Much of Resolve's scripting power came with the acquisition of eyeon Fusion, which is now integrated within Resolve, and its constituent classes and methods are contained within a "Fusion" scriptable object.
There's an active community of Fusion users who maintain a very supportive forum with helpful scripting resources at steakunderwater.com/wesuckless.  (There's a long history behind the strange domain name, which comes from the eyeon days).  There, you'll find the Suck Less Fusion Bug Tracker, the "Scripting, Fuses, and Macros" subforum, and Reactor, a Fusion plugin package manager, which contains more helpful links to resources, as well as its own helpful scripting examples.

or (better yet) a plugin that does this already .. or a plugin library I can search for one?

Reactor is the place you'd find one already built, if one exists already.  It would also be the place to share one which you create.  When you're ready to deploy, the site admin, Secondman frequently helps new developers bundle their packages for Reactor.
While WSL and Reactor aren't "official" documentation, its volunteers are active, supportive, and passionate experts, whose guidance is invaluable, and I cannot recommend highly enough.


Burn MKV with subtitles on a DVD I have a movie on an mkv file, the movie has video, audio and the subtitles all in the mkv file but I cannot find a way to burn it to dvd including the subtitles. I need to get VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS files out of the mkv file so I can burn those on dvd with a program like ImgBurn.

Please tell me which program I can use to get those VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS files (including working subtitles) out of my MKV file, I would like to keep the quality the MKV file has, and I need a program that is 100% free, I don't want a free trial.

Thank you for reading.

Best Regards,
Bas

Use Freemake Video Converter, it's 100% free and you can just burn MKV files on dvd, on the dvd, the subtitles also work if you set that up properly in the Freemake Video Converter program.


How can I put a PowerPoint presentation with a recording of the presenter? I have a video recording of a presenter, going through her PowerPoint presentation and taking crowd questions.

I'd like to be able to upload the video of the presentation along with the PowerPoint presentation, shown side by side.

There are plenty of YouTube videos that have this sort of thing going on. For example, most DEFCON presentations (example) show the recording of the presenter in a corner, the logo below, and the slides taking the rest of the video.

Is there a simple way to do this?

Any timeline-based multi-track video editor with crop and scale features will allow you to do this. Basic idea is to import all three assets viz. video, logo and Powerpoint (see below) on different tracks in the editor and resize/crop each of them so that the composition looks like the DEFCON videos.

The time-consuming part is syncing the slides with the presentation. That may be simple but not quick.

For Powerpoint, one has to export individual images of all slides, if there's no animation or transition in the PPT that you want to preserve, or export a video if you do. For video export, you need 2007 or later version of Powerpoint, I believe.

All professional video editors (Premiere, FCP, Avid, Vegas, Edius..etc) can do this. Here's a list. I'm not aware which of the free or lite video editors are best suited for your task, sorry.


Fix distorted mp4 files In our university sometimes the recordings of videos are very distorted.

Example frame (please ignore the red bar it's just there for privacy reasons):

I know that basically I would need to move each pixel of each frame horizontally based on its vertical position. Is there a way to do this with FFmpeg?

Thanks in advance!

Thanks to @Gyan, I was able to fix it.

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf "geq=p(mod(X+Y*2\,W)\, Y)" output.mp4


Need help finding the right video production software I have the following situation:
- I need to create a movie in the format .mov or .mp4 on Windows 8.
- As sources I have already 10 .mov files in a format 1600x1200 on Windows8. (originals)
- I need to speed up some parts of my video up to 30 from the original.
- I need to export the constructed video again as 1600 x 1200 in .mov or .mp4 with the same quality as the originals.

I tried to do this already with my tools I already have, but I did not succeed:
My Software:
- Microsoft movie maker
- Handbrake
- Movie Studio Platinum 13.0
- Windows8

I like the simple MovieMaker, but it cannot handle/produce 1600*1200.
Also Movie Studio Platinum 13.0 can't produce 1600*1200 and I am not able to speed up the video more then 4x.

Any hints ?

UPDATE

My Speeduf problem is solved, but I am still searching for a performant reliable software to create videos in the format 1600*1200.
I have Movie Studio Platinum 13.0 which is unusable. It produces black screens in some parts of the video and it lags. I have a high performant computer with 24GB of ram.

Can someone suggest any software ?

You could use Davinci Resolve. The free version can do all the things you want.
It's a professional software tho, so you'll maybe need to read into it.
But you can allways ask here, we can guide you further if you're stuck.


ffmpeg: preserve timecode when converting mp4 to mov I have .mp4 files created by a Sony A7s camera. They're using the XAVC S codec. I'm converting them to .mov using the command below. The original files have a timecode but that is not present in the output file. The output files have their timecodes set to zero. Is there any way to preserve the timecode?

ffmpeg -i [filenmae] -vcodec copy -acodec copy [outputDirectory]

In case someone else comes looking for this, timecode in mp4 and mov files is often a "data" track, and ffmpeg usually drops data tracks. To keep all tracks, I usually use these switches to map tracks from the source to tracks in the destination

-map 0:v (video switches)
-map 0:a (audio switches)
-map 0:d (this keeps the data track)

Which also has the advantage of keeping all the source audio tracks, rather than the default of only the first one. So your command might look like

ffmpeg -i [filenmae] -map 0:v -codec:v copy -map 0:a -codec:a copy -map 0:d [outputDirectory]

EDIT: In modern ffmpeg you can also add a question mark (like -0:a?) which means ffmpeg will keep going if it doesn't find a track like you asked it to copy


what hardware can I use to connect a Laserdisc player to my laptop? I have a Windows 7 Laptop (Sony VGN-Z12GN) and a Pioneer DVL-9 Laserdisc player.

I want to digitize some of my Laserdiscs.

I have some experience with video transcoding (Virtual Dub, Sony Vegas), but I have absolutely no idea how I to get the signal from the Laserdisc player into the laptop in the first place.

What kind of hardware is necessary and most useful for this purpose?

I somewhere read that I can use a TV card for this, but as I described above, I have a laptop.

The best quality output that your LaserDisc player has is S-Video, so you will want to get a capture device that supports S-Video input.

Your laptop has three inputs that could be used.  You have 4 pin firewire, ExpressCard34 and USB2.0.  The USB solutions are the cheapest, but also generally the lowest quality.  Either a firewire based external adapter or an ExpressCard34 internal adapter should work about equally well depending on build quality.  The data rates supported are much higher and the quality should be superior, but it's also going to cost more as that moves more into prosumer and professional territory.

Unfortunately, I can't tell you much in terms of capture devices.  Most of the tech has moved on to being HD focused at this point and finding products that are still made to capture high quality SD video seems to be trickier now than it used to be.


Precise Keyframing in Final Cut Pro X I'm wondering how I can expand the transformation line like it's possible for the compositing. Can it be done? Where can I edit the connection between two keyframes from linear to ...?

You cannot expand the Transform Line in the Timeline. You can finetune your Position keyframes separately in the Viewer.

Create keyframes and navigate between them with the keyframe buttons in the top-left corner of the Viewer.

Position keyframes

Click the Transform button in the lower-left corner of the Viewer (Shift-T).

The yellow handles in the middle of your clip are your position keyframes. Control-click on one of them.

Choose Smooth in the popup, you will see two smaller red dots, they are the bezier handles!

You can change direction and speed by moving the bezier handles.

change the length of the handle that points to the other keyframe
short means fast, long means slow
set your start speed in the first keyframe, and your end speed in the last keyframe.
if you make them both short, you will start gradually, speed up in the middle and slow down before stopping. use it for a smooth motion
if you make them both long, you will start promptly, slow down in the middle and stop abruptly. Use this effect to imitate gravity (bouncing)

Rotation and Scale keyframes

These can also be set separately but they are not visible on the Position line in the viewer as yellow dots.
In the middle of your clip is the blue Rotation handle.
On the corners and borders are the eight blue handles for Scaling.
Scale and Rotation keyframes don't have a smooth option in FCPX. It might be possible to do that in Motion.


rendering with the video card in MeGUI I do not know this is the right forum to ask for help.

I need help to speed up rendering with the software MeGUI 2500.

First I render to premiere with the help of CUDA.
CUDA makes the video card also yield, speeding too.

I put the second video has already ended in MeGUI 2500 with AVS scriptcreator decrease the size without affecting the quality too. Only in this software (MeGUI) did not find how to enable the video card to render.

If you have no way someone could tell me other compression software that helps with the video card? Why premiere is not very good at it.

If I understand you correctly, it sounds like you are trying to find a piece of software that can use hardware acceleration to encode video generated by AVISynth.  If that's the case, I'd suggest looking at Handbrake, which is capable of utilizing GPU acceleration and should handle AVISynth sources just fine.


Practice Manual Focussing I'm planning on shooting a short film in about 2 weeks with my Nikon d5300. Since its aAutofocus is unusable for video (it's great for photos, but too slow to be used for video in live view), I decided to manually focus. There will be many close-up shots (i.e. the actor's face, maybe a bit of the shoulders) with a shallow depth of field (up to f/1.8, 35mm). Often, the distance to the subject will vary throughout the shot as there will be camera movement.
So I figured I need to practice manual focussing. How? Do I simply take an object, record a video, move the camera and try to keep in in focus? Do you have any other tips?

Update
I still did not get to shoot the short film as planning didn't go as expected and then, I had a lot of stress with school. However, the answers so far are great in that they explain how MF is usually done on a higher budget. I still however miss how I can practice focussing manually.

Ever see the credit for "focus puller" in a film's credits? That's a single person's job, just to keep the camera focus where it should be on a moving shot (or even for changing the focus point at the right time in an otherwise static shot).

Usually the shot would be blocked out before hand, and they would work out exactly where the object of focus is going to be throughout the shot - they know in advance exactly where the focus needs to be at what time, and that person will make those focus adjustments as the shot is filmed, while other independent operators are moving, zooming, tracking, etc the camera. If your camera has the ability for the focus to be remote controlled via a pre-programmed sequence, that is also an option (usually you would remote control the camera movement as well, so it is all in sync).

Trying to manually track the focus while you're also operating the rest of the camera will be difficult to achieve accurately. I would consider breaking up your shots if possible, and cutting between more static shots. Otherwise just rehearse the shots as much as you can - it's not that it can't be done, but there's a reason films have an independent person working on just that task.


Timelapse video with meta information on every frame I have a set of images that I want to make a time lapse video with. I have done this a few times but now I want to add some meta information to every image.

For example I have taken a picture every day from the same spot and it would be quite nice if I had some calendar along the border where I could show the current day of month so the user can virtually see the time passing on the video.

Another example would be an analogue clock, which shows the current time for images that were taken in quick succession.

At the moment it's very hard for me to figure out how I can achieve such a thing, so any help would be greatly appreciated. Unfortunately I don't have access to "Pro-Style" Video Editing Software like After Effects and the like.

This may only answer the first part of your question:

I found this article on superuser.  It's on extracting the metadata from a batch of images.  They are using ExifTool, a command-line tool for Windows and OS X.

  ExifTool is a platform-independent Perl library plus a command-line application for reading, writing and editing meta information in a wide variety of files. ExifTool supports many different metadata formats...as well as the maker notes of many digital cameras...

You can find ExifTool here.  It looks pretty handy, I'll be installing it today.  It looks like it will output a csv with all the metadata you want.  That csv is what a program would use to burn into your video.

As far as burning the data into your video, I'm not finding anything online that would take any sort of data set and burn it onto a video or even to a jpeg, especially without "Pro" software.

I would be interested to hear your solution to this, if any.  It seems just putting the raw metadata in there wouldn't serve much purpose, because of the framerate.  It'd be nice to see some sort of graphical ebb and flow of the data, again, don't know how it could be done without paid software.