Object removal in After Effects via Content-Aware? I have footage from a drone, and there's a rather unsightly floating thing that I'd like to remove. I've heard that one could export this video as frames and use Photoshop's built in "Content-Aware" function to remove an object like this, but there's quite a few frames to work with here (and it's a rather complex object), so it doesn't seem completely feasible to do just that.

Here's a link to a GIF: Hosted on Imgur

I'd like to know if there's an easier way to do this (Maybe via plugins if necessary). Any help would be very much appreciated.

Can I suggest that you try Davinci Resolve for this?  It's free, and has a fantastic "clone stamping"-style tool, called Node Sizing  - see "Example 2: Using Node Sizing to duplicate a windowed area of an image to cover a blemish" p638 in the manual:
http://software.blackmagicdesign.com/DaVinciResolve/docs/DaVinci_Resolve_11_Manual_June_2014.pdf

It allows you to clone one region of a video over another, and to feather the edges. You can track the positions of moving items too - it's remarkably effective.

Update: After Effects now has content aware fill for video:
https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/content-aware-fill.html


Bad video quality on 600D I am a video amateur and have recently bought a Canon 600D, mostly for shooting. I have some photography background and the image quality of the 600D is far better than my old 350D, no problem with that.
But the video quality is simply horrible. I am not able to describe problems, but I saw smartphones with better video quality... It looks very bad, and the effect is more visible with low lights.

Here is two frames from my last shot :

Without mentioning the bad focusing and too high iso, anybody can provides some clues ?

Should be mentioned that the 600D isn't exactly the best DSLR for video out there. The artifacts that you are experiencing in your footage are the result of high compression. Check your video settings if you can increase the bitrate or choose a different codec other than h.264/AVC if Canon offers one by now for their DSLRs.

This thread might be interesting to read: http://forums.creativecow.net/thread/280/8433

Also a possibility would be to install Magic Lantern on your camera. This enables HDMI output which you could capture (will have a LOT better quality than h.264 encoded footage) and you should have more options about the video codec. On the Canon 5D Mark II they even enabled raw video capture to the CF card but I'm not sure if this is available for other models yet.
Though apparently you loose audio capture at the moment, which might be neglect-able as the audio capture on DSLRs is usually pretty bad. If you capture with HDMI then you can use an HDMI audio injector which aren't expensive so you don't end up with a separate audio and video file that you have to synchronize.


iMovie Not Letting Me Export I just finished up an iMovie project, and I tried to export it, but every time I click "Share to File", which is what I do every time, but it responds with the Mac "ding" sound, the one that plays when the Mac cannot complete the procedure. It won't let me upload to Youtube directly, or any of the other sharing options. I just get the Mac ding. I have 400 GB of storage left, and the project is only 4 minutes, so it should take up a gigabyte at most. Can someone help?

Ok, just a simple restart of iMovie fixed this. But it is still a weird glitch though.


Ghosting effect with open source software I am wondering if "Ghosting" effects like the one in this video are available in any Open Source software, like Blender.

Premiere Pro seem to call it "ghosting" while Final Cut Pro seems to call it "Ghost Trails".

To my knowledge, there is no Open Source tool with a built-in feature for producing that ghosting effect. However, I believe there exist the necessary tools for you to create the effect yourself.

Breaking down what's happening, it looks like the effect consists of:

Freezing and extracting the skater from the background at certain moments
Animating those freeze frames to track with the camera movement

There are Open Source tools to do just that.

Rotoscoping to extract the skater from still frames (Gimp or Blender)
Motion Tracking (Blender) to animate those stills to match camera motion
Compositing (Blender) to put it all together


How to spread light? I am looking to film near a window. I was wondering if there was a certain material that can take the sun light source and spread it evenly and wider. I find that a diffuser it isn't enough is there another type of material that would spread and expand it even?

A prism would separate the light into a spectrum, which probably isn't what you want. If the window isn't visible in your shot, you could use what's sometimes called a silk, which is more often made of muslin or other semi-translucent material.


How to get smooth motion when changing clip speed? Let's say I have a 30 fps video created by a camera panning at a constant speed while filming some static scenery.

When I watch the video, the motion in the video is perfectly smooth.
When I double the speed, the motion continues to be perfectly smooth.
When I halve the speed, the video looks choppy but again the motion continues to look smooth.

The problem comes when I try to change the speed by irregular numbers.
Let's say I want to change the speed of the video to 120%. I then export the video at 30 FPS. The motion in the video then becomes visually choppy, jerky.

I quickly figured out what is happening:

By increasing the speed, my 30 FPS video becomes 30 * 1.2 = 36 FPS. But I am exporting at the standard 30 FPS so every 6th frame is dropped. This means that every 5 frames the camera moves at double speed. If I look at the motion frame by frame the camera movement is: slow, slow, slow, slow, FAST, slow, slow, slow, slow, FAST, slow, slow, slow, slow, FAST, etc.

So finally my question is what option do I have to get smooth motion or hide this problem when changing the speed of the video by small intervals?

Shooting at a higher shutter speed is not an option in my opinion, as it just blurs the motion until the problem is not visible.

I use Adobe Premiere and Adobe After Effects.
Will the Time Warp plugin in After Effects be able to create smooth motion by using motion vectors? What if there is active movement in the scene? Will it still look good?

I have yet to see people truly understand this problem. How is this effect called? Does anyone have any link or article explaining what I described?

Shooting at a higher shutter speed is not an option in my opinion, as it just blurs the motion until the problem is not visible.

I don't get that part. Isn't hiding the problem until it is no longer visible what you want?
Also, a higher shutter speed results in less blurred frames, not the other way around.

I quickly figured out what is happening: by increasing the speed, my 30 FPS video becomes 30*1.2=36FPS. But I am exporting at the standard 30FPS so every 6th frame is dropped.

This is the default behaviour of the Media Encoder. Adobe calls it Frame Sampling. As you said, since frames will be dropped at regular intervals, it will produce curious results.

So finally my question is what option do I have to get smooth motion or hide this problem when changing the the speed of the video by small intervals?

Use one of the other Time Interpolation modes Premiere Pro has to offer. At the bottom of the Export Settings dialog, there's a dropdown menu containing three options: Frame Sampling, Frame Blending and Optical Flow. You will find the same dropdown menu in the Speed/Duration panel that can be accessed via the context-menu to change the interpolation mode of individual clips.
From the documentation:

The Optical Flow feature in Premiere Pro uses frame analyses and pixel motion estimation to create brand new video frames, resulting in significantly smoother speed changes, time-remapping, and frame-rate conversion. [...]
Frame Sampling repeats or removes frames as needed to reach the desired speed. Frame Blending repeats frames, and it also blends between them as needed to help smooth out the motion.

Here's another helpful article on using the Optical Flow interpolation.
I suggest you try all the interpolation modes and see what works best for your footage.
One more thing, you probably don't want to hear that, but 30 fps video is really bad for doing slow or fast motion effects (except maybe timelapses with 200% speed or more). As you explained yourself, there's not that many frames to go on so some frames will need to be dropped, synthesised or blended in some way which looks subpar at best. The interpolation algorithms do a decent job, but it will never look as good as it would with footage that was shot at a higher frame rate in the first place.


How to burn timestamp onto video? I want to burn timestamp from the video meta data on to the video.

I'm having great difficulty in finding a good tool that does that.

Is there a video editing tool out there that allows timestamp to be inserted and change the font of it?

I am editing HD videos.

Also is there a tool out there that allows changing the timestamp on the meta data for correction?

FFmpeg's drawtext filter can burn timecodes into frames.

edit: I misread the docs before.  I saw the timecode option to the filter, and missed seeing that there was a pts available for text expansion.  See the edit history for the longer-and-less-useful answer.

I eventually got around to trying it, and here's the command line I cobbled together from pasting and tweaking some examples:

ffmpeg -i /f/p/moto-g\ camera/VID_20141225_140557099.mp4 -filter_complex "drawtext=fontfile=/usr/share/fonts/truetype/freefont/FreeSerif.ttf: text='frame %{n}\\: %{pict_type}\\: pts=%{pts \\: hms}': x=100: y=50: fontsize=24: fontcolor=yellow@0.8: box=1: boxcolor=blue@0.9" -c:a copy -c:v libx264 -preset veryfast -crf 16 -x264-params keyint=60 -map 0 foo.mkv

Note the actual text to be printed needs a lot of escaping, to protect it from the shell, then from ffmpeg's arg-to-drawtext.  To modify it, change the text='frame %{n}\\: %{pict_type}\\: pts=%{pts \\: hms}' part of that ffmpeg command.

example output: "frame 0: I: pts=00:00:00.0000"  (I/B/P are frame types, from %{pict_type}.)

Modify x and y to put it somewhere else in the frame.  (you can use x=iw/2 to put it horizontally in the middle.  iw = input width.  (anchor = top left corner of the text, I think?))  Modify other params to change colors or whatnot.

This works even with VFR video.  I checked with video from the camera in a Moto G phone, which makes variable frame-rate video.  The first second has 30 frames.  A later 1-sec interval in the video has 17 frames.  (Indoors, not very well lit, so I think it's lower FPS to get more light, not because it can't write to flash storage fast enough.)  The timestamps it puts in the MP4 container are correct, so it plays fine.

The encode parameters -c:a copy -c:v libx264 -preset faster -crf 16 -x264-params keyint=60 are my suggestion for what you might want for scratch files with timestamps burned in: you just want it to encode fast, and don't care much about filesize since you're just going to use it locally, since it has timestamps scribbled all over it.  (There's even a superfast.  Don't use ultrafast except for lossless mode, though.)

keyint=60 will make sure there's an I frame at least as often as every 60 frames, for efficient scrubbing.  Leave it out if you don't need to be able to efficiently framestep backwards; lower it if you want high-rez seeking to be faster.

Use -map 0 if you want multiple audio and metadata streams copied into the output, instead of just the first audio and first video tracks (and no e.g. chapter metadata).


What are some tips for shooting green/blue screen footage? I am completely new to shooting on a green/blue screen. What are some tips to getting good results when shooting on a green/blue screen? Is there a difference in the way you shoot green screen footage, as opposed to blue screen footage?

Jonas Hummelstrand has a great guide over on his blog - General Specialist that details out a bunch of tips for it (including descriptions and pictures), I'd recommend checking that out.

Ultimately the #1 key is lighting - you have to maintain a smooth and consistent lighting job on the backdrop so that the camera "sees" a consistent blue/green free from dark and light spots.  Not only does this make it easier to remove the background, but it means you can use a smaller "slice" of the color spectrum and thereby makes it less likely that you'll accidentally remove part of your foreground subject.

The #2 key is separating your foreground subject from the background (once again, to make the edge definition clear and easy to define).  You want to put at least a few feet between them and the screen (to reduce the amount of green/blue light reflected off the wall and onto them).  If you're using a greenscreen, it often helps to use an amber backlight for your subject (being the opposite of green means that amber cancels any bounced off green light).


Transverse Waves in After Effects I'm trying to create a transverse wave in Adobe after effects, much like:

To start off, I've got a Water World animation going, but it's obviously not the type of look I'm going for. Any help on this matter would be appreciated.

You could use an image or vector of a sine wave and move it to the right, with the second keyframe at exactly the distance between the zero crossing of each cycle, cropping the sides so it looks like the waves are travelling. Use the loopOut() function on the position channel to have it loop continuously.

Then for the nodes you could use shape or image layers. Apply an expression to their position channel like this

var wavelength = 100; //the width of the sin wave in pixels
var magnitude = 120; //the height ""
xPos = value[0];
yPos = value[1];
[xPos, Math.sin(time*freq + xPos/wavelength)*magnitude);

the first line could use the distance between the two keyframes of the sinewave like:

var wavelength = thisComp.layer("sine wave layer name").transform.position.key(1).value[0]-thisComp.layer("sine wave layer name").transform.position.key(2).value[0];


When does YouTube Reencode Videos? I've got some videos on Vimeo that I want move over to my new channel on YouTube. I can download what Vimeo lists as the 'Original' files, ~2GB H.264 MP4s (20-30mins).

Does YouTube re-encode regardless of the incoming format, or does it just re-mux? I don't want any more video degradation than necessary; I figure YT will re-encode to optimize for delivery to other resolutions / bit-rates, but if my original files are 720p, will they get re-encoded / go through another lossy pass when re-uploaded to YouTube?

And to be clear, these are all /my/ videos (I'm the creator on both channels), so not trying to move someone else's content.

Yes, youtube re-encode videos. You can see more information here, and find, which codecs most fits for youtube upload (in case you will make new ones).

As a example of degradation, here is video, which was re-uploaded to youtube 1000 times in 2010 year:

And with different content you will see more degradation. You can see it here  at 2:33::

About "When": Re-encoding happens right after uploading in the save progress-bar will be written "Processing"


Prediction and Motion Estimation As far as I understand, the motion estimation is a process, where when we have two frames t and t+1 we search for the blocks/pixels that changed position and then encode that change with a motion vector. So in the end we have only the frame t and its encoded successor.

After that we use compensation in order to use these motion vectors, and further encode only the difference between the "vectorized" frame t+1 and the frame t.

Firstly, am I right? Secondly, when the prediction issue comes into play? I'm reading about prediction all the time, but in the sequence I've described, I don't see any prediction happening anywhere.

The prediction comes in when actually adding the motion estimation to both frames t and t+1.  Consider a video of a ninja cutting a melon in half, but shot at a very short shutter speed, so as to freeze motion in each frame.  The motion estimator notices that the sword is moving between frame t and frame t+1.  (It also moved between frame t-1 and t, and also frame t+1 to t+2).  Frame t gets half the motion from t-1 to t and half the motion from t to t+1.  The latter half is the prediction.  Frame t+1 gets half the motion from t to t+1 and half the motion from t+1 to t+2.  In this way, the video does not appear to shift half a frame later than the audio.


Delete unused video clips in Vegas After finishing editing a video with Sony's Movie Studio Platinum 12.0, I'm left with a giant folder of uncompressed rushes. I would like to delete some of them to save disk space.

Is there an easy way to keep only the video files that I have used in a project ?

I use Vegas Pro, but I think this applies to the Movie Studio version as well. As far as I know there is no magic clean up button that removes the unused files from your folder. However, if you go to the 'project media' tab in Vegas, you will see reference icons of all the files that were used during your editing session including jpegs, and .wav files. This is an accumulation, so if you pulled a clip in and then decided to delete it from the timeline it will still show up here until you click the button with the lightning bolt icon, this updates this folder so it will show you everything that is currently on the timeline.

This can be your reference to manually remove from the folder outside of Vegas. Caution: if you delete a file that is in the timeline, Vegas will complain and ask you for the location of the file the next time you launch this session. Likewise, if you move or rename any clips that were in the timeline, Vegas will treat this like a lost file and you will have to show Vegas where it is.


Automated Commercial Recorder I'm working on a project and one part of the project needs me to create an application that needs to record commercials from the TV shows.

Basically people skip commercials, but in my case I need to record them. and for that Case I will need a trigger to let the recorder know that it is time to record!

This is one of the times that I searched Google alot couldn't figure out something!

Thanks for any advice!

Mythtv could be of use to you.  It will automatically mark commercial in points and out points in a recording.  You could modify the their transcode shell script to cut the program and leave the commercials.


How can I convert frame rates without changing speed? I have a video with 60fps and I know that if I keep all the frames and play it at 24fps, then I get a slow motion effect. I want to know how to make it play at 24fps while still showing things in real time.

Would it be better if I record that video again in 24 fps?

In order to convert frame rates without impacting the speed of playback, you have to remove frames to decrease the frame rate or create new frames to speed it up.  If the frame rate is an even multiple, then this process can be done losslessly for reduction in frame rate since you simply drop every unneeded frame.

If they are not multiples or you are increasing the frame rate, then it is necessary to interpolate new frames.  Interpolation is a process by which the computer looks at the next and previous frames and invents one that looks like it would fit between them.

If you shoot at 60fps and drop it to 24fps, it is not an even multiple and frames have to be interpolated or taken at the wrong time in order to make up for the difference.  This results in a lower quality of video than shooting in 24fps to start.


Which would be the best VFX software for an absolute beginner? I am absolutely new to VFX designing and I have tried my hands on Blender, which I find quite useful. I tried After Effects, but couldn't do anything due to its complexity. I want to know about a program with which I can do simple editing cool stuff like say, create a virtual light-saber, or an action movie effect like plane crash etc. in my videos.
Thank you!

In general you can't create visual effects within a single application, because there are too many different departments like:

Match moving
Keying / Rotoscoping
Modeling
Texturing
Animation
Simulation
Lighting / Rendering
Compositing

Some of them are more artistic and other very technical tasks. For every task there are 2+ specific applications to solve the issue, because in order to achieve best results in the predetermined time it's key to use a confortable application with no or less limitation to complete a task. To connect the work of all departments the industry hires technical directors. In most cases these are computer scientist, trying to built so called pipelines for a solid studio environment.

The idea of Blender is to do everything in it, but Blender also has known limitations like:

Scene Assembly - Issues to display large amounts of geometry
Compositing - Compositor is quite slow, missing nodes like denoise or deep compositing
Rendering - Cycles is not very good at rendering caustics at the moment
Simulation - Bullet Engine is not fully integrated at the moment

These are very special and more professional cases - therefore, I think it is a very good idea to dive into visual effects with blender and learn about your interests.

Related:

Sean Kennedy - Using Blender for VFX in Hollywood
Tears Of Steel - Official VFX Breakdown


I am having problems using xml list in transporting timelines from Adobe Premiere to the DaVinci Resolve If I use XML list to transport a timeline from Premiere to REsolve, I find strange results.

I have a shot that I cannot transport without it arriving to Resolve 33 frames shorter on the start (the original time codes are changed in Premiere)
change in nesting, zooming or doing anything with the shot are not transported.
Now and then I get the Premiere report written

  Translation issue:
  Effect  on Clip <A001_C010_10245N_001.R3D> not translated.

Or it Resolve just does not want to use the XML saying in the pop in window

  DOM parser error. Line 532

Anybody understands what is happening?

At the Big Picture level, commercial NLE companies' raison d'etre is to make money.  As such, they are obliged to protect their own intellectual property, and distinguish themselves from their competitors.  While a certain level of interoperability is required to appease their customers, they will never co-operate well enough with each other to provide each other with perfect, seamless project exchange file formats.  This is nothing new or surprising to video, not to mention computers, or capitalism in general.

However, DaVinci Resolve happens to be better than its competitors at the process of interpreting an edit created by a different NLE.  This process, by the way, is known as "conform" (that'll be a helpful search term).

Before you conform an edit from PP to DR (or anywhere), the following steps are best practice:

Export a Master Version of your sequence for reference in DR.
Create a backup of the sequence in the PP project.
"Flatten" the edit in Premiere; delete any hidden, disabled, or otherwise unused media, AND overwrite lower-level video tracks with higher-level ones, as much as possible.  Ideally, everything should fit onto V1, but realistically, 2-4 tracks of video is OK.
Remove any unsupported effects, transitions, and plugins from the remaining clips.  This step is a matter of personal preference, because Resolve actually imports and exports unsupported effects, passing them through the pipeline unchanged, at least theoretically, YMMV.  A list of supported operations is in the Resolve manual (pp. 873, Oct 2019 edition).  The "Translation issue: Effect on Clip..." error is telling you exactly which clip contains an unsupported effect.
Finally, export the .XML

The conform process begins once these steps are complete.  Some colorists will do this for you as long as you pay their day rate, others will flat out reject your project.  Patrick Inhofer encourages colorists to include conform time in their budgets on MixingLight.com (which is an excellent resource on this subject.)

Conform isn't a difficult process to comprehend, or even execute.  It is a little bit labor-intensive, and it involves checking the entire program, frame-for-frame, against the Master you export in the first step above (and manually re-creating anything which doesn't match).  Like I said before, Resolve's tools for doing this are unparalleled, but they're also too extensive to explain here.  So, you'll want to cozy up with Part 6 of the Resolve User Manual, "Import and Conform Projects" (pp.867-940 of the Oct 2019 revision).  But basically, the steps are like this:

Import your .XML from Premiere
Re-Link your footage in Resolve
Set up the Master Export you generated in Premiere as an "Offline Reference" in Resolve.
Watch the Offline Reference, side-by-side against the interpreted XML, and mark discrepancies.
Fix the discrepancies.
Do whatever it is you came into Resolve to do -- presumably, color grade.
Optionally, "round-trip" back to Premiere.

Historically, Resolve was designed as a "finishing" program.  It was meant to add the final touches.  But because the real world is messy, and edits never really get locked, BMD fully supports round-trip workflows.  They've also built some very nice NLE, DAW, and VFX/MG software into their first-class color suite.  So, if the whole round-trip thing gets tiresome, you can always just... not.


Import .flac to after effects cs6 How can i import a simple .flac audio file to After Effects ? I didn't find one single plugin/presets and answer at adobe site.

Sadly Adobe doesn't support FLAC in any of their video products. The only Adobe product that supports it so far is Audition.

Though there is this great and open source plugin that works just fine with CS6 even though it was made for CS5. Plugins made for CS5 are usually compatible with CS6 and CC.

For CS4 there is a 32bit version of the same plugin: http://valion.net/flacimporter/


Can I multiply 3D cards in a Nuke 3d scene on top of each other, like i can multiply layers in After Effects? I have a 3D Scene in Nuke with several cards behind each other in 3d space. Is there a way to multiply them on top of each other? Like with layer blending modes in After Effects but still keeping it a NUKE 3D scene?

It is not possible to use  blending modes in a 3D scene. What can be done though, is to use several scenes or 3D objects with a scan line renderer and a cam. Each of those are merged with the blending mode of choice after the scan line renderer in 2d.


D5200 Color levels change through video Im shooting video using nikon D5200, just a man speaking in a green background.

The problem is that at the beginning of video the man is more "blue-ish" and as video progresses he becomes more "red-ish".

I noticed this at post-processing while trying to fix color levels.

What happened? Is this a constant auto-balance of colors from the camera while shooting video? How can i disable this and have the same color balance through all the video?

Don't use auto white balance and use manual exposure.

Auto white balance will guess at what is white and may shift while you are running video on some cameras (which makes sense since often people may move from one room to another while shooting or lighting conditions could change.

Manual exposure will preserve luminosity.  Auto exposure shouldn't change color temperature (which is what you are noticing) however it will change how bright things are and that can be just as much of an issue for trying to get accurate green screen footage.


Create a splitscreen video from two videos of different lengths with delay I want to create a splitscreen video from two video clips.
Left one is of duration 70seconds.
Right one is of duration 80seconds.
In the splitscreen video, the right video should start first. Left video shouldn't start for first 15 seconds. After 80s, i.e. after right video ends, left video should continue. So, the final splitscreen video should be of 85 seconds. For the first 80 seconds, the audio should be from right video and for the next 5 seconds, it should be from left video. Or vice-versa is also fine (i.e. first 15 seconds, audio from right video, next 70 seconds, audio from left video). How to do this?

Another optional requirement: For first 15 seconds, when right video is playing, in the left part, instead of black screen, it would be preferable to have the first frame (image) of the left video. So, after 15s, when left video starts, it takes off from there. Similarly, after 80s when right video stops, instead of black screen, it would be preferable to have the last frame of right video there.

Thanks

Edit: Opensource software is preferred.

Get some basic knowledge of premiere Pro first.

Import both videos and set the settings for your output.
Move the right video in the timeline to where it should start.
Use effects to slow down or speedup your video
Create a still of the first frame and add it to the layer. You can do this as easily as a screenshot and cut it out with photoshop. Ah hell even import the video to Photoshop.


Davinci Resolve 16 wont playback a clip in the timeline preview I have a brand new project, with some media imported to the pool. I marked in and out on a clip on the left hand preview, dragged it to the timeline, and tried to play the result in the timeline preview on the right.
The timeline preview on the right will not play the clip, it flashes the mark in/out symbols on the edge of the screen. I can't click on the clip timeline to jog to a point in the clip. If i click on the project timeline down the bottom it will move, but anytime i click play in the preview window it snaps back to the beginning and does not play.
Whats going on?

Your clip is only one frame long, according to the number "00:00:00:01"  Perhaps you accidentally imported a single image from an image sequence.  To switch back and forth between how DaVinci treats image sequences, check or un-check the "Show Individual Frames" item in the option (three dots) menu of the media storage panel on the media storage page.

This menu item is fairly hidden, and poorly named; you might interpret it to mean the same thing as the similarly-named, "Show all Video Frames" menu item under the options menu of the edit page viewers, but it is different.
The Media page command, when checked, does two things.  It shows every .jpg, .tiff, .png, etc as distinct items in the media browser. But more importantly, it affects how these items are imported to DaVinci through media pool drag-and-drop, system import dialogue, or any other import method.
When it's disabled, such as in the image above, and you import any member frame of an image sequence, Resolve treats the incoming clip as video.  When it's enabled, Resolve treats the incoming clip as a still frame.  If your setting: Preferences->User tab->Editing->Standard still duration is set to 1 frame, you will experience the behavior you describe.
Another possibility is that your clip imported into the project correctly, but you've accidentally only sent a single frame to the timeline (it's hard to tell from your picture).  This happens by mistake sometimes, if you hit the "i" and "o" keys with the source viewer in focus, but without moving the playhead.  Then, editing the clip to the timeline will result in the behavior you've described. [*]
The other case in which you'd experience the described behavior is that your camera, either by mistake or malfunction, only recorded a single frame in the first place.
[*] With the exception of a "Fit to Fill" edit.


What kind of lighting setup is this? I'm looking to understand how this person did their lighting setups, what kind of filters they used, and angle of view (35mm equivalent focal length).
From what I can see, there is a ring light and two flolights. Are those the only 3 lights?
What kind of filter did they use to achieve the ultra soft skin tones?
What kind of focal length (35mm equivalent) are they using for his field of view?

In the meantime, I found more pictures of the panels in question. Can anyone identify make and model?

I doubt that the creator used a ring light, as you would definitely see the reflection of it in her eyes. The lights she used look like your regular Kinoflo or Kobalt. You could use frost, also called white diffusion in front of it to give softer light, but I don't think she used that either. Remember: The bigger the light source, the softer the light (and shadow). Kinoflos are very very big, and especially 4-Banks (flos with 4 tubes of light) give out very soft light on their own, which is why I assume she opted for this specific light.

Technically, her head is kind of disappearing into the dark tv-screen, since the hair and the display have a very similar color. To prevent this, you would usually set up a light on the opposite end of where your keylight points at. This way, you will have a nice bright edge around the back of the head, separating her from the background a bit more.

As so the lens it's very hard to tell, you'd have to go into pftrack and manually track the leading lines etc. However I assume that it's a lens way below 50mm, probably at about 20-25.


Making a gif from a video I have a video clip that I want to convert to gif. I used this app: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/gifbrewery/id435989461

But I couldn't figure out how to make a gif that's the proper speed. The default preview they showed had way too many frames missing, so i increased the frame count. But once I did that the gif played way too slowly. How do I make the gif speed simply the same speed as the original video?

I also used MPEG Streamclip to export to PNGs so I can use GIMP to create the GIF. Same problem, couldn't create a proper speed GIF.

The GIMP has a GIF Animation Package that can convert MP4 to gif.

You can just use the Split Video into Frames function, which will split each frame into a layer in GIMP.

Then when you Save As, select .gif and choose Save as Animation.

Photoshop has a similar function, but I haven't used it for a while now.


Best bitrate to responsive (web) video So, I am a multimedia developer: I develop websites and that nerd things... My last site is responsive (fluid work in all devices - mobile, computer, television,...).

A responsive website needs 4 video files:

2 MP4 - 1) for big screens and 1) for small screens
2 WEBM - for same purposes

So, recently I checked my server disk usage and I realized that videos are consuming a big percentage of it, so I guess that it's because of bitrate.

DEFAULT BITRATE OF MY VIDEOS

HD MP4 - 2,10 Mbps - 1280X720 (~77,5MB) - Duration: 04:42
SD MP4 - 694 kbps - 640X360 (~25,57MB) - Duration: 04:42

So, am I using right bitrate? Are the files small enough?

Those are the expected file sizes for those data rates.  4 minutes and 42 seconds of video is 282 seconds of video, at 2.1 Mbps, that's 592.2 Mbits.  That's around 72 megabytes or so, so your 77.5 megabyte file is the correct size (there can be some variation and sound is also generally factored in separately.)

Those are also pretty close to the minimum bitrates that you can use without getting substantial quality loss.  2.1 Mbps is around the same bitrate that Hulu uses for their 720HD streaming and they are the lowest bandwidth of the major streaming sites that I'm aware of.

If you plan to host video, you really need more disk space and bandwidth.  Hosting is available very cheaply for multiple gigabytes of hosting space with unlimited bandwidth if you look around a bit, though I haven't been in that segment of the market for a while so I couldn't tell you who is best anymore.  (I self host on a dedicated server because I need a lot of space and high performance.)


Which sensor is better for video, cropped or full frame? I was watching a you tube video on cropped sensor and they the author mentioned that for video it does not really matter whether you use cropped sensor or full frame?

Does the sensor size matter for videography? What could be the physics behind this?

Thanks,
NN

It depends.

All of the questions at http://photo.stackexchange.com regarding the relationship between sensor size and Depth of Field (DoF) apply to video as well. (See, for example: https://photo.stackexchange.com/q/12098/15871, https://photo.stackexchange.com/questions/7904/how-does-background-blur-bokeh-relate-to-sensor-size, and especially https://photo.stackexchange.com/questions/3986/when-do-the-differences-between-aps-c-and-full-frame-sensors-matter-and-why)   If you want very shallow depth of field a FF will give you shallower DoF for the same subject distance, field of view (FoV), and aperture than a  cropped sensor will. This is because the FF camera must use a longer focal length than the crop sensor to achieve the same FoV from the same subject distance. If you want very large depth of field the cropped sensor will have the advantage over the FF camera with the same distance/FoV/aperture.

I think what the comment you heard might have been addressing was the difference in resolution that once existed between most cropped sensor cameras and most full frame cameras. Just a few years ago most APS-C cameras ranged from about 10-12MP while FF cameras where at around 18-20MP. This is not so much the case any more as improvements in sensor technology have allowed APS-C cameras in the 18-20MP range. Since 1920X1080 HD video is only about 2MP per frame, any camera in the 10MP+ range is going to downsize the output of the sensor to 1920X1080 so there is not much difference between a 12MP APS-C camera and a 20MP full frame camera in that regard.


Imitate letters in text falling down as if under gravity AE I have a tricky (seems to me) task: I need to make 3 layers of text lose their shape and fall down to the bottom of the screen like a heavy mass of letters, so that in the end all the letters lay there in one heap. Here is what the text looks like from the beginning:

Is it at all possible in AE? I remember doing per character animation with text once, but it doesn't seem to be the way to go here, or am I missing something? Please tell me it's doable! :)

If the text is random characters, you could possibly do this using a particle engine.  Assign one character per frame to a comp, then apply those frames to the particles texture... Something like Particular from Trapcode would work with this.

Alternatively if it's a full page of actual text:
I reckon Newton 2 could do this..
http://www.motionboutique.com/newton/
Or Cinema 4D, but I don't think the free version that comes with AE now has the physics plugins included.


Source video has 1GB and the final version has 3GB or more I've created a small intro animation for my videos on After Effects and created a project on Premiere, than joined the animation and the video from a webseminar.

The webseminar file has 1GB and the intro video with just 13 seconds that has been rendered on AE also has 1GB.

My final video will be uploaded to Vimeo and I only need HD quality, but even this way the file has at least 2.5GB.

Which codec do you suggest?
Another thing, I saw that if I use the same codec from my composition, the rendering process is faster. Is this true? Because a 50 minutes video is taking 2h and a half to render.

For web use h.264, there are lots of web presets in the export media dialogue, or in Media Encoder that you can use. The first or second one should do the job, but if not there's lots of options.

If you're planning on exporting different copies of the video, or you want a copy for archiving then a master in a lossless format or a high-quality lossy codec like proRes, GoPro Cineform or DNxHR is a good idea. Then you can re-encode from this master to the more compressed web versions without having to re-render.

As for rendering times, with an After Effects comp at the start of the encode it will often report that it is going to take a lot longer to render than it actually will - it assumes that the whole composition is going to take as long per frame as the intro does. If you're exporting to h.264 it will take a little longer than other less compressed codecs, generally the smaller the resulting file the longer the encode takes.

Import the After Effects comp using Dynamic Link, that way you don't have to create intermediate render files, and you can change the AE comp without having to recreate your intermediates. Just import the after effects project as you would any other media file, and then choose the composition from the dialog that pops up.


Is there a way to apply an Animation Preset - Text Effect onto a shape? I have a few bullet points as so:

I would like to apply an Animation Preset > Text > Blurs > Bullet Train to it... But I want the effect to include the blue circle. I've tried applying directly, parenting, and pre-composing. None had the desired result. Is there a way to get the Text Effect onto the shape layer?

There sadly does not appear to be a direct way to do it, however you can approximate it by using a Directional Blur on your shape layer with a 90 degree orientation and then applying a fade in.  If you mess with the keyframes a bit, you should be able to get it to look like a constant animation.


Canon DSLR that changes aperture in Video I purchased a 1100D/Rebel T3 as a starting DSLR.
I like the video aspect the most, but its quite limited.

I have some low aperture lenses and I like them very much, but they make it difficult to focus  when something is moving around.

The only option I have with this camera to change the aperture setting on video is... buying a different lens with a different minimum aperture.

I was wondering what Canon DSLR allows me to change aperture in video mode?

With canon the first DSLR that can do that is the 550d (you need to set the movie mode to manual in the settings otherwise it will adjust automatically).

However i would suggest something with a swivel screen (600d and up) because it's very useful while shooting video. The 60d and 7d have more options for video (frame rate for one) but it depends on your needs and budget if those are an option.

Hope this is helpful.


How do I change FPS in a sequence in Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 I imported some images for a LEGO stop motion but the animation is going too fast. When I change FPS to something smaller and export, the video is tiny.
I'm not really sure what I do when I change presets, but following tutorials hasn't paid of in my case.

When you set the number of frames per second of the sequence, you are describing the rate your rendered footage will playback, whatever that footage may be.  If you have 600 frames and you set the sequence to play 60 frames/sec, you'll get 10 seconds of video.  If you set the sequence to play at 6 frames per second, you'll get 100 seconds of video.  60 frames per second is a speed that players like YouTube (now) accept, but 6 frames per second is not.  So if you render a sequence that's supposed to play at 6 fps, you might create something that most players will not honor.

Instead, set your sequence frames per second to what you actually want to play the video at, likely 24, 25, or 30 fps (but maybe 60 fps or 120 fps if you are part of the HFR vanguard).  Inside the sequence, look at all the little (violet) boxes that represent your individual images (JPG, PNG, TGA, whatever they are).  Select them all, right click, and choose the menu item "Speed/Duration...".  That opens up a dialog box.  Change the 00:00:05:00 default to 00:00:00:02 (or however many frames you expect each image to last).  In the world of stop-motion, it is common to make a movie that plays at 24 fps but in which each image is repeated (so 12 images per 24 frames).  If you didn't do "twelves", then use 00:00:00:01.  Select the box "Ripple Edit, Shifting Trailing Clips" and choose OK.  This will create a tiny, but correct, sequence of images that can then be rendered to play back at a sane speed that all video players (including YouTube) will honor.


Can running a video over ethernet be split? Running video over ethernet isn't something new, but is it possible to split the video signal (over short runs) without losing video signal - or at all?

I know you can buy these sort of items (just an example): http://www.aten.com/global/en/products/professional-audiovideo/video-extenders/ve800/ but if you were to run the ethernet into a switch, would the receiving end be able to be multiple Rx boxes?

I know this deviates from the normal ffmpeg question, but was curious if anyone had any proper insight into the way these boxes work.

Not with those boxes, but the broadcast industry version of video over IP (SMPTE 2022-6 and the 2110 suite) can do this as they are actually IP Multicast based.

The gotcha is that they typically run uncompressed so you are looking at up to several Gb/s per multicast flow (4k60 you are looking at 12Gb/s), and you really want non blocking switching fabric.

It does work, but you will hate the price.

HDCP with consumer gear is also a bit of a pain (There are ways around that however).


How can I do Camera Tracking of turnaround Camera Shot? Hope you are doing well.

I am working on a Slow Motion Video in which Camera is rotating around a person on a dolly. I want to do 3D Camera Tracking of this Shot. I have tried it Using Adobe After Effects Camera Tracker but I am getting following error:

"Unable to solve camera"

I am not sure what to do about it. So here I need help with that, I need suggestions, and guidelines about how to do it actually and which software should I use for this kind of Camera Tracking.

This is
Video for Camera Tracking

Please have a look at above video and help me to do Camera Tracking.

Waiting for response.

Thanks

You can check PFTrack.
Also there are another good trackers options like Boujou, Syntheyes, Mocha Pro, Match mover, 3D Equializer ...
NukeX has also a good tracking suite.


Convert 1920x1080 to PAL - DVD This question differs from how to burn full hd movies (1080px720p) in DVD because I would like to know how to convert the video in this resolution to DVD without giving up too much quality.

I used Any video converter to convert my 1920x1080 video to a PAL-DVD. Since the max resolution of a PAL-DVD is 720x576 the video looks very pixelated. Also the original video with a 16:9 format filled my full screen. The dvd has now black bars on the edge, since 720x576 is not 16:9 ratio.

I know that great movies like lord of the rings are out on DVD, in 16:9 format and look great. How did they make this possible with a 720x576  resolution?

I have not tried Any Video Converter, but I did try HandBrake, and it works reasonably well. DVD-Video allows up to 9.5 Mbit/s bitrate, so do not be stingy, allow at least 5 Mbit/s or so, considering that free encoders are not very efficient. Make sure frame rates match, or convert without judder or ghosting. Make sure you convert between progressive and interlaced correctly. Make sure your luma is encoded within DVD legal range, otherwise your image will have too much contrast and will lose near-black and near-white detail.

704x576 can be 4:3 or 16:9, plus 8 pixels on each side for digital blanking. The best looking DVDs I authored were 24p ones because they have full vertical resolution. I am not sure whether 25p DVDs can be authored as true progressive DVDs though. Interlaced DVDs look rather sad on a big screen.


Recommendations for HD camcorder for all-day static recording? I am working on a computer vision project where I will setup a camcorder in a room at around 6am and record people as they walk around and interact with things. The recording ends at 11pm. The room itself is huge (~50 ft tall) and I need to mount the camera either on the ceiling or on one of the rafters, so I'd prefer not to have to fetch an SD card at the end of each day if at all avoidable. The people are not moving super fast, but I will be doing motion analysis based on an image of the empty room, so it's important that the video be uncompressed (compression changes pixels and messes up the before/after diff for the motion tracking). Also, the people will be interested in viewing their actions later, so it needs to be in color and preferably HD. There is likely to be minor vibrations, so it also needs to be able to stabilize the video, though I imagine that is standard nowadays.

Given those requirements, does anyone have any recommendations for a camcorder? I'm looking in the sub-$400 range if at all possible.

Edit: Compressed video is fine after all. I was misunderstanding what kind of video my test data was using, but it seems to be compressed, so I can handle that. Also, if possible I'd like the camera to be able to just stream the video to a server on a local network so I can store it offline without having to retrieve the SD card.

Edit 2: After some more looking, it does seem like there are 30M (~64ft) active USB extension cables. So it's possible that I could run a cable to a laptop on the ground and not need to worry about power or SD storage. As a result, I'm currently leaning towards an HD webcam like AJ suggested.

Ok, so now that I got that comment out of my system, let me start by saying your expectation is 100% completely, totally and insanely unrealistic.  HD + uncompressed = a data rate measured in gigabytes (11.2 gigabytes to be specific) per minute (16.1 terabytes per 24 hour day) and is only available on very high end cameras (>$3000, without optics) price range.  Additionally, to not have to get the card every 30 minutes, let alone every day, you would need to have it wired in to a recorder elsewhere which means getting a record deck alone that will be over $600.  There is simply no possible way to accomplish all of your goals within an order of magnitude of your stated target cost.

For $6,000 or so, I could probably recommend a setup that would work nicely for capture and then you'd need another $4,000 or so just for the disk drives that could store it, but unless you can bear a reasonable level of compression, then it isn't going to be any cheaper.  Even SD would have problems running fully uncompressed for lengths of time without a dedicated professional deck, though SD might possibly drop the cost in to the 1 to 2k range.

While off topic for AVP, I would suggest that what you need to do is update your analysis to support compression.  Add a buffer that will recognize pixels that are close in color as the same and adjust as necessary until compression artifacts aren't recognized.  Unless people are all the same color as the floor, it should probably still be able to track pretty well.

You'll need this anyway as from frame to frame, there are going to be variations in what hits the sensor even if you have a fully uncompressed signal.  Noise happens in the real world.  You have to deal with it.  The noise in the signal is going to be at least as much of a problem as most good compression, probably much more.


Why would Blu-ray made with Encore CS6 be silent/have missing audio, no sound? Any thoughts on why audio might be missing from such a project?

Steps:

1) 3 mkv files 1280x720 25P, stereo audio (2 channels)

2) converted to mp4 using ffmpeg

3) audio still present

4) created premiere pro cs6 hdv project

5) lines up the 3 files, back to back

6) confirmed audio still present by listening in the monitor

7) saved project

8) created encore cs6 project, H264 blu-ray, 1280x720 50 (25 not selectable)

9) confirm audio still present in monitor

10) create blu-ray image

11) burn it with imgburn

12) watch blu-ray on vlc player - no audio

13) on MPC-HC player - no audio

14) on cyberlink powerdvd - no audio

I've just started to repeat the steps, this time in step 8, selecting PCM audio instead of dolby (in first attempt), as the original signal is 2 channel.

Playback through Yamaha SW1000XG sound card, stereo out on Windows 8 desktop.

Encore blu-ray generation done on Mac. blu-ray image burnt using imgburn on windows 8 desktop.

The only thing I can think of is that the audio channel may not be getting set on the timeline for some reason.  I would verify what audio track is associated by default with the timeline as a first step and try a simple case of a disk that immediately plays the timeline with the audio set to the default audio track.  If that still doesn't work, I'm out of ideas.  Your situation seems very odd.  Have you tried playing it in a stand alone bluray player by any chance?


With ffmpeg how do I imply spatial position when mixing mono to stereo I have a range of mono audio samples and have worked out how to play them at specific time offsets but would like to give some indication of 'where the sound is coming from' I have the x and y centers of each sound source in the frame, is it sufficient to use a slight bias in the pan filter? Or is some element of delay in one channel needed too?

My best guess is passing each of the samples through this:

[mono0]pan=stereo|c0=c0|c1=c0,stereotools=balance_out={panpos}[stereo0]

where {panpos} is a value -1 = 1 representing the x position.

and them later amerge over them all.

This is something that we can't really give an absolute answer because we don't have your inputs and what is "best" will be fairly subjective.

You could just try using the pan filter with a bigger gain factor for one side. Something like:

pan=stereo|c0=0.8*c0|0.2*c1=c0

Depending on your inputs adding adelay may make it sound less flat:

pan=stereo|c0=0.8*c0|c1=0.2*c0,adelay=0|10

You can use stereotools filter if you prefer as it has many options (I completely forgot about this filter...can't keep up).


What means "Data: Skeleton" in an .ogv file? My Question: I made a screencast with recordmydesktop (Version 0.3.8.1). When I investigate the rendered file with avprobe I see, that there is Stream #0.0: Data: skeleton in the produced file. I guess ffprobe will produce the same results...

What is "Data: Skeleton"? What is stored inside such a stream? Is it necessary to play the media file?

What I did: First I record a part of my screen via

recordmydesktop --height 10 --width 10 -y 50

Now I run avprobe out.ogv an I get as a result

avprobe version 9.16-6:9.16-0ubuntu0.14.04.1, Copyright (c) 2007-2014 the Libav developers
  built on Aug 10 2014 18:19:26 with gcc 4.8 (Ubuntu 4.8.2-19ubuntu1)
[ogg @ 0x93aa700] Multiple fisbone for the same stream is not implemented. Update your Libav version to the newest one from Git. If the problem still occurs, it means that your file has a feature which has not been implemented.
[ogg @ 0x93aa700] 22 bytes of comment header remain
[ogg @ 0x93aa700] truncated comment header, 1 comments not found
[ogg @ 0x93aa700] max_analyze_duration reached
Input #0, ogg, from 'out.ogv':
  Duration: 00:00:06.93, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 9 kb/s
    Stream #0.0: Data: skeleton
    Stream #0.1: Video: theora, yuv420p, 16x16 [PAR 1:1 DAR 1:1], 15 tbn, 15 tbc
    Stream #0.2: Audio: vorbis, 22050 Hz, mono, fltp, 89 kb/s
Unsupported codec with id 0 for input stream 0

When you want to investigate the video file by yourself, you can download it at http://www38.zippyshare.com/d/BaItXEdB/2145/out.ogv

What is Ogg Skeleton?

From Ogg Skeleton 4:

  Ogg Skeleton provides structuring information for multitrack Ogg
  files. It is compatible with Ogg Theora and provides extra clues for
  synchronization and content negotiation such as language selection.
  The latest version of Skeleton, version 4.0, also provides keyframe
  indexes to enable optimal seeking over high-latency connections, such
  as the internet.

So basically the Ogg container can support multiple tracks of multiple track types types. However:

  Ogg does not know anything about the content it carries and leaves it
  to the media mapping of each codec to declare and describe itself.
  There is no meta information available at the Ogg level about the
  content tracks encapsulated within an Ogg physical bitstream.

Ogg Skeleton attempts to deal with these issues by providing information about the other streams that allows parsing and (de)muxing without having to decode.

What is stored inside such a stream?

  Ogg Skeleton is a logical bitstream within an Ogg stream that contains
  information about the other encapsulated logical bitstreams. For each
  logical bitstream it provides information such as its media type, and
  explains the way the granulepos field in Ogg pages is mapped to time.

See The "skeleton" meta information track for Ogg for more details.

Is it necessary to play the media file?

Continuing from the second quoted paragraph:

  This is particularly a problem if you don't have all the decoder
  libraries available and just want to parse an Ogg file (such as with file)  to find out what type of data it encapsulates.

For playback you are decoding.
You're using (libogg/libvorbis/libtheora and) the FFmpeg cli tools (or should be; I don't recommend Libav) to demux and decode. You have the various decoder libraries available. You can download a recent build of ffmpeg.
Your file is not complicated. It just contains one video stream, one video stream, and one data stream (the Ogg Skeleton). It does not contain multiple streams of video, audio, subtitles, etc.
Ogg Skeleton 4.0 can index keyframes for seeking in high latency situations. Given the information you (did not) provide I'm going to assume this does not apply to you.

So the answer here is: Ogg Skeleton is not necessary to play this media file.

You can test this by remuxing the file while excluding the data stream with a negative mapping:

ffmpeg -i input.ogv -map 0 -map -0:d -c copy output.ogv

Now try playing it.


ffmpeg: Create a black background video from audio, for Youtube upload I have MP3 audio that I would like to turn into video, by joining the audio with a solid black background. I then want to upload the video to Youtube.

Using ffmpeg, I have tried this command, and a few adjacent variants:

ffmpeg -i 'black.png' -i 'input.mp3' -c:v libx264 -tune stillimage -c:a copy 'output.mp4'

(where black.png is a PNG file that is 640×480 pixels).

However, when uploading the video output.mp4 to Youtube via Creator's Studio, I get the error:

  Processing abandoned. The video could not be processed.

What could be the reason?

Alternatively you can have ffmpeg generate the black video with the color source filter instead of making an image:

ffmpeg -f lavfi -i color=c=black:s=1280x720:r=5 -i audio.mp3 -crf 0 -c:a copy -shortest output.mp4

Since it is just black video this is one case with lossless mode (-crf 0) will have a smaller file size than the default lossy mode.
The resulting file may not play in your player or device, but it will on YouTube.


Adobe After Effects - Why is my position marker not set to a frame? In after effects, one of my compesitions is comprised soley of static images, vectors, solids, and other non-movie footage. One such static image layer lasts from frame 0 for 100 frames.

Another user has edited this file while i was away, and amongst these edits they changed the framerate for this compesition and managed to change the static image's lifetime in a funky way. It was still 100 frames long, and started at frame 0 on the compesition, but it some odd things had happened to it at the layer instance level.

The problem is that the static image has been given start time offset, and when I try and rectify this using the layer preview of said solid image, I can't set the cursor, in-point or out-point to a solid frame. When if scrub through the timeline I find myself always in-between frame markers; the cursor simply will not sit dead on frame 0 and will either snap to (aproximately) frame 0.125 or frame -0.625. The snap seems to be offset +0.125 frames and jumps in 0.5 frame ammounts.

The lifetime of the image as seen in the layer preview:

A close up of the timeline showing that the cursor is in-between frames:

I suspect it was due to the fps change, but that actually needs to stay as it is, so I need to rectify this issue without changing that. How can i fix this odd frame snap and snap offset?

This may ultimiately seem like a non-issue for many, but for us it's a breaking problem, as it's causing funky things to happen with one of our plugins, so any help rectifying this would be apprecated.

It's probably worth noting that my After Effects (along with my animation and movie editing knowledge in general) is very beginner. I'm at home in Photoshop, but I've been required to use After effects for my current project, so the fix may be simple, but i must be using a wrong keyword somewhere as I'm finding nothing remotely close to this when i search.

You don't need to go into the layer source to set the in-point of a layer. In the comp timeline select the layer, put the playhead at the frame you want and hit alt / opt[. For the outpoint it's alt / opt].

Should you wish to learn more have a look at the docs here.


Trim a segment of live, still-encoding H.264/FLV with ffmpeg I am encoding a video with ffmpeg into H.264 stored in an FLV container. I would like to be able to trim segments of this video out as it is still encoding. The video contains no audio.

I am encoding the video like so:

ffmpeg -i recording.mp4 -c libx264 output.flv

And I'm attempting to trim the video with:

ffmpeg -i output.flv -ss 00:00:00.000 -t 00:00:01.000 -c copy output2.mp4

While the video is still encoding, I see this error when I try to trim:

Output file is empty, nothing was encoded (check -ss / -t / -frames parameters if used)

Also while encoding, using ffprobe, I get information like the following:

Duration: 00:00:26.96, start: 0.080000, bitrate: 126 kb/s
  Stream #0:0: Video: h264 (High), yuv420p, 640x480, 25 fps, 25 tbr, 1k tbn, 50 tbc

How can I go about trimming this file while it's still encoding? I am willing to change container formats from flv to something else if needed. Ultimately, I need to be in mp4, but I don't mind doing some container shuffling to allow me to trim out portions while still encoding.

Keep FLV but trim using demuxer seek and duration.

ffmpeg -ss 00:00:03.000 -t 00:00:01.000 -i output.flv -c copy output2.mp4

Also, skip -ss if it's 0 i.e. stream start.


Save existing project to an external drive Final Cut Pro X 10 I have a project with events saved on my Mac drive. I want to save this project on my external HD drive to clean space and work on this project later.

I copy pasted Final Cut Events and Final Cut Projects folders to my external HD but I don't know how to restore it into project in FC.
Any help is appreciated.

"I copy pasted Final Cut Events and Final Cut Projects folders to my external HD but I don't know how to restore it into project in FC. Any help is appreciated."

It's better to perform this type of operation from within FCPX, instead of the Finder via copy/paste.  With the project selected in the Project Library, choose File->Move Project...  As long as you have an external drive connected, the resultant "location" dropdown menu will be populated (instead of saying "no value").  Selecting the "Move project and referenced events" radio button will transfer all of the necessary media to the external drive, AND remove it from the local drive, thus freeing up space.

When you work this way, there is no need to, as you say, "restore it to a project in FC".  You simply make sure the external drive which contains the project file and media is connected to your machine, and the project is available in the project library window.


using images as text characters in after effects I've made a series of comps each representing a letter from the alphabet.
Is there an expression or plugin where I can convert the relevant text character on screen to be replaced by the appropriate comp.

e.g. I've made a.jpg b.jpg c.jpg.

I type "abc" into a text field, apply a magic expression/plugin, and the letters abc are overlaid/replaced by my comps?

I'm not expecting perfect kerning, spacing etc.. Just a quick way to get a start on this.

The Characteristic plugin for After Effects is built specifically for this:

https://aescripts.com/characteristic/

You can set  kerning and spacing parameters for each character. Check out this tutorial to see how the font is set up:

https://vimeo.com/72438545

I hope this helps your situation!


Creating transparent video from transparent png files using ffmpeg I have a set of 300 transparent png files and I would like to create a transparent video file from them. I'm using the ffmpeg command as follows:
ffmpeg -f image2 -i anim.%04d.png -r 30 -vcodec png video.webm

I know webm has an alpha channel according to this answer. The command creates the video but the transparency is completely lost. What am I doing wrong? Is it possible to create a transparent .mp4 with ffmpeg?

You have to specify the pixel format, to force it to include the alpha channel, using the -pix_fmt option. You don't need to use png as your video codec either.
ffmpeg -i anim.%04d.png -r 30  -pix_fmt yuva420p video.webm


Video noise and harsh shadows on green screen caused by feet We have a recurring shoot where we continue to run into the same two issues. Our set consists of a medical exam table sitting on top of a green screen. The talent sits on the exam table and we record 'Doctor/Patient interviews'.

ISSUE 1: When the talent is on the taller side, their feet hang down past the bottom of the exam table and create really harsh shadows on the green screen, making the footage very difficult to key.

ISSUE 2: The dark area on the front of the exam table, behind the talent's legs, is very noisy.

I believe these two issues are linked and both have to do with lighting. However, I have yet to find a permanent solution to either one of them. I am currently setting a small LED light in front of the camera that helps with the shadows, but it still isn't solving the problem.

Our camera is a Panasonic HMC150 and I use the 'Keylight' effect in After Effects to key the footage. Keying is very difficult around the feet shadows and some of the green reflection shows on the exam table, which in turn, ends up being keyed slightly creating a lot of noise. I use the 'Remove Grain' effect to help remove the noise.

Any advice on a different lighting setup, keying solution, or anything else that could help this situation is greatly appreciated. I've attached images demonstrating the issues.

To reduce or eliminate the greenish reflection on the front of the table, you can buy some dark gray or black construction paper, or something equally non-reflective, cut it to size, and tape it over the 2 dark rectangles on the front of the table.

I have 3 different solutions for the foot-shadows on the floor.

You could point a semi-dim spotlight directly on that section of the green screen. Make sure to mask it so it doesn't hit the dark rectangles on the front of the table too much.
If the camera is always stationary, you could lower the camera slightly so the talent's feet never extend past the dark rectangle on the front of the table and into the green (as the tip of her left shoe does in the pictures you included). Then you can mask out that part of the shot instead of relying on the Keylight effect.
You could just move the camera about a foot closer to the talent so you crop out the bottom of the table (and the green in front of it). You can also do this by cropping the shot during post production.

(Or, obviously, just get shorter talent.)


How can I capture multiple computer screens and put them onto a single video stream? We are looking to broadcast or record a single video stream of two desktop computers running Windows.  The software we are looking for would be able to capture the screens of the people working on it and composite them into a single video feed.

For audio, we would like to capture the computer's audio device but also ambient sounds from the room.

To summarize, we want one output feed that consists of the following:

Source video feed from computer #1 (in a 50% rectangle)
Source video feed #2 (in a 50% rectangle)
Environment noise from the room (mic in)
Source audio feed from computer #1
Source audio feed from computer #2

So far, we have attempted to use Google Hangout, but it's impossible to get two screen shares going on at the same time.

UStream has a great program that you can do that with. Your video will eighter be streamed over UStream or to a server you specify if you want that.


Deinterlace by dropping even lines from command line I want to make an interlaced video with 50fps into a 25fps progressive, in the process i'm also reducing the size of the frame. Currently i am using avconv and there are deinterlacing options, however, they are not documented. So what i am afraid of is that they will actually start bleeding information i am trying to drop into the frames that i am trying to keep.

The only tool that i have found, that does a documented drop of even/odd frames is a plugin for AVIDemux, which unfortunately does not export into Ogg or even encode into Theora. When i attempt to dump into Huff codec (to not introduce quality loss due to reencoding) it demands that i split files at 4 GiB. So i can only use it for small videos.

Is there another tool that can help me?

ffmpeg -i input -vf field,scale=123:456 output will do the trick, where 123:456 is your x:y frame dimensions for the output. The field filter just chucks away the fields it doesn't use. Documention on the field filter here. Note that you'll need extra stuff in the command to get good results - e.g. you'll probably want to specify codec details and so on.


Encode settings for HTML5 background video I want to create a website with a HTML5 video background.

I have a short 1080p mp4 clip that I want to use (20s). I intend to run the video in a letterbox format (5:2 ish), full screen behind the page content (for an example see Paypal's website: https://www.paypal.com/uk/webapps/mpp/home)

What would the best export settings in Premiere CC for this purpose?

You should export multiple versions to accommodate for different browsers. With HTML5, you can offer different versions of the video and the browser will automatically pick the first one that's supported. For example, take a look at the source code of the paypal website you refered to:

<video autoplay="autoplay" muted="muted" poster="none">
    <source src="https://www.paypalobjects.com/webstatic/mktg/wright/videos/send-money.mp4" type="video/mp4">
    <source src="https://www.paypalobjects.com/webstatic/mktg/wright/videos/send-money.webm" type="video/webm">
</video>

As you can see, they offer both a mp4 (H264 codec) and a webm version of the video. Those would be good options for you as well.

Furthermore, you should try to keep the videos as small as possible, so that site visitors with slow internet will also be able to watch it. For that purpose, you should export the video with 720p instead of 1080p (nobody will see the difference, especially if the video is in the background) and aim for a bitrate below 1 Mbit/s. For example, the paypal video uses a bitrate of about 700 Kbit/s. If you don't need the audio, you could export without audio or with a low audio bitrate, i.e. 96 Kbit/s.

You can also save the video from the website to your computer and check the codec, bitrate and other parameters e.g. with MediaInfo or similar programs.

Update November 2018

Since this question is still getting a lot of views, I wanted to add some up-to-date information. By now, all modern browsers support MP4 (MPEG-4/H.264), and have been for a long enough time that you will be fine offering only MP4 for most projects. Check the link above for a browser compatibity table to make sure all browsers your project needs to support can play MP4. Keep in mind to use AAC for the audio track, not MP3, since it's supported by fewer browsers.

Still, you can and should offer a WebM video as the first <source>, since it features better compression, so users on a limited data plan will thank you. I just wanted to add that if you are limited in terms of disk space, render time or some other variable that makes it difficult to offer WebM, MP4 is all you need by now.

Also, since my original answer included something about audio, one additional takeaway that's not strictly related: Browser vendors are cracking down on autoplay videos (video that start playing automatically after loading the page, without a user interaction), especially if the video contains audio. For example, Safari will only allow autoplay videos if the video contains no audio track, or the video is muted (using the corresponding attribute on the <video> element). So if you don't need the audio track, export your video without one (autoplaying videos with audio are obnoxious UX anyway). And if you do need the audio, keep in mind that some browsers will block the autoplay, so make sure to include a placeholder image using the poster attribute.


Is there a way to export a list of all files used in an Adobe Premiere Pro project? I have a project which uses a lot of files that are placed on different hard drives. Is there an easy way to get all used files?

Just in case, you want to copy the files afterwards somewhere: You could convert the project to a team project, if not already and use Edit->Team Project...-> Media Management to copy all files to a shared storage.
But for a plain list you best go to File->Export -> Final Cut Pro XML. Make sure you haven't selected any clip in Media browser, because then it'll only export information for that one. With nothing selected, a copy of the whole project file should be converted to the XML file. The benefit: unlike Adobe's own format, this XML is human readable and it contains all file paths. Just search the document for <pathurl> and you find the file path there but with special characters escaped (meaning those are replaced, e.g. the space character is expressed by %20).
One way to get a clean list, is to use a text editor with RegEx (=regular expressions) support. Sometimes usage of regular expressions varies a tiny bit with different tools. The following has been tested with the text editor Sublime for Windows, press Ctrl+H for the replacment dialogue and make sure to click the button with .* as text. In case you use macOS, I am sure there are similar alternatives available or pre-installed.

use ^((?!<pathurl>.*</pathurl>).)*$ and replace it with nothing to get rid of everything but the pathurl parts
replace \s with nothing to remove the tons empty lines.
replace <pathurl>file://localhost/ with nothing
replace </pathurl> with a line break \n.

Finally copy everything into a tool like URL Encode Decode (and press decode URL) to get a list with those %20 and similar escapings removed. You could replace them one by one in text editor, but depending how many different escapings there are, this would be too much work. Oh, and finally replace the / with \ if you use Windows (or \\ in RegEx syntax).
Of course, if you do it more than once, it might help to write a script or a program, that extracts those XML parts. However, this would be well beyond the scope of this question. Alternatively you could look for XML tools, which might make things much more convenient for you, but I'm not aware of a good tool that does this job better than a text editor with RegEx support.


Adobe Premiere Background Processes Premiere keeps running in the background, eating up a lot of RAM, but I can't figure out why. I have to keep manually stopping it.

In addition to this, the program keeps refusing to have video playback. It will do audio of the videos but not the videos themselves. I've tried everything that I can find on the internet and NOTHING works.

Have any of you experienced this before?

Thanks

That's not really a large allocation of memory for Premiere. It's only holding as private memory just under 4GB.

My recommendation would be to add additional memory to you system.

I personally would recommend a minimum of 32 GB, but if your overhead is low in general, you can get away with less and not have any issues.


Adobe premiere - dedicated method for split frame video? I'm after a video that has a short clip of me tying two different shoes. Here is a still frame with the desired effect:

Question

Does premiere have anything built-in to achieve this kind of effect? As it stands, I only seem to be able to add the clips in one at a time, but I don't see any functionality for the split-frame effect I desire. If there is nothing built-in, do I have other options?

You should position two tracks differently, one to the left and one to the right. Those tracks need also croppings to have the interesting part visible. See for ex. this tutorial video: Adobe Premiere Pro Tutorial: How to create Split Screen Side by Side Video Effect.

There's more of them, search for “Premiere split screen”.


ffmpeg combine three videos side by side I have three videos s1.mp4,s2.mp4 s3.mp4 and I need to combine three videos side by side I know use hstack but my three videos has different size?

I've found  following commands.It works,but only support two videos.

ffmpeg -i s1.mp4 -i s2.mp4 -filter_complex "[1:v][0:v]scale2ref[wm][base];[base][wm]hstack=2" final.mp4

Use

ffmpeg -i s1.mp4 -i s2.mp4 -i s3.mp4 -filter_complex "[1:v][0:v]scale2ref=oh*mdar:ih[1v][0v];[2:v][0v]scale2ref=oh*mdar:ih[2v][0v];[0v][1v][2v]hstack=3,scale='2*trunc(iw/2)':'2*trunc(ih/2)'" final.mp4


Video compression for Beginner, where to start? I'm interested in video, but I know very little about it.
I love to make videos with my camcorder or GoPro, edit them afterwards and upload them.

The thing is, I know how to do this, but I don't know how it works. When I have to choose the presets in Adobe Premiere Elements 9, I have no idea what all those things mean. Neither do I know what settings are the best on the camcorder and GoPro. I don't know in what filetype I should export or upload the video.

I want to learn very much about video.
My question: where and how do I start?

Compression is a very complex field that you can get in to either a little or a lot or anywhere in between.  There are companies whose only job is to do high quality compression for major releases.  Part of the trick is that there are different compression algorithms, different storage formats, different codecs and each codec has its own set of settings.

Starting at the most broad, we have different algorithms.  A compression algorithm is a particular approach to trying to reduce the amount of information that needs to be stored to reproduce a signal.  Examples of compression algorithms are things like MPEG, MPEG-2/H.262, MPEG-4, MPEG-4 AVC/H.264.  It defines how to simplify the information and what kinds of patterns are being looked for in the signal.

Then, similarly broad, we have storage formats.  These are either physical formats such as Bluray disk or DV tape or file formats such as WMV, MOV, M4V and simply store information that is either raw or more likely compressed with a compression algorithm via a codec.

A codec is a particular implementation of a compression algorithm.  It is an encoder/decoder.  With standards based codecs, it is not necessary for the same exact codec to be used for decoding as is used for encoding, though proprietary codecs do exist that require the same codec to be installed for playback to function.  Part of the complexity of compression is that each codec makes it's own implementation of even standard algorithms and has it's own settings available to adjust how encoding is done.

Often, the better the codec, the more control it gives over how compression is performed.  Since settings differ from one codec to another, the impact of settings can similarly differ.  There isn't really any substitute for experimentation when learning how a codec behaves, but some key terminology stays consistent between different codecs and even different algorithms.

The most obvious, significant and consistent one is probably VBR (1 and 2 pass) and CBR.  Almost any motion based compression has these options.  CBR is Constant Bit Rate.  It means that a certain amount of data should be used per second every second regardless of the amount of activity or difficulty of compressing.  In motion based video, it leads to really high quality when things are relatively still, but quality suffers during times of high motion.  It also gives very easy to estimate file sizes.

VBR, on the other hand, stands for Variable Bit Rate and as the name implies, the bit rate can change based on the difficulty of compressing the current scene.  Typically a target bit rate and a maximum bitrate are give.  The target is what the codec will try to average out to and the maximum bitrate is the level it isn't allowed to exceed at any time.  1 pass VBR will attempt to do so with no prior knowledge of the video being encoded.  2 pass VBR on the other hand makes a pass through the video to determine the characteristics of the video so that it can properly spread the data rates around to achieve the best possible quality with the allotted bandwidth.  The downside is that it takes roughly twice as long to encode.

Another relatively consistent concept is keyframes.  Many compression work by only actually storing full images occasionally.  The rest of the frames are approximations based on the previous full image.  Keyframes can determine how often those full frames are used.  More advanced codecs will even allow for the actual sequence of frame types being used to be controlled.  (For example, with MPEG-2, I, B and P frames are the 3 main types of frames.)

When using non-standard formats, resolution is also an option for compression.  It can greatly reduce the amount of information that needs to be stored, but also greatly reduces the quality it is designed to be played back at.  When trying to figure out the best compression for the web, it's important to consider both the bitrate and the resolution.  Trying to store too many pixels with not enough bitrate will result in compression related artifacts, but storing too few pixels will result in a universal loss of resolution (but less artifacts).

While each codec can have guidelines for approximating bitrates needed for various resolutions, there unfortunately isn't much substitute for experimentation.  A video of watching paint dry is going to take substantially less bitrate than Uncle Billy Bob's shaky footage of a high speed soccer match.  In general, for motion based compression, the amount of motion in the scenes determines how well it compresses and you can develop a feel for it with time working with a particular codec.

As with your other question, if there are any more specific topics you are stuck on, feel free to ask here or to check a particular format on Wikipedia or similar for much more in-depth information than can easily fit in a Q/A format.


How to apply the same white point to multiple clips of the same take? I shot one take with a camera that could not set white balance. I imported it into Final Cut Pro and set the white balance from a white point. I then cut the take into multiple slices and shuffled them around. I tried removing the white balance adjustment and then Final Cut Pro hung on me. How can I apply the same color correction to all slices of the same take?

I was able to save the corrections to one slice as an effect preset and apply the preset to all other clips with directions from Apple:

You apply a color correction preset as you would apply any other clip effect from the Effects browser.


Anyone with Mac Pro, please help for CPU advice I'm about to buy a Mac Pro, possibly an iMac instead, in a few days for extensive 3D and video work. I was able to try an online CPU stress test which renders complex video frames on the iMac but I need someone that has a Mac Pro. If you could go to the link below and click on the third bottom option "Stress Test," and tell me exactly how many seconds it took to render the first frame. This would be greatly appreciated thank you!

http://silver.urih.com/

Also let me know what your processor is/specs are. Thank you again!

I have mid 2012 Mac Pro with two E5645 Xeon's and result is 01:10

But I don't think that SilverBench is best benchmark. Guys who use Cinema 4D usually use Cinebench by Maxon. My results in Cinebench:


changing this code to check for a collision from a specific layer I got this code from motionscript and I would like to change it to check a specific layer instead of all the layers for a collision. Maybe within the function checklayers() and then there's the if checklayers() at the last line   ??

function getMin(a, b, c, d){
  return Math.min(Math.min(a,b),Math.min(c,d));
}

function getMax(a, b, c, d){
  return Math.max(Math.max(a,b),Math.max(c,d));
}

function getBoundingBox(theLayer){
  bb = [];
  c1 = theLayer.toWorld([0,0]);
  c2 = theLayer.toWorld([theLayer.width,0]);
  c3 = theLayer.toWorld([theLayer.width,theLayer.height]);
  c4 = theLayer.toWorld([0,theLayer.height]);
  bb[0] = getMin(c1[0],c2[0],c3[0],c4[0]);
  bb[1] = getMin(c1[1],c2[1],c3[1],c4[1]);
  bb[2] = getMax(c1[0],c2[0],c3[0],c4[0]);
  bb[3] = getMax(c1[1],c2[1],c3[1],c4[1]);
  return bb;
}

function checkLayers(){
  cUL = [];
  cLR = [];
  for ( idx = 1; idx <= thisComp.numLayers; idx++){
    if (index == idx) continue;
    L = thisComp.layer(idx);
    if (! L.active) continue;
    BB = getBoundingBox(L);
    UL = [BB[0],BB[1]];
    LR = [BB[2],BB[3]];

    if (!(myLR[1] < UL[1] || LR[1] < myUL[1] ||
          myLR[0] < UL[0] || LR[0] < myUL[0])){

      if (myUL[1] < UL[1]) cUL[1]=UL[1] else cUL[1]=myUL[1];
      if (myUL[0] < UL[0]) cUL[0]=UL[0] else cUL[0]=myUL[0];
      if (myLR[1] < LR[1]) cLR[1]=myLR[1] else cLR[1]=LR[1];
      if (myLR[0] < LR[0]) cLR[0]=myLR[0] else cLR[0]=LR[0];

      for(i = cUL[0]; i <= cLR[0]; i++){
        for (j = cUL[1]; j <= cLR[1]; j++){
          if (sampleImage(fromWorld([i,j]))[3] > 0 &&
              L.sampleImage(L.fromWorld([i,j]))[3] > 0){

            return true;
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
  return false;
}

myBB = getBoundingBox(thisLayer);
myUL = [myBB[0],myBB[1]];
myLR = [myBB[2],myBB[3]];

if (checkLayers()) 1 else 0

Yes, checkLayers() is what is performs the collision test, and compares every layer in the Comp against the one running the script.

To check against only one layer, you could re-write that function a little cleaner, but here's a quick solution.

First, remove the lines that start and end the for loop, since you'll only be checking one layer. But don't remove the code inside the for loop, since that code is what does the collision check.

for ( idx = 1; idx <= thisComp.numLayers; idx++){  // delete
    ... // keep this stuff
} // delete

You can also delete these two lines, since you don't need to check every layer in the Comp for whether it's the same as the layer running the script, or whether the layer is active or not:

if (index == idx) continue; // skips if the comparison layer is the same as the current layer

if (! L.active) continue;   // skips if the comparison layer is inactive

Last, modify this line:

L = thisComp.layer(idx);

… to make L the one layer that you want to compare to. You might do that by referencing a layer by index or name, such as:

L = thisComp.layer("Name of Single Layer to Compare");

Check the Adobe documentation on Comp attributes and methods to see other options for referencing a specific layer.

You do need the if (checkLayers()) 1 else 0 line at the end, because that's the “switch” that returns the final value of your expression, depending on whether there was a collision (returns 1) or not (returns 0).


Can ffmpeg input mp4 and convert it to m4b or m4a? Can mp4 audio/video be converted to m4b using ffmpeg command line tool.(in vb.net)

I've spent the last few days trying various query combinations to find an answer but to no avail.

What I have found is that m4a/m4b is the same container as mp4, the difference being m4a/m4b contains no video signal.

When I tried to convert mp4 directly to m4b, I ended up with an output m4b much larger than the original mp4 and the m4b still contained video.

I am using a code example from CodeProject. I am able to convert from mp4 to mp3 and from mp3 to m4b but mp4 to m4b still contains the video portion of the file.

So, can ffmpeg input mp4 and convert it to m4b or m4a directly or is it a 2 step process, mp4 to mp3 then mp3 to m4b? If it is a 1 step process, could you point me in the direction of the documentation so I can learn how to do it.

Thanks

This might be a bit late but if it helps I've got a working PowerShell script that I use to create chapterized m4b files which I am assuming you are trying to do since you list m4b.

I use the following command for mp3 format files

ffmpeg -f concat -safe 0 -i list.txt -vn -y -b:a 64k -acodec aac -ac 2 temp.m4a

If its already in AAC format (MP4) it's even simpler

ffmpeg -f concat -safe 0 -i list.txt -c copy temp.m4a

list.txt is a simple list of all the files to combine into a single m4a, 1 file per line. I found this to work much better than trying to do it using INPUT and listing all the files on the command line. That method always seemed to break for me.

Once this is done you can inject the chapters and rename to m4b all in a single command line.

ffmpeg -i "ffmetadata.txt" -i "temp.m4a" -map_metadata 1 -codec copy "$artist - $albumSanitized.m4b"


Application for Screen-casting for Macintosh I need to make a Screen-cast. This is, I need to capture my screen and audio from my computer and then after be able to edit this video.

Then I need an app for Macintosh.

Since I just need to do really basic editing tasks I've trying Camtasia and Screenflow, both of them works just fine, but both of these has important lacks imho.

Screenflow: doesn't have vectorial objects like "bubble speeches", "squares", etc.

Camtasia: you can not group or nest the tracks (keep in mind that this is Camtasia for Mac, which has less features that its Windows version)

Then, I'm just wondering what other app would I use.

Should I use Final Cut Pro to get all the features I need?

I know you looked at ScreenFlow. Were you looking at the latest version--ScreenFlow 4? It does have some vectorial shapes (they're called Annotations):

Line (arrow)
Line
Square (filled)
Square
Circle

Now, that doesn't get you speech bubbles and other abstract shapes. For those, you can use a text box with an image fill--unfortunately, you've got to supply your own image in that case.

ScreenFlow also accepts PDF and other image types as layers. This makes ScreenFlow able to import vector PDF's as "shapes" that one can use to add annotations such as the mentioned speech bubbles.


Dropping Frames when Playing back Sped Up Footage in PP CC 2018 My playback of footage that is sped up 500% is awful in PP CC 2018 on my desktop but fine on my laptop. My CPU utilization is not maxing out on my desktop but I'm still dropping 90% of my frames. I'm using 1/4 resolution for playback, have plenty of memory allocated to PP, have memory usage set to "performance", etc.

Desktop specs:
6700K
32GB 3200Mhz
GTX1070

My laptops specs are not as good but seems to be fine with the playback of the exact same timeline. I'm curious if there's something I'm forgetting or not thinking about.

If you haven't done so already, you might need to pre-render the time adjusted clip.

Select your clip(s) and from the top menu bar select "Sequence > Render Selection".

The green bar above your tracks will indicate that the selection should run at real time during playback as you have preview files store in memory.


how to Rotate a 3gp video without re-encoding I created a video in my cellphone holding the phone in portrait mode. The video is 720p and it looks perfectly fine in cell phone. I copied it on computer and when viewing it, the video looks 90 degrees anti-clockwise rotated. It is confusing for me that why it happened. How can I rotate the copied video back to 90-degrees without re-enconding the video.

Rotate without re-encoding

You can add rotation metadata:

ffmpeg -i input.3gp -c copy -metadata:s:v rotate=90 output.3gp

-c copy will enable stream copy mode, so it will just re-mux instead of re-encode.
Player and device support for the rotate metadata may vary, so your player or device may not actually rotate the video. If that is the case you may have to manually rotate within the player, or re-encode.

Rotate with re-encoding

When re-encoding ffmpeg will automatically rotate the video. The rotate metadata/sidedata will not be copied from the input (which is a good thing).

ffmpeg -i input output

If it doesn't work for you then your build is too old. Refer to the FFmpeg Download page.


Best file format workflow for Final Cut Pro 7 on Maveriks i am having problems exporting my project in Final Cut Pro 7.
All the clips i am working on are mov in h.264.
I want to export correctly a master file, that will be converted in web format, hd... with MPEG Streamclip.
But i am experiencing problems with frame freezes, and coding problems.

Can you suggest me a tutorial, a guide, a book, a video course where to learn the perfect workflow for video production with Final Cut Pro 7 on Maveriks?
Or do you have any suggestions to help me?

Thank you guys.

Luca

Likely your issues were stemming from trying to edit with H264 files.  This is something that FCP hates!  Convert all your h264 footage to ProRes before you start editing (using Compressor, MPEG Streamclip, or the awesome Magic Bullet Grinder) and then edit with the ProRes files.  Output your final 'Master File' as ProRes and then use Compressor to encode that file to various formats for delivery.


Optimal pace of speech I am applying to a scholarship, where I need to answer some questions in a one minute long video. I would like to push as much information as I can, but I wouldn't like to make it over-crowded... so what is an optimal speech / time ratio? (how many characters, or sentences, etc for one minute?)
Are there some statistics like that? What is it like at ads from tech companies?

You will generally get the following guidance if you take courses on presentation skills (this list from write-out-loud.com)

Slow speech is usually regarded as less than 110 wpm, or words per minute.
Conversational speech generally falls between 120 wpm at the slow end, to 150 - 200 wpm in the fast range.
People who read books for radio or podcasts are often asked to speak at 150-160 wpm.
Auctioneers or commentators who practice speed speech are usually in the 250 to 400 wpm range.

So you'll probably want to aim for that 150 wpm range to be able to get a reasonable amount across, but not sound like an auctioneer


Replace image in a template created on After Effects I've created an intro template on After Effects that has some text and the animation of a masked image. If I import this aep template to Premiere Pro, I can easily replace the text, however I can't find a way to replace the image too.

Is it possible?

I don't think it is.  As you say, you can replace text using Live Text Templates.
If you need to easily re-version comps from AE with different source material, I would suggest looking at Templater.


After Effects expression - define two positions, tween back and forth So I want to do something simple: define two sets of coordinates (a "from" and a "to" position), along with a duration in frames. I want the animation to be executed, then reversed, and looped.

I know I can set two keyframes, and use loopOut("pingPong"); but I want to try and achieve this with a simple expression.

I'm sure it's possible!

Darby Edelen posted an answer on Creative Cow.

  You won't be able to define any spatial paths any other way, but this
  should work:

d = 5;
fd = d * 2;
p1 = [200, 500];
p2 = [500, 200];
t = (time - inPoint) % fd;
if(t <= d) linear(t, 0, d, p1, p2);
else linear(t, d, fd, p2, p1);

  This starts from p1 at the beginning of the layer and runs to p2 over
  5 seconds, then goes back to p1 and begins again. If you want the
  animation to ease in to each point you could use the ease() function
  instead of linear() providing the same arguments.

  -Darby


Photoshop: Video timeline - hide part of a layer I have recently got into Video Timelines with Photoshop CC 2015.

I am trying to make a transition with text. I can rasterize it if needed. I am trying to make it so that only part of the text is showing and the other part is hidden. I want to do this for a transition. How can I do this without any additional layers?

In general, when you use a program as complex as Photoshop, you don't want to fight its idiomatic way of doing things, you want to use it instead.  The idiomatic way of hiding/revealing parts of an image (which, in turn, means parts of a layer or set of layers) is with a mask, which is typically its own layer.  The layering system of Photoshop is a major aspect of its functionality.  Don't fight it or try to not use it.  Learn it, master it, and then use it.


Convert vfr mov file to cfr mov file Adobe Premiere has problems with variable frame rate. If I import a MOV file from an iPhone for example than audio and video is not synchron. I found out that the problem is the variable frame rate. Now I'm looking for a solution to fix this.

Currently I reencoded the videos in Windows Movie Maker for example but I don't want to have a loss in quality. I searched a bit and found out that AviSynth could do this for me. AviSynth cannot open MOV files so qtsource should be able to handle it. I placed it in the plugin folder of AviSynth but in the readme it says that the vfr feature is experimental and not working ...

Yes, I could use Handbrake but I always would have to reencode. Are there other options?

If you have Premiere, why not simply use Adobe Media Encoder?  I believe it should handle your needs.  There will always be some quality loss though as you will have to change codecs and the compression is going to differ.  You can use high quality formats to minimize the loss, but there is going to be loss.