How do the super resolution filters in FFmpeg work? I need to incorporate a small amount of 1080p HD shots in a 2160p 4K composition. I'm not impressed by default upscaling techniques like lanczos/bicubic/trilinear; it seems like my television does a better job of upscaling 1080p in real time. It may be time to learn some new tricks.

The FFmpeg manual mention a technique called Super Resolution, and it comes in two forms:

SRCNN: Super-Resolution Convolutional Neural Network model
ESPCN: Efficient Sub-Pixel Convolutional Neural Network model

Usually I can find many online sources for figuring out how to do something with FFmpeg. But I can't seem to find any tutorials on how to use this. I don't really understand it. I need to train (how?) a model (from what?), or get a pre-trained model (where?). I'd like to know how to get from 1080p to 2160p using this technique, assuming I know nothing about it.

I realise this question is pretty old now but it still comes up quite high in search results so I would like to document how I got the "sr" to work (August 2020) in case it can help someone else. Before proceeding it is worth saying that I was not overly impressed by the result. I felt on my test videos that lanczos did an ever so slightly better job. Bear in mind that my test was upscaling from 640x360 flv file to 1920x1080 mp4. I have not tested many other videos and I also have quite a lot to learn about SR like if I feed it different training material will I get a better result.
What you will need

A CUDA enabled GPU with a capability of at least 6.0. I worked all
the way through this once with a GeForce GT710 (capability of 3.5)
only to get to the final ffmpeg upscaling for it to tell me I needed
a capability of 6.0. It did proceed to use the CPU but was very slow.
I then went through it again with a GeForce GTX 1050TI 4GB card and
saw a noticable performance gain.
At least 70GB free disk space. The training scripts download about 42GB worth of videos and 9GB worth of images. The rest is used up generating the model.
Patience. Generating the datasets took a good few hours and training just one model took nearly the whole day.
I had a couple of spare computers (one server and one pc) so I was able to build this from scratch and let it run. First I tried it on Ubuntu Server 20.04 and 18.04. Final run through with the new GPU was on Xubuntu 20.04. The only reason I went with Xubuntu in the end was because I was also investigating a new USB capture device for VHS but the instructions below will work with Server.

Setup
THIS GUIDE IS OFFERED AS IS WITH NO GUARANTEES IT WILL WORK FOR YOU. PLEASE TAKE CARE AND ONLY FOLLOW IF YOU KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING.
My starting point is a fresh install of Xubuntu 20.04. I have a GeForce GTX 1050TI GPU that is not my main GPU and there is no monitor connected to it. I do not think it should matter though if it is your main GPU or if there is a monitor connected.
FROM https://www.tensorflow.org/install/gpu
Add NVIDIA package repositories
wget https://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/cuda/repos/ubuntu1804/x86_64/cuda-repo-ubuntu1804_10.1.243-1_amd64.deb
sudo apt-key adv --fetch-keys https://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/cuda/repos/ubuntu1804/x86_64/7fa2af80.pub
sudo dpkg -i cuda-repo-ubuntu1804_10.1.243-1_amd64.deb
sudo apt-get update
wget http://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/machine-learning/repos/ubuntu1804/x86_64/nvidia-machine-learning-repo-ubuntu1804_1.0.0-1_amd64.deb
sudo apt install ./nvidia-machine-learning-repo-ubuntu1804_1.0.0-1_amd64.deb
sudo apt-get update

Install NVIDIA driver
sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends nvidia-driver-450

REBOOT, then check that GPUs are visible using the command: nvidia-smi. Do not proceed if you do not see a table output. If you have a message saying there is no device then you need to troubleshoot this stage. For example in my first build the BIOS was set to use the onboard graphics card first and changing it to use the offboard card got it working. I didn't have this problem in the last build on a different PC.
Install development and runtime libraries (~4GB). Here we are installing both CUDA 10.0, 10.1. The training scripts and filter are a couple of years old now and we therefore need to accommodate them.
sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends \
    cuda-10-0 \
    libcudnn7=7.6.5.32-1+cuda10.0  \
    libcudnn7-dev=7.6.5.32-1+cuda10.0

Install TensorRT. Requires that libcudnn7 is installed above.
sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends libnvinfer6=6.0.1-1+cuda10.0 \
    libnvinfer-dev=6.0.1-1+cuda10.0 \
    libnvinfer-plugin6=6.0.1-1+cuda10.0

And now the 10.1 versions
sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends \
    cuda-10-1 \
    libcudnn7=7.6.5.32-1+cuda10.1  \
    libcudnn7-dev=7.6.5.32-1+cuda10.1

sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends libnvinfer6=6.0.1-1+cuda10.1 \
    libnvinfer-dev=6.0.1-1+cuda10.1 \
    libnvinfer-plugin6=6.0.1-1+cuda10.1

FROM https://www.tensorflow.org/install/pip#system-install
The guide above suggests to install venv here but this was not a concern for me so I left it out. If you are familiar with Python then go ahead and use venv.
sudo apt install python3-dev python3-pip
sudo pip3 install --upgrade tensorflow

Add some libraries temporarily to LD_LIBRARY_PATH. We will make this permanent a little later.
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/usr/local/lib:/usr/local/cuda-10.0/lib64:/usr/local/cuda-10.1/lib64:/usr/local/cuda-10.2/lib64:/usr/local/cuda/extras/CUPTI/lib64

You will notice I am adding cuda 10.2 here as well but we did not install it. For some reason one of the library files (libcublas) when installing 10.1 is taken from 10.2.
We can verify with the below (check for errors). There is a lot of output, mainly information and you want to check that it has seen your GPU and has successfully opened all the libraries.
python3 -c "import tensorflow as tf; print(tf.reduce_sum(tf.random.normal([1000, 1000])))"

Add LD_LIBRARY_PATH to ld.so.conf.d
sudo vi /etc/ld.so.conf.d/cuda-additional.conf

Add the lines
/usr/local/cuda/extras/CUPTI/lib64
/usr/local/cuda-10.2/lib64

The other 2 paths are automatically added for us during install.
FROM https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-filters.html#sr-1
Install the TensorFlow for C library. If you follow the link given at the above it shows you Tensorflow version 2.3.0 (or later), however, as mentioned earlier the filter code is old and requires version 1.15.0. So:
wget https://storage.googleapis.com/tensorflow/libtensorflow/libtensorflow-gpu-linux-x86_64-1.15.0.tar.gz
sudo tar -C /usr/local -xzf libtensorflow-gpu-linux-x86_64-1.15.0.tar.gz

FROM https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/CompilationGuide/Ubuntu
Now we fetch and compile ffmpeg. So install some dependencies first:
sudo apt-get update -qq && sudo apt-get -y install \
  autoconf \
  automake \
  build-essential \
  cmake \
  git-core \
  libass-dev \
  libfreetype6-dev \
  libgnutls28-dev \
  libsdl2-dev \
  libtool \
  libva-dev \
  libvdpau-dev \
  libvorbis-dev \
  libxcb1-dev \
  libxcb-shm0-dev \
  libxcb-xfixes0-dev \
  pkg-config \
  texinfo \
  wget \
  yasm \
  zlib1g-dev

mkdir -p ~/ffmpeg_sources ~/bin
sudo apt-get install nasm libx264-dev libx265-dev libnuma-dev libvpx-dev libfdk-aac-dev libmp3lame-dev libopus-dev libunistring-dev

cd ~/ffmpeg_sources && \
wget -O ffmpeg-snapshot.tar.bz2 https://ffmpeg.org/releases/ffmpeg-snapshot.tar.bz2 && \
tar xjvf ffmpeg-snapshot.tar.bz2 && \
cd ffmpeg && \
PATH="$HOME/bin:$PATH" PKG_CONFIG_PATH="$HOME/ffmpeg_build/lib/pkgconfig" ./configure \
  --prefix="$HOME/ffmpeg_build" \
  --pkg-config-flags="--static" \
  --extra-cflags="-I$HOME/ffmpeg_build/include" \
  --extra-ldflags="-L$HOME/ffmpeg_build/lib" \
  --extra-libs="-lpthread -lm" \
  --bindir="$HOME/bin" \
  --enable-gpl \
  --enable-gnutls \
  --enable-libass \
  --enable-libfdk-aac \
  --enable-libfreetype \
  --enable-libmp3lame \
  --enable-libopus \
  --enable-libvorbis \
  --enable-libvpx \
  --enable-libx264 \
  --enable-libx265 \
  --enable-libtensorflow \
  --enable-nonfree && \
PATH="$HOME/bin:$PATH" make && \
make install && \
hash -r

Notice that I have left out libaom and added libtensorflow. This has created new binaries under ~/bin and added it to your profile and path so it can be called from anywhere. If you do not want to replace your existing ffmpeg then be sure to change the bindir and paths as required.
Reload our profile
source ~/.profile

FROM https://github.com/XueweiMeng/sr/tree/sr_dnn_native
So now we are almost at the stage where we can start to generate and train the models, however, the scripts are old so we need to modify them somewhat. Get them first (you can specify any path to download it to or get it manually with GUI:
cd ~
wget https://github.com/XueweiMeng/sr/archive/sr_dnn_native.zip
unzip sr_dnn_native.zip
rm sr_dnn_native.zip
cd sr-sr_dnn_native

Now edit all python files that have "import tensorflow as tf", i.e.
datasets/prepare_dataset.py
datasets/prepare_div2k_dataset.py
evaluate.py
generate_header_and_model.py
models/model_vespcn.py
models/model_espcn.py
models/image_warp.py
models/model_srcnn.py
models/model.py
models/dataset.py
models/model_vsrnet.py
train.py

After the imports in each script add the line:
tf = tf.compat.v1

For example using datasets/prepare_dataset.py:
import os
import argparse
from tqdm import tqdm
import cv2
import numpy as np
import json
import tensorflow as tf
from PIL import Image

tf = tf.compat.v1

class SceneChangeDetector:

There is one other depreciated function we need to take care of and that is imresize.
Edit the file datasets/prepare_dataset.py
Replace line 8: from scipy.misc import imresize
With: from PIL import Image
Replace line 127: frame_lr = imresize(frames[k], (lr_h, lr_w), interp='bicubic')
With: frame_lr = np.array(Image.fromarray(frames[k]).resize(size=(lr_h, lr_w)))
We can finally start generating. Install some dependencies.
sudo pip3 install Pillow tqdm opencv-python

Generate (expect it to take a good few hours and you will likely see a lot of information output and warnings of almost depreciated functions, these are ok):
sh generate_datasets.sh

This will download 11 videos totalling around 43GB and images totalling around 9GB and can take a few hours to run depending on hardware.
And now for the training (expect these to take about a day each). The models after this will be found in the extracted ~/sr-sr_dnn_native folder if that is where you saved the Git zip file to:
SRCNN
sh train_srcnn.sh
python3 generate_header_and_model.py --model=srcnn --ckpt_path=logdir/srcnn_batch_32_lr_1e-3_decay_adam/train

ESPCN
sh train_espcn.sh
python3 generate_header_and_model.py --model=espcn --ckpt_path=logdir/espcn_batch_32_lr_1e-3_decay_adam/train

Once the training is complete you can use the filter. It seems as though ESPCN only upscales by a factor of 2 whereas with SRCNN you can specify 2, 3, or 4. I moved the models generated into the same folder as my videos for ease of use but you can simply point to the models wherever they are.
e.g.
ffmpeg -i <input_video> -vf sr=dnn_backend=tensorflow:scale_factor=3:model=srcnn.pb -q 15 -preset slow <output_video>
ffmpeg -i <input_video> -vf sr=dnn_backend=tensorflow:model=espcn.pb -q 15 -preset slow <output_video>

Here is an interesting video of this in use and was probably one of the only places I have seen anyone use this. In it he suggests it can only work on a single plane but I did not find that to be the case. His results actually appear to be quite good:

This is the ffmpeg command he refers to in the video at 14:44:
ffmpeg -i my_video_540p.mp4 -filter_complex "format=pix_fmts=yuv420p,extractplanes=y+u+v[y][u][v];[y] sr=dnn_backend=tensorflow:scale_factor=2:model=espcn.model [y_scale];[u] scale=960:-2 [u_scale];[v] scale=960:-2 [v_scale];[y_scale][u_scale][v_scale] mergeplanes=0x001020:yuv420p [merged]" -map "[merged]" -c:v libx264 -crf 18 -pix_fmt yuv420p my_video_1080p.mp4


News media copyright? As a producer I know that samples need to be cleared. How are news programs treated for inclusion in musical works. Are some historical works public domain (Kennedy moon mission speech is a good example). What about current news, NPR, etc?

In the US, fair use, the doctrine of copyright law that permits limited use of copyrighted material without needing to obtain permission first, is measured by four criteria. It doesn't matter whether the work you are including or creating is music, text, or a newscast, the same four criteria apply.

The purpose and character of the work you are including the copyrighted material in. For example, are you using it for educational purposes or are you trying to profit from what you are making?
The nature of the material you are including.
The amount of the work you are including, in relative and absolute terms. Are you including 5 seconds of a 1 hour work or all 10 lines of a poem?
The effect on the market or value of the included work. Are you going to take sales away from the included work?

However, there is no checklist to determine if your use of something falls under fair use. There is no guarantee that if you are, for example, using 30 seconds of a newscast for for educational purposes that will have no impact on the broadcaster's ability to sell commercials that you fall under fair use. Or that you tip the scale at 31 seconds of included material. Or that any commercial purpose of your work isn't fair use. "The only way to get a definitive answer on whether a particular use is a fair use is to have it resolved in federal court."

Historical material is not automatically public domain nor is it automatically available for fair use. Figuring out if a work's copyright is still in force is rather complex. You need to sort through the correct copyright term for the original work and whether any extensions have been applied.

However, any U.S. government work is automatically in the public domain. But there are exceptions to that. You can't just assume that because you found it on a government website that it is a government work. Something, like an NPR broadcast or a medical study, does not automatically become a government work and public domain just because it is partly or fully funded by the federal government.


Saving/renaming a project and preview files If I save Adobe Premier Pro (CS6) projects under different names as I go along to mark my progress, are the preview files in the associated folder no longer used?

For example, if I save a project as: "video v1.prj", and then render some video in the edit window, and then save it under a different name as "video v2.prj" does premier use any pre-rendered files in the old directories?  Or can I delete those pre-rendered files if I'm no longer using that version of the project without causing any data loss other than any pre-rendering for that particular project version?

If you rename a project it continues to link to the old preview files. Any new preview files Premiere creates are saved in a new folder with the updated project name. So you'd be using media from two different folders at that point.

If you delete the old preview files then Premiere will just re-render them when needed.

I tested this by creating a project called test, adding some clips and applying effects and rendering. Render files were created on my scratch disk in a folder called test.PRV. Then I saved the project as test-rename. When I closed and reopened it the clips I had rendered still had the green bar above them, and played back fine, though at this point there was no test-rename.PRV folder in my preview folders.

If I moved the original render file from the test.PRV folder and re-opened the test-rename project the bar went red. When I rendered it the resulting file was saved in a new test-rename.PRV folder. QED.

Note that Premiere gets confused if you remove the render files while the project is open. It doesn't realise that the preview files are missing, and behaves erratically.


Artifact in animation / horizontal lines & double images I'm using Handbrake, with the H.264 Codec (RF:16). It works pretty well with live action, but it produces odd results whenever I try to back up/encode animations. I've attached a screenshot:

Anything that's static is fine. But for anything moving (like the money tsunami in the image), I get the double image and horizontal lines. When it's moving, the double image isn't as noticeable, but the horizontal lines really stick out badly. Can anyone tell me what's going on, and how to fix it? Are there any codecs made precisely for animations?
(It's really bad with old psychodelic-type animation. Think "Yellow Submarine" style animation, with lots of bright, flashing colors.)

This artifact is likely the result of interlacing. And to get rid of it, you can deinterlace it.


FIXED - AfterEffect graph editor is stuck on displaying one particular curve and does not refresh The graph editor constantly displays the curves for the positions of a puppet pin, even when I'm not selecting anything and when I select something else.

Deleting the layer will get rid of it. But I want to find an alternative because I've spent a lot of time animating the pin.

Does anyone have any ideas?

FIXED:  It seems to be a bug with AE. My solution was by just duplicating the old layer and then deleting the old layer.


Scaling optimal video frame dimensions I'm trying to setup my site to store uploaded user content in a 640x360 frame size, which will be presented back for viewing in that frame size and in a smaller frame size.

I'm trying to understand why this site (and others): http://www.encoding.com/what_are_the_best_flash_video_frame_dimensions recommend only the following values for smaller sizes:

384 x 216
128 x 72

when clearly others like:

320 x 180
256 x 144

also exist.

What is the mathematical reason behind recommending only these frame sizes?

According to the site you referred to:
http://www.encoding.com/what_are_the_best_flash_video_frame_dimensions

The math behind the "Best, Better, and Good" video formats are based on if both Horizontal and Vertical pixels are divided by 16 for best, 8 for better, and 4 for good.

Therefore 256x144 is best, while 384x216 & 128x72 are better, while 320x180 is good.


When making an animation how can I get a zooming effect? I want to add a transition to one of my animations that gives the impression of the camera rushing/zooming towards the animation. Is there a better means of doing this in After Effects than scaling all of the elements onscreen up until they screen is filled?
It's an effect you see in a ton of animated infographic-style videos at the moment, but I am new to After Effects and am not sure about the best way to replicate it.

Drag your composition (in the project window) onto the Make new Composition button, everything inside that first composition will be added as one layer in the new composition. Now you can just zoom this one layer!

(Say your original comp. is called 1. You drag 1 onto the button. Now there will be a New Composition comp. with one layer inside. This layer is called 1.)


Does some macro exist for creating this text effect? I'm referring to this video (top right). How can I create a similar video / text effect. Indeed I can give expressions of the damped oscillator and tweak it for a long time until I get a good effect, but what would be a way way to do this? I prefer to use Adobe After Effects?

It's a Kinetic Typography piece. Search for templates on VideoHive, there are also plugins for AE that allow for easier generation of KT setups.

It's timeconsuming, search vimeo for some great samples: Kinetic Typography.

One of my all time favorites still to this day - produced years ago:  https://vimeo.com/17419652    The guy who did this spent months on it. But he did it all himself, great work.


Is there a process faster than masking frame by frame for cutting an animated character from a background? The following video is made from a number of different Anime videos, masked and composed in to a single video. I am wondering if the person who made this masked the videos frame by frame or is there a faster way in achieving this?

I am just asking for guidelines or another way of cutting the characters from a background, in an Anime which is made of a limited number colors.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPv6c3xGwzw&spfreload=1

Here is an example of a replaced character in the video:

You can also checkout some of the various keying techniques. I've been able to color key things pretty well in After Effects or Nuke - for After Effects you can either use "Change to Color" to create a matte or "Linear Color Key". Either way you're going to need to split up the video into a bunch of layers - each one keying in (or out) a specific color. The end result you're going for is a black-and-white matte which you can use to cut out the footage. Often times it requires a combination of all kinds of techniques - keying some colors, luminance based keying (which can be done with "extract" in After Effects), luminance based keying on specific channels (also "extract") and a bit of hand-made roto.

If you need a more in depth explanation let me know.


Best codec for playing unfinished files with VLC I am writing stream into video files with ffmpeg. Each file about 15 minutes. I want to be able to play finished and unfinished files with VLC (program using MetaVLC to be more precise). Which codec will best suit for this scenario?

I tried raw h264. Vlc can play them with option "demux=h264" but it unable to seek or change current time of playing. They play only from beginning.

I tried flv, but VLC can't play unfinished file.

You can use H.264 in MPEG-TS.

ffmpeg -i in -c:v libx264 out.ts

In Potplayer, I can play as well as seek. In VLC, as well, but timestamps are missing. Limitation is that you can only seek to keyframes. If you select a non-keyframe, then the video output will be frozen or corrupted till the player reaches a keyframe. Audio will work in any case.


Bitrate Settings for Minimal Data-Loss I cut clips from high-quality variable bitrate videos. What I'm wondering is if aiming for the same bitrate as the source video would result in a transparent-quality video. For example:

═════

Source video: kmaccaroni.mp4

Bit rate mode               : Variable

Bit rate                    : 26.0 Mb/s

Maximum bit rate            : 37.0 Mb/s

═════

I understand that data-loss is inevitable when transcoding. I simply want to minimize it in a reasonable manner.

•In this case, would it be enough to set my encoder settings to the same bitrate values?

•Would there be any benefit to using the same target rate but 50.0 MB/s for the Maximum rate?

•If not, should I increase the bitrate by a certain amount?

•What do you think of Premiere's "Adaptive High Bitrate" option?

•Is there any meaningful gains if I set the bitrate to 50.0 Mb/s CBR?

Thanks for reading.

The answer is no. You need lossless encoding. The good news is, the file size will be of a reasonable size if you use the H.264 encoder (and also H.265 or VP9, but those are not as popular and widely extended as H.264).

I am not used to that software you mention, but there must be an option called either "H.264" or "MPEG-4 AVC" or "MPEG-4 Part 10" (not to be confused with "MPEG-4 ASP" or "MPEG-4 Part 2" !), with the settings to "lossless" or "Constant Rate Factor equals zero".

Here are the settings in case you are using Blender:

Since you seem to be at the beginning of your learning curve, I recommend you switch to Blender. It is a professional alternative that was released as free software at some point and is maintained and upgraded by a very active and serious community. It is free, and there are awesome tutorials (Google for Mikeycal Meyers in YouTube).

Remark

You want to use lossless encoding only for the intermediate steps (e.g. cutting clips from other videos and putting them together as it seems you are doing). But once you are satisfied with the final form, for practical purposes you want to convert the last lossless compilation to a lossy format, e.g. H.264 with constant rate factor between 18 and 22 for visually good results. I use ffmpeg for this, although it can be done in Blender too.


How do I download FFmpeg build for windows 7 64 bit? (Zeranoe’s are offline.) There are two windows build on ffmpeg.org

gyan.dev
BtbN

The first one can’t be downloaded securely.
The second one has lots of files. Which files should I download?

The msg for gyan.dev downloads is a false alarm. All files are delivered via HTTPS. Select Keep instead of Discard.
Chrome shows the same message for Google Earth downloads as well.
This is apparently an initiative by Google to ultimately prevent mixed content downloads in Chrome.


Video with person 'writing on glass' effect I'm trying to find someone who can make videos similar to one shown here:

At 49 seconds, the actress writes on glass to explain the concept.

Does someone know what this effect is called so I know what to ask for?

Also, if you know how to do this sort of thing, please reply.

Thanks so much,

There is a much better way to do that. That example video is a pretty poor illusion.

It can be done "for real" with with real light. But it looks
different. It has to be dark.
You can use motion tracking to create an animation path.
You can also use manual key frames. There are lots of tutes on the intertubes about that. Here is one:


HEVC binary to MPEG 2TS I'm trying to convert a HEVC bit stream to MPEG-2 TS using ffmpeg. However I can't seem to perform the task without a wrapper such as mp4. Here is the command I was trying.

ffmpeg -i hevcBitstream.hevc -vcodec copy -acodec copy -vbsf h264_mp4toannexb output_file.ts

What seems to be the problem with this?.

Thanks.

This seemed to work for me...

ffmpeg -i "video.mp4" -vcodec copy -bsf:v hevc_mp4toannexb -f mpegts output_file.ts


How to render MP4 using After Effects Script with Adobe Media Encoder I can add my composition to Adobe Media Encoder Queue using below command

app.executeCommand(3800);

Now how i can render it from Adobe Media Encoder using render command like this

aerender -project /path/to/project/  -comp "Composition"  -v "ERRORS_AND_PROGRESS" -output output.mp4'

Thanks

Better later than never.

Since After Effects CC 2015.3 (13.8) you can send your comp to AME queue and render it immédiate with the recently used template.

app.project.renderQueue.canQueueInAME --> false is there is nothing to render in AE
app.project.renderQueue.queueInAME(false); --> false = no render, true = render immedialty in AME

Adobe exemple :

// Scripting support for Queue in AME.
// Requires Adobe Media Encoder 11.0.
{
    if (app.project.renderQueue.canQueueInAME == true)
    {
        // Send queued items to AME, but do not start rendering.
        app.project.renderQueue.queueInAME(false);
    }
    else {
        alert("There are no queued item in the Render Queue.");
    }
}

My exemple of use :

var resultFile = new File(outputVideoPath + outputVideoName)
var renderQueue = app.project.renderQueue;
var render = renderQueue.items.add(comp);
render.outputModules[1].file = resultFile;

app.project.renderQueue.queueInAME(true);

More details : https://forums.adobe.com/thread/2230567


How to Differentiate Subtitle Track Language Between Simplified and Traditional Chinese? I'm using MP4Box (command line tool) to add subtitles to mp4 movies. The language of the subtitle seems to be set using ISO 639 codes. There's no differentiation between Simplified and Traditional Chinese in ISO 639 (as the difference is not in the language, but in the script).

My question is: Does the MP4 format allows making this differentiation, and if so, how?

Thanks in advance for your answers.

You should be able to define you own 3 character long language code for imported media using the option :lang=LAN when specifying your media file for import. LAN being your own language code. So you could use something like SCN and TCN.


Live Streaming and Recording Simultaneously I will explain my situation first.  I am getting married in two months and have many family members that are in bad health.  They want to make the wedding, but just cant.  We had the idea of streaming the wedding over Skype, etc.  We had already planned on having a basic camcorder (non-professional) to record the wedding.

My question is, can we record the wedding and stream the video simultaneously using the same camcorder?  Or will we need a separate camcorder for each?

I'd love to make this possible without costing too much.

personally I think ustream or the like would be easier. assuming you dont mind the possibility of someone else watching


FFMpeg -filter_complex to place a video in a window on a larger image with text I'm trying to work out how to combine both features of the following in one -filter_complex statement in order to take an image, write some text on it, and then do an additive composite of a small video to an area of the image.  Every time I try to combine these two things it doesn't work!

ffmpeg -loop 1 -i mic720x1280.png -vf drawtext="fontfile=Montserrat-Bold.ttf: text='Hello': fontcolor=white: fontsize=44: box=1: boxcolor=black@0.5: boxborderw=10: x=(w-text_w)/2: y=100" -c:v libx264 -t 15 -pix_fmt yuv420p myvid.mp4

-vf "movie=waves5.mp4, scale=500:-1 [inner]; [in][inner] overlay=70:70 [out]"

Edited to change to additive blend.

Use

ffmpeg -loop 1 -i mic720x1280.png -i waves5.mp4 -filter_complex "color=0x000000@0,format=gbrap[bg];[0]format=gbrap,drawtext=fontfile=Montserrat-Bold.ttf: text='Hello': fontcolor=white: fontsize=44: box=1: boxcolor=black@0.5: boxborderw=10: x=(w-text_w)/2: y=100,setsar=1[img];[bg][img]scale2ref[bg][img];[bg]setsar=1[bg];[1]scale=500:-1,format=gbrap[vid];[bg][vid]overlay=70:70:format=rgb[vidbl];[vidbl][img]blend=all_mode=addition" -c:v libx264 -t 15 -pix_fmt yuv420p myvid.mp4


Insert Video Still onto MPEG2 video? I recorded a conference with my Sony camcorder that saves files as MPEG2.

Since I only had a single camera and the speaker didn't provide the PowerPoint slides afterwards, every time a slide was shown through the projectori, I had to move the camera from the speaker to the slides and back a few times during the talk.

So now I need to edit the file to get rid of those movements, and display the shots of the slides long enough each time so the video is steady; I don't know how it's called ("video overlay"?).

Is there a newbie-friendly, free NLE that can do this, such as VirtualDub or AviDemux, or do I have to buy a commercial solution such as Sony Vegas Studio?

Thank you.

iMovie comes free with a Mac and can easily do what you want. Here's how I'd do it, for each section you want to replace with a freeze frame:

Decide where you want to start and stop the freeze frame.  Cut the video clip at each of those points (right-click and select "Split").
See how long (exactly) that section is.
Within that section, click on the frame you want to use for the freeze frame.  Right-click it and select "Freeze Frame".  That will create a 4-second freeze frame.
Double-click the freeze frame and set its length to exactly the length of the clip you're replacing.
With the freeze frame clip still selected, click on the "Crop" tool.  The crop will automatically apply animation (called "Ken Burns").  I would change it to "Fit".
Right click on the first half of the clip you're replacing with the still frame.  Select "Detatch Audio".  Drag that detatched audio over the first half of your freeze frame.  Select the now-silent clip and delete it.
Do step 6 again for the second half of the clip you're replacing.

That should do it! Let me know if you have any questions. (And please mark this question as "The Answer" if it's useful!)


After Effects: Audio Not Playing - in AE CS4 O.K. so i'll tell the full thing on whats happening! I have two compsitions; one is the spectrum layers composition (which contains some spectrum things) and the other is the music composition (which contains the music and key-frame assistant)! The problem is when i put the music composition into the spectrum layers composition, the music doesn't play in the background and the spectrums doesn't read anything. I go back to the original music/mp3 file and i works. I even go to the music composition, click on the mp3 file, double tap "l", and it shows the waveform but when i go to the spectrum layers composition, and i double tap "l", it shows no waveform. Is this a glitch or did i do something wrong because when i did this with other projects (and i accidentally delete them), it works but now i doesn't. I tried my method on most of my spectrum videos but just now it doesn't work! Can anyone help me? Thanks

P.S. Sometimes when i press the RAM Preview button in the music composition, it says "After Effects Warning: Unable to create drawing surface"! Maybe that has to do something with it?

Maybe a dumb question, but is the loudspeaker icon enabled next to the music composition layer, when you place it in your main comp?

Also, sometimes if I have weird things happening with mp3 files, I convert them to 44.1khz 16bit WAV files instead, just to rule out any mp3 oddness...

Have you definitely connected the Audio Spectrum effect to your audio layer, by choosing it in the Audio Spectrum's "Audio Layer" effect setting?


Entire Track Velocity in Sony Vegas I have created a video+audio clip in Sony Vegas. After the work was completed, I decided to increase velocity a little bit (final percentage ~95% original).

In the project, I have several audio and video tracks, each of which obviously has multiple events.
I can Ctrl+Mouse Drag each individual event, but it seems even impossible to do the same when several events selected (only one event changes).

For both audio and viodeo, I need only velocity changed (time stretch, but no audio pitch shift), and all event points (transitions etc) change accordingly.

For audio, it seems possible to go to Master FX and add Time Stretch FX, but it only affects audio.

How can I change velocity for each individual track (or, well, an entire project) with minimum hassle?

P.S. Sony Vegas Pro 12.0, Windows 7.

The best way to increase the playback rate for the entire project is to use nested projects: Start new project and add your original project to the timeline as an event. Then Ctrl + Mouse Drag.


False copyright claims by "Orchard Music" I've created a video with background music. The background music is licensed under Creative Commons. Link (contains a download button):

Please click on the 'Awareness (Ambient Lounge Mix)' text to be directed to the license description.

When I uploaded the video to Youtube it had a copyright notice from "Orchard Music". So, I disputed the copyright infringement claim. My argumentation was that the music was a Creative Commons license. Orchard Music rejected my dispute.

I can dispute the rejected decision again. Two things can happen then.

The Copyright claim will be taken down
My uploaded video will be taken down

I fear that option 2 will be applied. I did some research and found valuable sources.

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/youtube/aVZ_dp7Ikt4

I have three questions actually:

How is it possible that Orchard Music can claim ownership of a Creative Commons music production?
Why do I need a publishing license to a Creative Commons music production?
Should I dispute the claim for the second time?

Ok, this is quite a complicated problem actually, and depending on the specific situation, the answer might vary. So I'll break this down in a couple of subsections.
CC licences and unauthorized distribution
Creative Commons are a set of licences that allow creators to distribute their original content (e.g. music) using liberal licences under easy to understand terms. However, in order to do so, the uploader needs to hold the rights to the music (usually this means they are the creator). If they don't, they have no right to grant any permissions regarding the use of that music. It's your responsibility to check if they do have those rights.
Excerpt from my answer here:

Remember that just because someone uploads music to a website and claims it's free-to-use, it doesn't mean he actually has the right to do so or the authority to grant you any rights to it. And if you use a copyrighted piece of music in your project without knowing any better, you can stil be held responsible even if you downloaded it from a website that claimed it was free. Always check if the website you are downloading from is legit and if the uploaders actually have to rights to the music (in most cases, that means they made it themselves).

In short, just because someone uploads a Hannah Montana album to some website and puts a CC icon next to it, you still can't use Best of Both Worlds in your video. And if you do, you can't rely on your claim that you got it from that site, because the uploader didn't hold the rights to that music in the first place and it would've been your responsibility to check if they do.
If it's music from a rather unknown author and there were no signs that the original source isn't legit, you might not be held responsible for the 'damage' (claimed by the copyright holder, whether that damage actually exists is a rather philosophical question) caused by your usage of the music. However, even in that case, you'd have to take your video down. So there's no winning in a situation like that.
tl;dr: Always make sure that uploader of whatever music you want to use actually made that music.
In your case, the Soundcloud account looks to be legit, so let's proceed.
CC licenses and retractability
This is only tangetially related to your specific problem, but it's actually something that I think is quite relevant to false copyright claims regarding CC licenced work. All CC licences contain this condition:

The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms.

What this means is as long as you uphold the terms of the licence, the uploader can't retract the permissions granted by the CC licence. Of course that doesn't mean he has to continue distribution his works indefinetely. But if a music creator at some point decides to stop distributing his work under a CC licence, this doesn't affect any work using his music (e.g. your YouTube video) that was created before that time.
So, assuming you made sure the uploader of the music holds the right to it and follow the licence terms (e.g. proper attribution), your video doesn't infringe any copyright and you are right to dispute such a claim.
(Note: If an artist at some point stops distributing his music under a CC licence, from that point onwards you can't rightfully publish any new work using his music, even if you downloaded it while it was still CC licenced. The non-retractibility only affects works published while the music was being distributed under a CC licence.)
However, being right isn't all there is to it. There's a saying in German:

Recht haben und Recht bekommen sind zwei Paar Schuhe.

Roughly translated: Being right and being proven right are two different things. That's where YouTube's ID system and false copyright claims come into play.
YouTube's ID system

"In the beginning the YouTube ID system was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move"

YouTube has a system in place that automatically checks for copyrighted music in uploaded videos and places copyright claims accordingly. The copyright holder of that music (according to YouTube's database) then gets notified and can decide what to do with it; for example, they can have the video taken down, or they can decide to leave it up but receive a portion of this video's ad proceeds. They can also decide on a default action, and that's a big part of the problem that made many people very angry.
In 2013 especially there was much trouble regarding this system. The problem was, the automated ID system was terrible to begin with and would often attribute music wrongly. There were also many scammers that would claim copyright for music that wasn't theirs. The problem is that in cases like this, YouTube favors the copyright holder. So instead of having the person who claims a copyright infringement provide them with proof, the video creator's have to dispute a claim and provide prove that they didn't infringe any copyrights. This usually took a couple of weeks and in the meantime, the person to claim the copyright infringement got all the proceeds from that video.
This system has since been refined and the uproar died down, but you still hear stories like yours occassionaly. When in doubt, YouTube still favors the copyright claimer over the video creator.
The Orchard Group
I hadn't heard of the Orchard Group before, but I've looked through the links you included in your question and did some additional research. As you already said, you are not the first creator to have problems with false copyright claims. On the forums, many people are quick to call them scam artists. But I'm not sure about that. There are also some stories about people that contacted them and got their false copyright claim resolved quickly. I believe the root of the problem might be this:

The Orchard's YouTube multi-channel network has more than 1,000 channels across the globe and uses technology, built in-house, called B.A.C.O.N. (Bulk Automated Claiming on The Orchard Network) to crawl, claim and track YouTube videos to monetize for their clients. It was ranked 7th in the U.S. in July 2014.

Source: Wikipedia
However, according to this source, the Orchard Music isn't unwilling to forfeit wrongly submitted copyright claims:

YouTube users have expressed concerns about The Orchard claiming copyright ownership of music used in user-generated content that may or may not belong to them. According to an article by The Orchard on their Daily Rind blog, if audio is matched to a particular copyright owner via YouTube's content identification system, then one or more links will be placed under the video in order to help promote the copyright owner's music, with the video remaining available. The article states that erroneous claims are removed by The Orchard Team after review upon email communication with their dispute department.
In this context, The Orchard has been criticized by YouTube users for claiming content that is not theirs or in some cases, content that did not exist within the video at all. In a blog post on The Daily Rind, The Orchard explains that this is due to YouTube's automated Content ID matching and outlines steps for resolving this scenario.

So, you got two automated systems that can both screw up and have been shown to do so often. Not an ideal situation for content creators. If you get caught in such an automated system, the solution is almost always to contact the people responsible for it. Contact the Orchard Group and possibly also contact the original artist of the music. If they are indeed not trying to scam anyone, they will be willing to help you. If the Orchard Group doesn't reply, public shaming on Twitter oftentimes helps you get in touch with an actual person, not just with an email autoresponder.
If they actually are scammers or plainly refuse to forfeit their copyright claim, you will have to contact YouTube to get it resolved. So ...
Your questions

How is it possible that Orchard Music can claim ownership of a Creative Commons music production?

As mentioned, this is mostly done by automated systems that are prone to misfires, especially if larger distribution/collection companies are involved. Also, you can claim anything, that doesn't mean you actually have any lawful grounds on which your claim is based. I can claim that I be crowned High King of the Universe, but nobody will have to call me Your Majesty. And if I sue them, I'm unlikely to win that case.

Why do I need a publishing license to a Creative Commons music production?

You don't. The CC licence gives you the right to publish your video if you follow the terms laid out in the licence, you don't need to pay any additional licence fees or royalties. However, a human error is also possible.
For example, maybe the artist is represented by the Orchard Group and never intended to publish their work under a CC licence. Maybe they just forgot to change that setting while uploading their music to Soundcloud. I'm not sure about Soundcloud, but if you for example upload something to Vimeo, a CC-BY licence is applied by default, and you have to go into a submenu of the settings to change that. I think that is a terrible implementation, but that's how it is.
Even if that case, you would probably be within your rights to invoke the licence terms the author published his music under, but it might not be feasible or realistic to do so and see your claim through.

Should I dispute the claim for the second time?

That is your decision. Before you do anything, check if you followed all the licence terms, the legitimacy of your music source and everything else mentioned in this post. It might also be better to contact the Orchard Group or the artist directly to see if you can't get the issue resolved without involving YouTube as a third party. Though a lawyer would probably tell you that contacting them is the worst thing to do if you plan to follow this up with a lawsuit.
Just remember, being right doesn't mean YouTube will take your side. And if they don't, there's little you can do besides suing, which might not be feasible for you.

Disclaimer: I'm not actually sure I answered your question after all that text. I'm sure I forgot something, but there's so many important factors involved, it's hard to put everything into one answer. Feel free to ask if I forgot anything, I'll be happy to edit my answer if I can. Also note that none of this constitutes legal advice. It's rather a description of the current situation regarding YouTube's copyright claims systes and some pointers as to what you can reasonably do to get this problem resolved. Your theoretical (lawful and moral) rights and responsibilites might actually differ from what you can reasonably enforce.


How to get a clip with the same aspect ratio and without losing quality orig.mod - properties:

Frame width 720
Frame height 576
Data rate 8900kbps
Total bitrate 9284kbps
Frame rate 25 frames/second

Audio
Bit rate 384kbps
Channels 2(stereo)
Audio sample rate 48kHz

I need a short clip of the above file, and tried using Sony Vegas Pro 13 and Premiere cc pr0 2015. In both applications I choose to adjust resulting file to the original, especially regarding frame size and frame rate. Result is simmilar in both applications:

result.mpg (tried .mp4 and .wmv also)

Frame width 720
Frame height 576
Data rate 9500kbps
Total bitrate 9724kbps
Frame rate 25 frames/second

Audio
Bit rate 224kbps
Channels 2(stereo)
Audio sample rate 48kHz

Main specifications are the same, but playing both file, using VLC and WMP players, what I see is - result.mpg is much narrower than orig.mod. Height is the same. That means aspect ratio is changed.
Also, result.mpg has poor quality, comparing to original.

Any help.

Check you pixel aspect ratio.  Its in the video settings in premiere.  My guess is its not matching the original file. Play around with the different settings.  Usually square pixels do it for me.

Adobe Premiere Pro CC aspect ratio streched


Fractional ffmpeg timecode in draw text I got a frame rate under 1 and can't seem to get ffmpeg to stamp the time code

Doesn't work

ffmpeg -start_number 0 -framerate 32 -y -i "f0_t%d_i0_ch1_c0_r0_z0_mqdic.jpg" -vframes 32 -vf "drawtext=fontfile=DejaVuSans.ttf:timecode='00\:00\:00\:00':timecode_rate=0.28571:fontcolor=red:fontsize=64: box=1: boxcolor=0x00000000@1,setpts=PTS" -pix_fmt yuv420p  -c:v libx264 "part9_dynamics_slower_sampling_z0.avi"

with an error

[Parsed_drawtext_0 @ 00000283dbab5f00] Timecode frame rate must be specified
[AVFilterGraph @ 00000283dbab58c0] Error initializing filter 'drawtext' with args 'fontfile=DejaVuSans.ttf:timecode=00\:00\:00\:00:timecode_rate=0.28571:fontcolor=red:fontsize=64: box=1: boxcolor=0x00000000@1'
Error reinitializing filters!
Failed to inject frame into filter network: Invalid argument
Error while processing the decoded data for stream #0:0
Conversion failed!

Works as expected

ffmpeg -start_number 0 -framerate 32 -y -i "f0_t%d_i0_ch1_c0_r0_z0_mqdic.jpg" -vframes 32 -vf "drawtext=fontfile=DejaVuSans.ttf:timecode='00\:00\:00\:00':timecode_rate=1:fontcolor=red:fontsize=64: box=1: boxcolor=0x00000000@1,setpts=PTS" -pix_fmt yuv420p  -c:v libx264 "part9_dynamics_slower_sampling_z0.avi"

In one case timecode_rate=0.28571 and in the other timecode_rate=1

So, how do I stamp in the correct, 0.28571 frame rate?

The timecode_rate value is rounded and then applied, so 0.2857 gets rounded down to 0, which is considered invalid. That error message should be refined.

Since you seem to want timecode value to increase by 0.2857 after each 32 frames, you can supply a custom text value

text='%{e\:0.2857*n/32}'

Remove the timecode and timecode_rate options.


Remove audio from video annotation in ActivePresenter I've been creating screencasts lately (cut with real footage) with ActivePresenter.

ActivePresenter allows one to add "annotations" and they can be in various formats including both audio and video clips. I would like to overlay a video clip onto my screencast, but my issue is, I cannot mute or remove the audio from the video clip in ActivePresenter. When accessing the video's properties, there is a volume slider there but it is disabled.

I can remove the audio using a different tool, and then import into ActivePresenter, but I thought this would be pretty standard functionality. So, the question - is there a way to remove audio from a video annotation in ActivePresenter? The format of the video annotation is mp4 (I'll try with other various formats and see if there are formats which ActivePresenter will provide this as an option).

Yes, you can remove audio from any video in ActivePresenter. To do that, please follow the instruction in ActivePresenter's community:

  You just need to select the video, click Adjust Volume tool on the
  Timeline, and select Mute checkbox.


Resolve Transcoding Workflow I'm struggling to find an optimal workflow with Resolve 14 involving XAVC-S video. I need to transcode to ProRes 422 (HQ) to edit and grade within Resolve.

At present I am bringing all my source intoResolve and Media Management to transcode the footage to a directory on my media drive. I am then creating a new Resolve project and importing the transcoded footage, editing and grading.

This workflow feels a bit clunky. Is there a way of handling the transcoding within a single project?

Old question, but in Media Management, there should be an option to relink the new footage.

This should allow you use the new transcoded footage within the same project.

It's under the "+ more options" section.


How compatible are high dynamic range and fast movements? I wanted to know how HDR would be useful for fast movement as I want to look into cameras that will move through regions of bright light and shadows and so, I want to see how I can make the footage more clear rather than get bland too bright and too dark components largely in the video. I want to check how action cameras implement such huge dynamic ranges. I'm a beginner and am slowly learning, so I might not have understood this right, but please help

There is rarely a direct relationship between HDR, or dynamic range in general, and motion artifacts. There may be an indirect relationship when trade offs are made for transmitting or storing the increased dynamic range. A specific implementation might reduce the frame rate or increase the compression in ways that introduce motion artifacts.


Software to handle 100/1000 hours video? There is some project that will be 720 hours long http://www.thelongestfilm.com/ what software can handle such amount of hours in timeline? Maximum what I could find is final cut pro x - 558 Day Timeline. On Windows every major application like premiere pro or avidemux can handle only 24 hours. Any suggestions?

After reading about FCP's 1600 track, 558 day long sequence test I don't think that's the limit of the software, but the hardware: "...very large numbers of clips within FCPX will slow the machine down."

Same is true of Adobe's Premiere - as the project grows, the performance lags. Avid Media Composer manages media differently and AFAIK, there's no limit (?) to the sequence length, but in the comments of the FCP 558days/1600track article, someone writes, "Last time I built a sequence over 13 hours, Avid stopped playing audio." Again, that might be a hardware and/or configuration issue.

Possibly Sony's Vegas would also be a contender?

Not sure about Blackmagic Design's DaVinci Resolve or EditShare's LightWorks (both free).

------EDIT
After talking to some Avid editors, I think I may be wrong and that Avid doesn't like projects even 24hr long, more like a 12-18 hour limit. Not a lot of day long content getting made for broadcast I suppose!

------EDIT
Interesting - & so much for what I think I know - Avid's sequence length maximum is comparatively quite limited. From a friend, "At 48KHz, about 12 hours. The limit is 2,147,483,648 audio samples. Six hours if you work at 96KHz."

------EDIT
Don't have an Avid setup to test on, but of note, I understand that if you remove audio tracks, Avid sequences can be much longer. This may hold true for other editing applications & worth testing if you only need 100 or 1000 hours of just "video" and no audio.


openload.cc How can I extract encoding settings of videos? My customer needs streaming service for his IP cameras and he ask me about same output quality as videos in openload.cc but I can´t simulate similar quality.I tried several encoding combination but nothing works fine.

My client needs reduce quality/size with good visibility in output I ask my client about choice which online service has good visibility for him and he choose openload.cc

Sample is here 480p (sorry about warez but I can´t find no warez content on openload

So I need find encoding settings now.
I try to save file and then use mediainfo but mediainfo did not detect full encoding settings (like CRF, one or two encoding pass, specific video bitrate - mediainfo detect only range of bitrate...)

I use ffmpeg as encoder so now I need to know which settings I need to use for same output quality as in 480p sample.

Thank you for help me.

Assuming it has been encoded with x264, download the file and run:

strings input | grep x264

It may output encoding information such as:

x264 - core 148 - H.264/MPEG-4 AVC codec - Copyleft 2003-2016 -
http://www.videolan.org/x264.html - options: cabac=1 ref=3 deblock=1:0:0
analyse=0x3:0x113 me=hex subme=7 psy=1 psy_rd=1.00:0.00 mixed_ref=1 me_range=16
chroma_me=1 trellis=1 8x8dct=1 cqm=0 deadzone=21,11 fast_pskip=1 chroma_qp_offset=4
threads=6 lookahead_threads=1 sliced_threads=0 nr=0 decimate=1 interlaced=0
bluray_compat=0 constrained_intra=0 bframes=3 b_pyramid=2 b_adapt=1 b_bias=0
direct=1 weightb=1 open_gop=0 weightp=2 keyint=250 keyint_min=25 scenecut=40
intra_refresh=0 rc_lookahead=40 rc=crf mbtree=1 crf=23.0 qcomp=0.60 qpmin=0
qpmax=69 qpstep=4 ip_ratio=1.40 aq=1:1.00

Do not copy and paste the displayed options and values–instead use the appropriate preset. Using the info above it is safe to assume the default settings were used (equivalent of using -preset medium -crf 23).

I'm assuming you're running Linux since you did not specify. If you're using Windows then mediainfo will likely also provide the same info if it is there.


Frame capture from videos: I-frame vs P-frames I'm trying to capture various frames within a x264-encoded video files into png files (in python), and then compare the quality of them:

cap = cv2.VideoCapture(filename);
//get frame_number for saving, and save the frame
cap.set(cv2.CAP_PROP_POS_FRAMES,frame_no);
ret, frame = cap.read()

cv2.imwrite(dir_path+'uniform_frame_'+str(frame_no)+".png", frame);

Now I was wondering if I fetch an I-Frame, does it mean that it has a higher quality than other frames, e.g. P-frames and B-Frames? (inherently, keyframes are not compressed, so they must have higher quality and less noise).

"I, B and P" don't refer to the viewed frames, they refer to the encoded, stored forms of the frames. However the frame is encoded in the file or stream, when it appears on the screen or is extracted as a still it is a complete frame, reconstructed from the IBP information as needed.


Do talent show programmes film lots of footage or is it set up? I keep watching auditions from talent shows. It seems like they have an interview process before each audition and apparently 'randomly' select them before they even enter the arena to do the audition.

Do the crews just film lots of footage of every freaking contestant (HD, 1 minute per contestant avg., hundreds of contestants) or do they do a process before-hand of deciding who will end up on the final cut (entertainment value ).

Surely if all the contestants have interviews where seemingly 'random' questions that reveal information on their backstories that would take up a lot of storage and be a real pain for the teams who have to edit it all together for the TV cut?

I know for a fact that they interview each contestant before hand (not always filmed - I think) so that the judges know what questions to ask the contestants (example: "is this a cover song or are you a songwriter" - contestant before hand said they were a songwriting, "what do you cuirrently do" - contestant is on show to escape menial, obscure, job).

I'm not sure if this is the right stackexchange site but it seems close enough.

tl;dr - Do talent show (audition based entertainment) programmes film lots of footage of each contestant in a hope that the contestant is entertaining (like interview before audition - outside arena - cliché shots of the contestants sitting around looking nervous) or do they have a huge process of selecting out acts that have entertainment value (based on some form of prerequisite audition tape or whatever) and then only selecting them?

This is a question I ponder every time I watch these shows.

I have a feeling the answer is a lot simpler than the ideas I've proposed here.

I've shot live events for the past 5 years, and had a few friends get on (and actually pretty far in) both American Idol and The Voice. There is a series of auditions way before contestants ever get in front of a studio camera, let alone a TV audience. Most auditions are not filmed, unless it is recorded by the casting directors/producers purely for their reference, usually with a simple handycam.

Yes, some auditions are staged a certain way, but not usually scripted. The nervous shots and emotional cut-aways you mentioned are almost always staged, shot after the fact, and then edited in a way that lets the audience project meaning onto the shot. The exception of course being when producers know a big event is about to take place (e.g. put a cameraman in the green room right before the contestant goes on stage.)

At this point it becomes a matter of efficiently handling your media so producers can quickly call up a shot that, even if they haven't seen it yet, they know it exists. That's why digital intermediates on set are worth their weight in gold for "reality" TV shows.

If it's a live show, there are many cameramen all wearing earpieces, ready to take direction from producers on who/what to cover and when. Then you have a big team of people behind the scenes watching what every camera sees and punching up the appropriate shots to the audience. So in this sense only, yes they just shoot a bunch of footage. But a live streaming video is a bit different than recording to hard disc.


Are Mini DV and Digital 8 considered film? MiniDV is using magnectic tape as storage and use the discrete cosine transformation compression technology. Does the use of magnectic digital tapes no more film?

Film is specifically a medium in which each frame is photographically exposed to capture the image.  It comes in a variety of formats, but the key property is that it must photographically capture the image through photosensitive film.

Magnetic media, regardless of being analog or digital, such as that used in MiniDV, Digital8, Hi-8 and even VHS tapes is not film.  It is tape.

Similarly, modern cameras now often go direct to disk, using either memory cards, hard drives or in rare cases, optical media to record to, thus avoiding the need for tapes which require running it from beginning to end.

The term filming is still often used when capturing video with these latter formats, however it does not make them film.  It just means that we reuse the common term even though the underlying technology has been replaced.  Technically it is video.


How to avoid noise when filming dark red I saw a brilliant thread talking about why the colour red is noisy in post:

Why does the color red always appear pixelated on TV and videos on the PC?

I found this incredibly helpful in understanding why red appears that way. What I want to know is what can you do when filming dark red to avoid high levels of noise?

I was recently filming a museum installation and all the walls were dark red brick. This museum was inside so the natural light was very limited, so naturally I shot at my highest aperture (at the time was 3.5) and set my ISO as low as possible. My camera hasn't got the best sensor but I just wondered if there was an explanation or other tips as to what to do when you know you're in a location with lots of dark red.

Cheers

Lav

Filming any light that is strongly a single color is likely to produce a lot of noise because it's absorbing more light. (In your case, the red brick is absorbing green and blue, leaving only the red.)

Furthermore, if you're filming with a Bayered CMOS sensor like the ones found in most phone cameras and DSLRs, the sensor captures twice as much green light as it does red or blue light. The sensor sites are generally set up in a red-green-blue-green order.

So you're starting with less light reflected from the material and your collecting less light at the sensor. Any noise is going to be magnified because the resolution of the red channel is half that of the green channel, too. So how do you avoid it? You have a few options:

Supply more light to the scene
Use a camera with a sensor that has good low light response
Apply noise reduction in post
If you can change out the background (either by replacing it or filming from a different angle), that might be better.


Which software gets the fastest rendering times? I'm sure there are benchmarks out there, but I'm not sure where to find them. Circa 2006 I was holding on to Vegas 6 without letting go because I could see very noticeable differences in its rendering times. (It's super fast!) And I've made fun of people who tough it out with Final Cut or Premiere for its atrociously slow rendering times. I'm just curious if anyone benchmarks this stuff.

I'm not sure that it is necessarily possible to get meaningful benchmarks for video editing render times now.  With the advent of system's using GPU processing for rendering, the already complicated field got even tougher.  There are simply too many variables.  It depends on the performance of particular effects and plugins and what kind of hardware and bandwidth needs there are within the project.  Since the needs of projects differ so greatly, I don't see how a meaningful benchmark could be established unless it was to try benchmarking individual filters within the applications.

In general, the new render engine in Premiere is very fast though.  Even for software only it works quick, but with GPU acceleration, it gets pretty crazy.  Running software only, I can run a full resolution all I frame 1080p 24fps signal with color correction applied through my tower with fairly minimal frame drops.  I'm unfortunately PC only so I can't compare to FCPX.


libx264 for ffmpeg on linux I am running ffmpeg on ubuntu.

I tried to set the codec to libx264 but it was not recognised by ffmmpeg.

Is there a way too install that codec for use by ffmpeg?

If the codec lib isn't linked in your binary, you can get one which does from https://www.johnvansickle.com/ffmpeg/ (get a git build).


Ffmpeg wipe diagonal transiton with audio concat How to create “diagonal wipe” effect in FFmpeg?

This question has an answer, however the answer does not concat the audios of videos. How can I fix it ?

ffmpeg -i old.mp4 -i new.mp4 -filter_complex
   "[1]format=yuva444p,
       geq=lum='p(X,Y)':
       a='st(1,(1+W/H/TN)*H/D);if(lt(W-X,((ld(1)*T-Y)/(ld(1)*T))*ld(1)*T*TN),p(X,Y),0)':
       enable='lte(t,D)',setpts=PTS+D/TB[new];
    [0:v][new]overlay" wipe.mp4

Use the acrossfade filter.

...
[0:v][new]overlay;
[0]atrim=0:T+D[a0];[a0][1:a]acrossfade=d=D"

D like in the original command is the duration of the wipe. T is the time at which the wipe starts.


Recursively Check MKV with ffprobe The basic of what I'm trying to do is to run through my old encodes recursively and output the results of ffprobe to a file so I can review it.

This is what I am trying and it is not working...

for /d /r "D:\Video\TEST" %%a in *.mkv do if exist "%%a" echo ffprobe.exe -i "%%a" -hide_banner >> results.txt

Also, Ideally I would like to exclude any "trailer.mkv" file.

/D is for processing directories, not contents of directories.

for /r D:\Video\TEST %%a in (*.mkv) do (
  if "%%~nxa" neq "trailer.mkv" ffprobe.exe -i "%%a" -hide_banner 2>> results.txt )


ffmpeg vf scale shifts colors to washed out Im trying to scale video down. No matter what I do the colors are always washed up as a result.
original:

After scaling:

Code I run for it
ffmpeg -i input.mkv -vf scale=1028:-1 output.mkv

log: log
Original file codec info

New file codec info

ideally I would want to convert the video to h264 and scale down.
I tried googling for x hours, tried a lot of random attemps, and in the end I tracked it down to scale filter. I have no idea how or why the filter messes up the colors.
I also tried some overkill commands(below) I found on the internet, and it is able to convert to h264 perfectly, but once I try to add scaling to that command it will also produce washed up colors like example above.
Overkill example:
ffmpeg -i "input" -c:v libx265 -preset fast -crf 21 -x265-params keyint=60:bframes=3:vbv-bufsize=75000:vbv-maxrate=75000:hdr-opt=1:repeat-headers=1:colorprim=bt2020:transfer=smpte-st-2084:colormatrix=bt2020nc:master-display="G(13250,34500)B(7500,3000)R(34000,16000)WP(15635,16450)L(10000000,500)" -c:a aac -vf colorspace=bt2020,transfer=smpte2084,scale=1280:-1 "small_output"

The video's color transfer characteristics (trc) and color primaries flags are not being set on the output video, which is causing the video player to use incorrect values for playback, resulting in washed out colors. When encoding, use the following FFmpeg flags to resolve this:
-color_trc smpte2084 -color_primaries bt2020

Note that these flags do not actually convert the the source material. These FFmpeg flags merely add flags to the output file that indicate to media players which values to use for these parameters. In this case, the question asker's media player chose incorrect values for these parameters since they were not set on the output video and displayed the video incorrectly.
For actually converting the video's content using specific transfer characteristics or primaries, see this wiki page on FFmpeg's colorspace filter.


Programs that help you export multi-language videos? I'm looking for a program that can do multi-language export of video.

Let me give an example: I create video with text and I would like to easily add 4 different languages inside each text. The program would export video with that language.

Let's say :

Importing text in four different languages (for example the program is connected to an Excel file or whatever)
Exporting four videos with that translated text.

Right now I have major problems because I need to save, then edit the whole video text for each different language, and then export.

Templater Rig can help with this. It's a plugin that connects the text in your After Effects project to a Google Sheet or other spreadsheet. Bear in mind that each language will have different read rates and sentence lengths for the same meaning on-screen, so swapping the translations is only the first step to making the videos look ok.


Is using codecs matter if Facebook re-encode all the uploaded videos? I usually encode with libx265 and libfdk_aac to get good quality and small file size for posting in Facebook. I use ffmpeg as follows.

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf -c:v libx265 -c:a libfdk_aac output.mp4

If Facebook, YouTube and others video hosting sites re-encode all videos uploaded, is the codecs used still matter?

If I use h.264 codec with mp4 or MOV format as Facebook recommended, will it reduce or bypass the Facebook's video processing?

If I use h.265 for smaller file size, will the viewers of my video save their mobile data usage?

If Facebook, YouTube and others video hosting sites re-encode all videos uploaded, is the codecs used still matter?

Both no and yes.

Technically, no, because they can handle most common formats and re-encode what you give it no matter the format.

Practically, yes, because you have to take into account your time, energy usage, and upload speed.

  If I use h.264 codec with mp4 or MOV format as Facebook recommended, will it reduce or bypass the Facebook's video processing?

No. They almost certainly re-encode everything for consistency.

  If I use h.265 for smaller file size, will the viewers of my video save their mobile data usage?

If the quality between the two formats is the same, then the answer is no.

What to do

Because it appears you are re-encoding something that has already been losslessly compressed I recommend that you upload the original file and avoid the needless re-encoding step. You'll save time and avoid generation loss.

If you have to re-encode

If you must re-encode, such as if the original was encoded inefficiently, or is too big to upload, or you want to modify the video (such as by using filters), then provide "visually lossless" or as close to that as you can while still being practical to encode and upload. Avoid lossless as it will make a huge file.


Adding video into the picture with ffmpeg? How to Adding video into the picture with ffmpeg?

example:

Use the overlay filter:

ffmpeg -loop 1 -i image.jpg -i overlay.mp4 -filter_complex \
"overlay=main_w-overlay_w:main_h-overlay_h:shortest=1" output.mp4


Extending the size of the video shot on iPhone I took a video in an upright (portrait) position on my iPhone. When I watch it on a computer, the edges look black. How can I remove this blackness and display it on the wide frame? I just can not do it in iMovie. I'm not talking about rotating the video.

Unfortunately, the screen is showing the whole frame. That is all that your camera recorded. It did not record anything to the left or right of what you see.

On YouTube, where many people shoot their videos in a vertical format as you did, it is common to enlarge the video to the full frame width - which will cut off the top and bottom of the video - and use that as a background image. Then place your regular-size vertical video over the top of it. I used iMovie in the past and I think its picture-in-picture feature could accomplish this, but I'm not sure.


How to save multiple masks as a preset for use on different clips in Adobe Premiere? I am working in Adobe Premiere. I am building a kaleidoscope effect that I would like to save as a preset to apply to other clips.
To build the kaliedoscope I have stacked a number of copies of the original clip, and to each of these copies i have added a small diamond shaped mask. Each copy has a unique position for the mask starting from the center and moving the mask outward to create the kaliedscope according to a diamond shaped grid.
This is quite time consuming to build and I would like reuse this effect throughout a video, and again in future.
How can I save this collection of masks as a preset to be applied to different clips by dragging and dropping?
So far I have only worked out saving all the individual masks (Opacity) and locations (Motion) as individual presets. Then each time manually making the copies of the new clip and applying those effects settings to each clip. There are more than 20 masks and this is still quite tedious. Is it possible to save all of those masks as one preset, or in a preset bin, or as a layer, to be automatically applied to a new clip as a nested sequence? How would you go about doing this?
Sincere thanks for your help.
I have attached a screenshot of my workspace so you can see the effect build so far. The grid is only there for reference to position each mask.

I think to create a Preset in Premier Pro you have to add a few factors to it like effects
OK ?
Because you can't make Preset through musks
You make all the changes and add a separate effect to it, but set the keyframe to zero and do the factors according to the tutorial below.

Good luck


Can a SONY HXR-NX30U camera record two external audio inputs? I own a Sony HXR-NX30U which has two XLR input ports. I would like to use both, the directional built in shotgun mic and a lapel mic.

Is that possible? In other words:

Does the camera support it?
If so, would both channels be in the same mp4 file?
Will iMovie see both channels?

Thank you in advance!

Pages 41-43 of the HXR-NX30U manual tells you exactly how to do this.

First of all, the "superdirectional boom mic" is an accessory that overrides the "builtin mic" (which is much smaller and not a boom mic).

Secondly, if you want to use both the boom mic and a lapel mic, you definitely need to use the XLR adapter, which will override the builtin (non-boom) mic.

If you set the switches correctly so that the boom mic is going to one channel (perhaps Ch 1) and the lapel mic is going to the other channel (perhaps Ch 2), then yes, both channels will be recorded to the media file that the camera records.  And iMovie will see both channels within the clip.  You might have to fight with iMovie to explain that the audio is dual-mono, not stereo, but that's an iMovie question, not a SONY question.

Make sure that if your microphone needs phantom (+48v) power, that phantom power is enabled on that channel.


Why does Premiere Pro 6 Generate Peak Files? I am having a challenge with Premiere Pro 6. Every time I open a project I get a little progress bar in the lower right hand corner of the window that says:

  Generating Peak File...

This can take a fair amount of time with a lengthy project. Is this normal? I have see comments on Adobe forums about issues with this.

Another possibly related issue is the project getting corrupted. Before I noticed this I tried making some changes while PP6 was Generating and ending up getting the dreaded project corruption message...

With that as background, is the Generating Peak File normal? What can I do about it and do I just need to be careful while it is going on not to make any changes?

Thanks!

Peak file creation as well as creating alternate forms of various assets is perfectly normal background behavior for Premiere.  When you load new assets into a project, Premiere automatically starts a number of background processes to analyze the clip and make it easier for Premiere to do its job smoothly.

This should not cause any trouble and should not be a concern to you.  It is just the program functioning as it should.  It shouldn't cause any problems if you start working with it prior to completion of the work, but some functions may work more slowly or provide incomplete information while the processes are still going on.


ffmpeg - get green overlay instead of red when using multiply? multiply should result in a darker image according to this website. However every multiply options with input that I'm using resulted in darker green videos instead of layering it with colour that I use for layering.

Many people refer that as format issue and resolved by using format=rgba options, however in my case there I'm still stuck.

FFMPEG command :

ffmpeg -i red.jpg -i car.mp4 -y -filter_complex [0][1]scale2ref[a][b];[a]setdar=1/1[c];[b]setdar=1/1[d];[c][d]blend=all_mode=multiply:all_opacity=1[out];[out]eq=contrast=2:brightness=0.5[ckv] -map [ckv] output.mp4

with format=rgba

ffmpeg -i red.jpg -i car.mp4 -y -filter_complex [0][1]scale2ref[a][b];[a]setdar=1/1[c];[b]setdar=1/1,format=rgba[d];[c][d]blend=all_mode=multiply:all_opacity=1[out];[out]eq=contrast=2:brightness=0.5[ckv] -map [ckv] output.mp4

assets in case someone want to try it.
- Images
- Videos

FFMPEG version 4.1

Your command is wrong, if you enable debug log messages, you would notice that yuv formats are still being used.
You need to put format=rgba filter to all inputs and outputs of blend filter to make it work as you want.


How to smooth out video My video jumps when playing (and I know it has nothing to do with my harddrive, cause it does the same thing on my phone in the same spots), all through the video.  Like every couple seconds it jumps, is there a program out there that will fix this?

For Instance a program that can smooth out the video somehow?

That would be super cool!  And preferably something that is free...

Thanks guys/gals :)

It sounds like the problem is probably what is known as dropped frames.  There is unfortunately not any particularly good fix.  With dropped frames, information is actually completely missing for the frames where there was no update, thus there is nothing to play during those frames.

Depending on the length of time that is dropped, it may be possible to interpolate frames, but this is not a perfect process and will generally produce substandard results.

Basically, the idea with interpolation is that the computer tries to guess what things are the same in the frame before and the frame after the missing information and then invents frames that go in-between, but since it doesn't know what objects are, it has to make a lot of guesses and motion isn't always linear, so if it is more than a frame or two, it won't be particularly good results.

Generally, if possible, the recommendation is re-shoot rather than try to interpolate, but you can interpolate if you don't have the ability to re-shoot.  This problem also generally occurs when you have insufficient write speed to stay ahead of the video, so you may want to consider a faster memory card for future video so that you can avoid dropped frames in the future.

This question over on superuser talks about doing so with some free tools.


Compatibility between Adobe Premiere Elements 15 and 11? Can Adobe Premiere Elements 15 process (take over) video projects (.prel files, etc.) previously built with Premiere Elements 11?

In other words, if I upgrade my iMac Mountain Lion OS X to El Capitan and get Premiere Elements 15, am I screwed, or can I continue the projects started on Premiere Elements 11?

In general with Adobe software, newer versions of a program can open/import project files created with older versions. This makes sense, since it would be pretty stupid if you couldn't open your old projects anymore after upgrading your software version. However, in most cases the project files are not backwards compatible, meaning you can't open a project created with the current version of your software with an older release of the same software.

For this reason, if you open an old project file with a newer release of Premiere Pro, it informs you that the project file needs to be converted and prompts you to save the new project file with a new name. This way, you will still have the old project file that can be opened with the older version of Premiere. However, any additional changes you make to the project will only be present in the converted project.

For Elements, I'm not sure how the conversion is handled, but you will definitely be able to open your Premiere Elements 11 project file with Premiere Elements 15. However, once you overwrite the project file from within Premiere Elements 15, you probably won't be able to open it in Premiere Elements 11 anymore.


How come my Adobe Illustrator file doesn't show up in After Effects? I had created an Adobe Illustrator animation/illustration file with 9 layers each depicting a drawing that progresses.

I tried to import the file to Adobe After Effects successfully, but the image/drawing doesn't show up.

I have recorded a video of it here:

Anyone know why? What can I do to have the illustrations show up on the Effects screen?

Thank you,
Jae

Are you manually animating in illustrator and then bringing them in as individual frames in After Effects or are they independent assets?  After Effects treats Illustrator files as images that are displayed across multiple frames and the background is transparent.  You then animate them in After Effects itself by positioning and scaling and such.

If you have multiple layers in Illustrator, you also need to decide which layers are imported as your asset.  You can either flatten it or use individual layers when importing.


Techniques for compressing a slideshow presentation video? I often do QuickTime screen recordings of slideshow presentations (e.g. Keynote).

These videos are 1080p 60fps and mostly text. They can go for minutes at a time with the same exact frame on-screen (static slide) yet have 60fps transitions between slides.

What are some compression tools or techniques that work best for this kind of video? I’m looking for something that keeps the text sharp while maintaining the 60fps animation transitions, without the file size being insane.

I’m not looking for answers like “use the Export for 1080p menu in QuickTime”. The best answer will have a solution that’s customized for the specific needs of a slideshow presentation video, perhaps using variable frame rate compression techniques.

x264 is the best-in-class encoder for generating H.264 video streams and you can use it via ffmpeg, a command-line tool, to encode to a small-sized file. Get a binary from here - opt for the latest nightly/snapshot release - and run

ffmpeg -i input.mov -c:v libx264 -crf 23 output.mov

The output will be the same constant frame rate as the input but x264 is very good at minimizing space consumed by frames which are the same as preceding ones. Lower CRF values produce better quality files at the cost of larger file sizes. 18 to 28 is a decent range to stick within.


Shooting short clips vs. cutting long clips Say I want to create several short clips with the original encoding of a certain camera. Do I have to shoot the short clips directly or can I shoot a long clip and then cut it up using ffmpeg with the appropriate options?

You can do either method.

Short clips

Take up less file space.
Files are already cut.

Long continuous shot

Easier method when shooting, but more work in post.
Easier to sync a continuous audio stream such as from an external mic.


Configuration sufficient for HD video editing I'm considering buying this pc for editing my HD videos.
Do you think it will be powerfull enough for editing and rendering?

Intel® Core™  i7-4790 processor
16 GB Dual Channel DDR3L 1.600 MHz
2 TB HDD (7.200 rpm) + 32 GB mSATA Solid State-HD
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750Ti 2GB DDR5

http://www.dell.com/be/p/xps-8700/pd?oc=cdx8718&model_id=xps-8700#overrides=cdx8718:5~736438

Thx

Short answer: Yes.

This machine is sufficient in all aspects. You will certainly benefit from the i7-CPU and the additional SSD, the available RAM. Also you'll have access to graphic acceleration using the CUDA technology of the NVIDIA GPU, which will greatly reduce the time required for rendering.


FFmpeg: Cutting 3 seconds at the beginning of a video leaves 5 seconds blank I have an MKV video, and want to cut the first 3 seconds. I tried with FFmpeg:

ffmpeg -i /input.mkv -ss 00:00:3.0 -c copy -t 00:09:58.0 output.mkv

But the result (when played in VLC) is that there are 5 seconds blank video with the original sound, and after that, the video shows.

I think it has something to do with a missing keyframe at the beginning. So I tried:

ffmpeg -i /input.mkv -ss 00:00:3.0 -c copy -t 00:09:58.0 -force_key_frames 00:00:00.000 output.mkv

But this has no effect - same result.

How can I cut a video properly so that it begins exactly where cut?

This is answered in FFmpeg's Seeking wiki page.
The behavior is expected: If the time hits to a space between 2 key frames, it copies only audio up to the next keyframe and fills the video with black.

There are some methods to get also the beginning.

One is to overlay the copied part with few seconds of re-encoded original.
Or, simply, seek to a bit earlier frame.
Or, find the previous keyframe and clip from that.
Or, reencoding the whole clip.

It's a bit pity that FFmpeg (AFAIK) doesn't have a feature for this built in.


How to do this motion graphics? This is the motion titling of a film.

I'd like to know few things. Assuming it's created using Afer Effects:

If you give a closer look, you could see ink spreading after it's written. How did they achieve it?
Was there any plug-in used for this purpose? If yes, which one?

If I have to make this manually, I would do the following:

Create/Draw the blue Logo in Illustrator as its seen in the final frame.
Breakdown and place spread ink into separate layers, like 4 or more.

To make the drawing animation, create a path "using pen tool" along the lines of the blue Logo, make sure that the path is thick enough to cover the lines.
Using Trim Path effect you can animate the path and as it spread it reveals the blue Logo, kinda like a mask.
The spread of ink is not that obvious, I think it was made using opacity. So whenever you reveal a letter or two, keyframe the opacity of the layer that contains spread ink that you made earlier in Illustrator from 0% to 100% which creates a feel like a spread.
I hope what I wrote does make sense.


MILC or camcorder for ENG? I'm going to shoot a lot of Electronic News Gathering stuff like demonstrations, reports. But also interviews and longer events like speeches and talks. I can't decide between a camcorder and a MILC (mirrorless interchangeable lens camera) because both have their pros and cons. I like in the MILC that it has a lot of possibilities to develop later.
I have a candidate for both categories. The JVC Everio GC-PX100 as a general camcorder and the Sony Alpha 7 as a MILC. I like about the Sony that it's a full-frame, very serious camera. But I'm afraid that it lacks some important features or not very good at some fields, like OIS or autofocus. I never worked with a DSLR or MILC before.
The JVC would be a safe bet but also a great loss in features due to the fixed lens and small sensor.

If you record speeches that are longer than 30 minutes, the 29m59s limitation of non-video cameras is going to drive you crazy, despite all the other wonderful things they can do.  Interviews can be broken up every 30 minutes.  Speeches not.

If you have ambitions to encompass art projects with your camera, the interchangeable lens feature of the SONY camera opens a world of possibilities (and and bottomless pit of budget requirements).  If you are really focused on ENG then the JVC packs an incredible punch in a single package.  Plus, small sensors are your friend for ENG because of deep depth of field.  It's incredibly annoying to have a speaker in front of a screen and the camera can only focus either on the speaker or their slides.

Based on the things you say you want to do, not the things you say you want, the JVC is the more sensible choice.


Gopro hero 5 black video modes recommendation Is there a recommendation or tips for the usage of the video modes that come with the gopro hero5 black, in the meaning of resolution vs fps vs fov:

https://gopro.com/help/articles/Block/Available-Video-Resolutions-for-HERO5-Black-and-HERO5-Session

Great question! I would take a look at Abe Kislevitz's blog. He is one of GoPro's senior Creative Directors and has a myriad of information on his website that covers the best settings to use on GoPros.


What is good software for camera recording under Linux? I use Linux(Mint Linux Petra) and will probably switch to Ubuntu 14 soon.

I need to record video with my camera on my laptop(imagine I use a web-camera for simplification) and I need to see real-time what I am shooting and record the stream.

I tried camera-app and cheese but both fail on my distribution.

Also, I plan to use external camera for better quality, any suggestions on interfaces, etc.? I prefer to see the stream directly on my laptop screen.
(If you want to know why - it will save me some time while editing.)

I was going to recommend Kino which is the one I used when I needed to do that, but according to their web page the project is no longer mantained, so you can either use it the way it is or try the other software that is recommended on their web page:

Shotcut, Kdenlive, Flowblade, OpenShot, PiTiVi, LiVES, and LightWorks.


Do media containers contain multiple audio channels in separate streams? The title is self-explanatory. If a media container file (like MPG) contains multiple audio channels, such as left or right channels, does it take these audios in separate streams??

Depending on the container format, multi-channel audio can either be in a single stream or in separate mono streams.

Most consumer formats allow both, but it's easier for the end-user to have it in one stream (it can be interleaved PCM audio, or encoded bit-streams as ac3 or aac). Notice that it doesn't prevent to have several multi-channel streams in one container (like several 5.1 mixes, each one being one stream, in ac3 codec in a single container)

The MXF OP1A often used in broadcast usually has several mono streams for multi-channel content. A 5.1 mix will then use 6 mono streams in the container.


Censoring license plate in a long video I'm editing a video recorded in a car workshop. The video is about 30 minutes long.

In the background there is a car whose license plate has to be hidden. Unfortunately, the camera moves a lot so it's not possible to censor many frames at a time.

I'm censoring using a mosaic effect over the plate, which has to be added to each frame, but it's taking a very long time.

Can you offer any tips that would help make this process faster?

I'm using Wondershare Filmora 9 for this job.

Thanks.

I am not sure about Filmora 9, but Google Motion Tracking. You just need to roughly track the sign and make a blur bigger than the sign, so it's allways covered. If you want to exactly censor the sign, you need to track the corners. But I'd think filmora can't do that


FFMPEG add resize to my comand Hey guys how can I add scale/resize command to mine command, because where ever I place the "scale" command I got error
Here is mine

ffmpeg -i movie.mkv -strict -2 -vf "subtitles=subtitle.srt:force_style='FontName=ubuntu,fontsize=30'" -qscale:v 3 -filter:v scale=720:-1 Movie.avi

Use

ffmpeg -i movie.mkv -strict -2 -vf "subtitles=subtitle.srt:force_style='FontName=ubuntu,fontsize=30',scale=720:-1" -qscale:v 3  Movie.avi

All filters applied to a single input should be presented as a sequence, separated by a comma.


Video format for instagram I need convert to the .mp4 video with this requirements.
Container: MOV or MP4 (MPEG-4 Part 14), no edit lists, moov atom at the front of the file.

Video codec: HEVC or H264, progressive scan, closed GOP, 4:2:0 chroma subsampling.

What is means?

Edit lists is a feature, that allows you to edit videos without re-encoding. For example, you want to remove a scene, make your edit points which are written into the container file. A video player reads those instructions and just such parts of the video. However, not many players seem to support that feature, nor does Instagram, so simply don't use it. I think it's not possible with mp4 only with mov anyway, so nothing to worry about.
The moov atom contains information how to play the video (duration, fps, etc.), it needs to be at the beginning in this case, which allows to start playing the video over the internet immediately while more data is loaded. In contrast, when the moov atom is at the file's end you need to wait until the video has been fully downloaded/buffered. The moov atom is rarely an issue in practice, most editors don't even allow to configure it and just put it at the front of the video file after the encoding is done. With ffmpeg you have control by using certain flags (I think -movflags faststart).
Progressive scan is the usual way to present a video on progressive screens (which means any screen in any modern device). There is also interlaced which is still somewhat relevant as a legacy format for TV but should always be avoided in the web. The difference is that progressive scan works with a full image per frame whereas for interlaced scan two half fields are combined into one image. Interlacing worked well on old CRT monitors, but not on modern devices. Both of these variants are often marked with a little suffix after the resolution of a video. For example you will see 1080p, referring to a video with a resolution of 1920x1080 using progressive scan, or when you see 1080i it means again a resolution of 1920x1080 but using interlacing. When creating video projects or creating a sequence where you put clips together or before export you may be asked to select profiles. Just make sure you always pick one of the progressive profiles where resolutions have the little p as suffix. Some tools may omit the distinction if they only support progressive scan.


Adding annotation to existing video file I an application demo video, I want to add annotations (Text notes, basic shapes etc) on already recorded video. Is there any free software available for that on Windows?
I found some, but they work on desktop screen capturing... but I want to work on existing video. I tried with Youtube. I'm able to add annotations but if I download the video from YouTube, they are not there / or downloaded as separate file. I need single video file with my annotation added to the same.

Take a look at Blender or Lightworks (both free).
You can import footage and add text or shapes (simple one with Lightworks) to it.


Corrupt MP4 [recording interrupted] I was recording an MP4 file using PlaysTV, and my computer had a power fault half-way through the recording.
I'm sure that the file contains valid data, it's just that no media player will recognize it.
To fix it I have tried Avidemux, I have tried numerous programs listed in other questions on stackexchange. And so far nothing has worked.
The ffmpeg -i output is as follows:
  libavutil      55. 24.100 / 55. 24.100
  libavcodec     57. 43.100 / 57. 43.100
  libavformat    57. 37.100 / 57. 37.100
  libavdevice    57.  0.101 / 57.  0.101
  libavfilter     6. 46.100 /  6. 46.100
  libswscale      4.  1.100 /  4.  1.100
  libswresample   2.  0.101 /  2.  0.101
  libpostproc    54.  0.100 / 54.  0.100
[mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2 @ 000000000262d040] moov atom not found
2016_05_27_20_08_12-ses.mp4: Invalid data found when processing input

Mediainfo output:
General
Complete name                            : F:\vids\2016_05_27_20_08_12-ses.mp4
Format                                   : MPEG-4
Format profile                           : Base Media / Version 2
Codec ID                                 : mp42 (mp41/isom)
File size                                : 1.21 GiB

There are probably paid services that will fix this file for me, however since it is a (quite)large-ish file, they cost too much.
Can anyone help me here?

I recently encountered this exact problem and I was able to repair the file using Untrunc, a program created specifically to solve this problem, as suggested by sparrowt on SuperUser:

  For this method you need:

  another video file which isn't broken
  a linux installation (I used Ubuntu 12.04) and basic ability to use a command line.

  This is what to do:

  Install some pre-requisite libraries with this command:

  sudo apt-get install libavformat-dev libavcodec-dev libavutil-dev
  Download the source code for Untrunc from the github repo:

  wget https://github.com/ponchio/untrunc/archive/master.zip
  Unzip the source code:

  unzip master.zip
  Go into the directory where it's been unzipped:

  cd untrunc-master
  Compile the source code using this command (all one line):

  g++ -o untrunc file.cpp main.cpp track.cpp atom.cpp mp4.cpp
  -L/usr/local/lib -lavformat -lavcodec -lavutil

  (you can try skipping this step and using the ready-provided
  executable, but it didn't work for me)
  Then you can actually fix the video. You need both the broken video and an example working video.

  Ideally the video should be from the same camera & have the same
  resolution (mine was but it might work without). Also if it is at
  least as long as the broken one (preferably roughly the same) this may
  help.

  Run this command in the folder where you have unzipped and compiled
  Untrunc but replace the /path/to/... bits with your 2 video files:

  ./untrunc /path/to/working-video.m4v /path/to/broken-video.m4v

  Then it should churn away and hopefully produce a playable file
  called broken-video_fixed.m4v

  That's it you're done!

  VLC Media Player should now be able to play the file. However it may
  be reporting the wrong length information (Untrunc tries to guess/work
  this out, but doesn't always get it right). To fix this try
  re-encoding the video through another program.


Serving static video content directly vs. via adaptive streaming protocols (HLS, DASH) Is there an advantage of serving static video content (not a live stream) via adaptive streaming protocols such as HLS or DASH over serving them directly as files using HTTP server in terms of speed?

Example case is when you have a 500MB mp4 h264+AAC video that you have to serve on a website via HTML5 video element. Would you rather serve it directly, since most popular browsers implement functions such as seek without downloading the whole file first; or would you rather use ffmpeg or similar solution to create HLS chunks from the mp4 file and instead provide .m3u8 playlist source to the HTML5 video element. Is there a real advantage in terms of speed of doing this?

Which one would you implement if you had hundreds of video files all served as static content?

ABR formats like HLS and DASH allow the client to adapt the its specific conditions, providing a better experience. faster startup, faster seeks, less buffering, etc.