Lower framerate without re-encode I'm looking for a way to lower the framerate of an H264 mp4 video without re-encoding the video.

Example: I have a 30 FPS input file and I need it to be 5 FPS. I want to avoid re-encoding because of time constraints and I also don't want to introduce additional compression artifacts.

Is this possible?

No. The video can be slowed down, but frames from an inter-coded codec stream (like H.264) can't be dropped without re-encoding.

Update:

The command below produces a file that plays in Potplayer and ffplay but not in VLC. It works for me on MP4s, Should work on MOVs. Doesn't work with MKV (you should be able to remux to MOV/MP4 and execute).

ffmpeg -discard nokey -i input.mp4 -c copy -vsync 0 I-only.mp4

Timestamps are retained. So each I-frame shows as a freeze frame till it's time for the next one. There may be a way to make this playable in VLC, but I'll try when I have more time.


How to create slideshow/video from still images using a varying point of interest? I have still images of a motorcycle's odometer, taken by hand whilst riding (varying angles) over the course of a 20000km motorcycle journey (i.e. the odometer is not always centered in the still image).

I plan to create a slideshow/video from these stills, but I would like to align the odometer to the centre of the frame, so that the viewer can focus on the increasing mileage as the stills are played in a timelapse/slideshow fashion, rather than have the odometer jitter around.

Does anyone know of any software that would allow me to quickly select the area of the odometer for each image, and then have the software rotate or pan the images based on this manually defined 'odometer region'? Or another method that is somewhat automated as opposed to adjusting each image inside Premiere Pro.

I hope this make sense...!

Thanks.

You can import all the images as a video i.e. an image sequence and then try to stabilize the "video" by selecting a distinctive part of the odometer as your target anchor. The result may still need some manual tweaking especially if there's a huge change in light, but it will be faster than doing it manually.

You might have to rename the images to form an unbroken naming sequence  i.e. img0001.jpg, img0002.jpg, img0003.jpg..etc. You can use Advanced Renamer to do this.


Best video format for a retired PowerPC (iBook G4)? We have a retired iBook G4, it plays H.264 quite laggy.

My question is what is the best video format optimizing for Battery Life on a PowerPC?

Bonus question: Is there a free batch converter for macOS to process 300+ file?

Is there a forum somewhere better suited for this kind of question?

MPEG4 encoded with Handbrake, or use Xvid with ffmpegX.

MacRumors PowerPC forum is definitely a better place to discuss this.


Why is my Linear FOV GoPro Hero 4 Black video distorted at edges? I installed the latest firmware as of 09-APR-2019 to my GoPro Hero 4 Black.

I recorded video in 1080 60fps in LINEAR FOV mode with ProTune enabled. Why am I seeing lens distortion at the edges? For example look at the front wheel of the car.

I have Adobe Premiere and can get GoPro Studio how can I remove this? i don't mind losing some of the frame.

UPDATE:

Further to this i have now made a comparison between LINEAR and NARROW FOV options on the Hero 4 Black below. The NARROW option (the left image) seems to remove this effect, why is this?

Is it simply because the Narrow is cropped by comparison?

The distortion you are seeing has nothing to do with ProTune or other codec settings. Its perspective distortion caused by the wide focal length of the GoPro Lens + The low quality of the GoPro Lens itself.

When I say low quality, I mean that in relative terms. The GoPro lens actually produces a pretty amazing image for what it is. But even when you enable the Linear FOV mode, the camera's software can only do so much to reduce the tearing - specifically in the corners of the frame, that you are seeing. It does a decent job overall, but the lens on the GoPro in Wide FOV is roughly 17mm equivalent to a full frame lens.

If you want nearly zero distortion at that focal length... The Zeiss 15mm released a few years back is fantastic, but it's $2500 ish just for the lens itself.

The 16mm and 14mm Arri Master Primes are practically flawless in terms of edge and corner distortion, remarkable actually even at their widest f1.4 t-stop. But for that look, you have to rent or shell out $30,000 for the lens.

So that is basically the reason. You will only get "so good" with a cheap plastic lens on a $400 camera at that focal length. And there is only so much the in camera software can do to process that distortion out. Even doing a more detailed correction in post will get you so far.

The problem has nothing to do with the settings. Thats as good as it gets with the GoPro, in terms of it's wide angle ability to capture a relatively flat looking image. Flat in the middle, but the closer you get to the corners the worse it's going to get.

My recommendation is if you can't live with it, shoot from a farther distance and crop in in post. I think judging by the image had you just backed up perhaps 5 or 6 feet, you'd be able to crop in just a bit and remove "the worst of it".


Is it feasible to manually implement chroma keying? I have a weak computer (Atom N270 & onboard, 2006 Intel graphics) and it's super slow to do video editing on modern resolution videos, preferably 720p and up.

I was wondering if I could manually do chroma keying without software to make it easier. Is it possible? Could I replicate what the software does manually, like, for example, painting sixty pixels into a square instead of using a fill brush in a single click? Chroma keying the entire video one frame at a time and composing a video format, or use some set algorithm to do it faster?

I believe everything made easier can be done manually in segments.

I mean it's hard to sit and wait like 2 hours to chroma key a 10 second video on these weak specs. I need to see if there's a way to ease the chroma keying process on weaker hardware.

The modern chroma keying software features are too demanding for a 1.6 GHz Atom N270.

No you wont be faster, but you could use a different method. As in a different application. Really it comes down to what your bottleneck is. If the bottleneck is the interplay between you and the computer then sure. What you can do is expand the video to frames as a prepass. This takes time but is essentially unsupervised. Likewise you could preprocess the mask somehow (use a half size proxy image for example), and use that as a basis.

The problem is that it might not be economically feasible. Since:

you need to learn a new software, as well as find it. Test it etc.
You may need to write portions of it yourself, atleast scripts.

You still dont get fast enough to get your investment back. I mean its still cheaper to buy new hardware, if you plan to do this more than 3 times in a row. I understand that your circumstances may be special and you havent got the money.

But on that note, we are actually doing what is essentially chroma keying on the graphics card of a raspberry Pi and it works at 15 frames per second on a full hd image. So i doubt its the hardware computation per see. Possibly its a IO problem.


FFmpeg for m2t and Sony Bravia - not working -f mp4 -c:v libx264 -preset veryslow -tune grain -profile:v high422 -flags +ildct+ilme

I am preparing video to be streamed (DLNA) from my NAS to an older Sony Bravia. I have successfully created playable m2t files (1080i) with VideoStudio (AVC, high@L4, Cabac, h264, vbr max 20 Mbps, 25 fps, interlaced). Interlaced is important because it seems the TV cannot handle 1080p from NAS or USB.
I have some old family video in prores/mov that VideoStudio does not accept as input, so I am trying to convert that to something acceptable to the TV using FFmpeg.

I haven't found a way to create m2t files with FFmpeg.
The TV is supposedly capable of handling MP4, but regardless of the settings tried — and I have tried dozens that all plays well on VLC (including BD compatible, PSP profiles and other) the TV just says 'not playable'

Anyone has ideas for any of the two routes?

Searching the internet I have learned that the Sony Bravia is known for being very picky, but I am sure someone has found the key...? (other than those at pavtube, who claims to have a commercial tool, that does the trick)

FFprobe of working m2t file:

Stream #0:0[0x1011]: Video: h264 (High) (HDMV / 0x564D4448), yuv420p(top first), 1920x1080 [SAR 1:1 DAR 16:9], 25 fps, 50 tbr, 90k tbn, 50 tbc
Stream #0:1[0x1100]: Audio: ac3 (AC-3 / 0x332D4341), 48000 Hz, stereo, fltp, 384 kb/s

Properties of working m2t by MediaTab:

===================== General =====================
Id                          : 0 (0x0)
Complete name               : D:\ThisWorks.m2t
Format                      : BDAV
Format info                 : Blu-ray Video
File size                   : 2.21 GB
Duration (ms)               : 21mn 10s
Overall bit rate mode       : Variable
Overall bit rate            : 14.9 Mbps
Maximum Overall bit rate    : 25.5 Mbps

===================== Video =====================
Id                          : 4113 (0x1011)
Menu ID                     : 1 (0x1)
Format                      : AVC
Format info                 : Advanced Video Codec
Formatprofile               : High@L4
Formatsettings, CABAC       : Yes
Formatsettings, ReFrames    : 2 frames
Formatsettings, GOP         : N=1
Codec Id                    : 27
Duration (ms)               : 21mn 10s
Bit rate mode               : Variable
Bit rate                    : 13.9 Mbps
Maximum bit rate            : 20.0 Mbps
Width                       : 1 920 pixels
Height                      : 1 080 pixels
Display aspect ratio        : 16:9
Frame rate                  : 25.000 fps
Color space                 : YUV
Chroma subsampling          : 4:2:0
Bit depth                   : 8 bits
Scan type                   : Interlaced
Scan type, store method     : Separated fields
Scan order                  : Top Field First
Bits/(Pixel*Frame)          : 0.269
Stream size                 : 2.06 GB (93%)

===================== Audio =====================
Id                          : 4352 (0x1100)
Menu ID                     : 1 (0x1)
Format                      : AC-3
Format info                 : Audio Coding 3
Mode extension              : CM (complete main)
Formatsettings, Endianness  : Big
Codec Id                    : 129
Duration (ms)               : 21mn 10s
Bit rate mode               : Constant
Bit rate                    : 384 Kbps
Channel(s)                  : 2 channels
Channel positions           : Front: L R
Sampling rate               : 48.0 KHz
Frame rate                  : 31.250 fps (1536 spf)
Compression mode            : Lossy
Stream size                 : 58.2 MB (3%)

Try

ffmpeg -i in -vf format=yuv420p,setsar=1 -g 25 -c:v libx264 -tune grain -profile:v high -refs 2 -x264opts bluray-compat=1:fake-interlaced=1:nalhrd=vbr:aud=1 -maxrate 20M -bufsize 20M -c:a ac3 -ac 2 out.ts

FFmpeg can't replicate Scan type, store method     : Separated fields but it may not matter.


Splitting and regrouping stereo's right and left channels (Stereo to Mono) I have several (rather old) videos of which probably due to an encoding error by their original creator, sound is in stereo, but only coming out of the left side, while the right side stays silent.

I want to split the audio and then copy the left side to the right side (basically turn the whole thing into mono).

I'm using pitivi, but I'm open to suggestions of using another software, as long as it's free and have a Linux version.

Using ffmpeg, a free command-line tool,

ffmpeg -i input.mov -c:v copy -af "pan=1c|c0=c0" out.mov

This copies the video over, and the audio is mono with the first channel of the input mapped for export.

Some players may not be setup to default to a stereo matrix. In which case, you can generate a faux stereo stream.

ffmpeg -i input.mov -c:v copy -af "pan=stereo|c0=c0|c1=c0" out.mov


Is ffmpeg the solution to automate video building from multiple files Need some help automating video & audio stitching and could use some help/direction.

Let's say I have the following assets:
Video 1
Video 2
Video 3
Music 1

And I want to build a few variations of the above assets like:

Variation #1
Video 1 -> Video 3
<----Music 1----->

Variation #2
Video 3 -> Video 1
<----Music 1----->

Note Music would need to be trimmed based on the length of the videos combined.

Is it possible to map a web form to the assets listed above (located on a local server) and have the web form ultimately build the order of the video and render out to the local server?
If possible, would FFmpeg or Animoto API (or another) be the right choice?
What kind of time/resources would it take to build something like this?

You can do this with ffmpeg using either the concat filter or the concat demuxer. Which one to use depends whether or not your inputs have the same parameters or not. If they do not, you may have to perform additional filtering to make everything suitable to be concatenated properly.

Example: concat filter

For inputs that vary in frame rate, width, and height:

ffmpeg -i video0 -i video1 -i video2 -i music -filter_complex \
"[0:v]fps=25,scale=1280x720,setpts=PTS-STARTPTS[v0]; \
"[1:v]fps=25,scale=1280x720,setpts=PTS-STARTPTS[v1]; \
"[2:v]fps=25,scale=1280x720,setpts=PTS-STARTPTS[v2]; \
"[v0][v1][v2]concat=n=3:v=1:a=0,format=yuv420p[v]" \
-map "[v]" -map 3:a -shortest output

If outputting mp4 consider adding -movflags +faststart as an output option if your viewers will watch via progressive download.

Example: concat demuxer

If all of your inputs are similar then first make a list file named input.txt:

file "/path/to/video0"
file "/path/to/video1"
file "/path/to/video2"

Then run ffmpeg:

ffmpeg -f concat -i input.txt -i music -shortest output

Add -codec copy if you want to stream copy instead of re-encode. This is not possible with the concat filter because filtering requires re-encoding.

Your questions

  Is it possible to map a web form to the assets listed above (located on a local server) and have the web form ultimately build the order of the video and render out to the local server?

Yes. As long as your protocol is supported by ffmpeg. See ffmpeg -protocols for a list supported by your build.

  If possible, would FFmpeg or Animoto API (or another) be the right choice?

It is possible with ffmpeg, but I've never used Animoto API so I can't comment on that.

  What kind of time/resources would it take to build something like this?

That's not really possible to answer. You provided very little info and it depends on the skill of whoever is building it.

Also see

FFmpeg Wiki: Concatenate


Are the robots in the transformers films really transforming? I was always wondering if the robots in transformers had millions of parts like LEGOs and the different parts snapped on and off and rotated in a completely mechanical way, but I feel like the VFX artists cheated a lot and make parts appear and disappear magically out of thin air. What do you think? I am not sure if this is the right place, but the robot sequences is VFX and this stackexchange seems to be about VFX.

1. They HAVE to cheat
First of all, having a part that is not showing in the frame will consume render time to be computed, even if it is not showing. The files are heavier to handle and all the process becomes sluggish.
2. Transforming in a 3D program is given by 3 main operations

Moving
Rotating, which they are pretty obvious in a transformation.

But you also have

Scaling. If you have something scaled so tiny that you can not see it, the geometry is still there consuming resources of the computer that are wasted.

3. The goal is
Telling a story, a fantasy story about fictitious characters, not to be accurate on a transformation.
The other main goal is to make things look cool, somehow logic and accurate but mainly cool.
4. Autobot's universe actually has parts that "disappear"
Take for example the Spark humungous building-sized cube. It does not only compress in size to be handheld... It would have the density of Jupiter nuclei, weighing the same as a building. But somehow things there just went "poof"... So, again some liberty can be used on the transformations.


how to change video size in Final Cut Pro I am creating a video clip of pictures, and when I edit them in FCPX, I get on both sides a black bar. is there a way to get rid of them? it doest look that professional to have those bars.
thx!
Benji

The aspects ratio of your source material does not match the aspect ratio of your output device. That's not unprofessional, as you say it. Often it is just inevitable. Go watch a movie on any streaming platform and you surely will see black bars. Probably at the top and bottom, not the sides but it's the same problem.
Anyway, you have two options:

Crop the photos to reduce the height while keeping the same width until it matches the aspect ratio of your output device. If it's a computer monitor it will be probably 16:10 or 16:9. That means for each 16 pixel in width you need 10 or 9 pixel in height.  I recommend to do it manually for each photo. Another option is to combine several photos in one mashup or panorama if applicable.

Get another output device that has the same aspect ratio as your photos. However, I think this will be much harder.

With some cameras you can set the aspect ratio beforehand, so for the future, there is the option to shoot with your target ratio.


Programs to improve audio quality? I just recently purchased a Blue Snowball USB microphone and a Dragonpad Studio Mic Filter pad because I am interested in creating videos and podcasts. However, I am still experiencing excess background noise. Is there any way to reduce this using Audacity or any other freely available program?

I'm not sure if Audacity has this, but what you need is a compressor (actually an expander, but they're opposite things built into a tool referred to as a compressor). The compressor allows you to limit sound that is above a certain dB level, the expander limits sound under that level, called a gate.  You can set a gate with the compressor at a sound level, cutting out faint background noise but keeping your voice.  This will also cut out breathing noises you make at the beginning and end of syllables particularly Hs and Ss. This technique will not work if your voice is not considerably above the level of the background noise.

Another tool which can help refine your voice, but not entirely solve the noise problem is an eq (equalizer).  Look specifically for a parametric eq; these are the most intuitive. Essentially the equalizer loudens or softens sound based on its frequency.  You can use this to raise the level of your voice, but also soften background noise.  This works particularly well if there's a hissing sound that fills up only a small area on the frequency spectrum.

In terms of the recording environment, ideally you could build a sound proof room, but these are incredibly expensive.  Another slightly cheaper idea is to give your recording room an acoustic treatment, essentially coating the walls in acoustic foam.  This won't solve existing noise problems, but it will limit reverb.  Acoustic treatment is fairly cheap.  Generally you can coat a fairly large room at 50-75% coverage for under $100.

UPDATE: Audacity does have a compressor, but the GUI looks really ugly and unintuitive.  A parametric eq also requires an external plugin.  That said, it's still probably the best free program available.  Something paid and marketed as a DAW (digital audio workstation), would do the job much better.  Something like Adobe Audition, Apple Logic Pro, or Avid Pro Tools.


Is there an equivalent to Premiere's tilde key in DaVinci Resolve? In Adobe Premiere, you can maximise the currently selected window or pane by pressing the tilde ~ key. Is there an equivalent in Davinci Resolve 16?
See Display any panel full screen in Premiere's help

You can't expand any panel to full screen in Resolve 16 like you can in Premiere Pro.  You can expand the viewer to full screen with cmd/ctrl-F, and on the color page you can also get different viewer expansions with alt/opt-F and shift-F.
Beyond that, if a panel can be hidden, it's listed under the Workspace menu->Panels in Workspace, or by simply dimming its tab across the top of the screen. Not all panels can be hidden in Resolve.  In general, Resolve's UI is less customizable than Premiere.
BlackMagic's approach to UI design is very structured, and while it takes a period of adjustment for new users to become comfortable, it mitigates the need to hunt for shifting UI elements. "Where did I put that panel" doesn't happen.  Neither does "Where did I get Dave's Fave Layout" when your name is not Dave, but Dave shared a project with you.

You can save layout presets, under the Workspace->Layout Presets menu, and you can re-map keybindings to most commands in Resolve.  This, coupled with the fact that the positions of UI elements are consistently and predictably located make it possible to automate repetitive tasks easily with third-party macro software (e.g. autohotkey for Windows; Keyboard Maestro for Mac) which use mouse clicks in addition to keystrokes.
But DaVinci Resolve's secret killer feature is actually not one you'll find in its (oversized) manual.  It's BlackMagic's stellar support staff and developers.  If you have a reasonable feature suggestion or bug report, post it to their user forums.  They will evaluate it, and if it's a good idea, they will implement it, quickly.  The last issue I brought up wasn't even really something I considered a big deal, and there was already a workaround, but they fixed it in less than a month.  And they've implemented my suggestions on multiple occasions.
Something like the tilde key for full-screen windows has probably been brought up before, but if they see more demand than pushback for it, and as long as the feature doesn't infringe on another company's intellectual property, they'll do it.


FFMPEG slow / fast motion part a video anywhere am trying to cut a part of Video

Here is the code i have tried Let's say i have 6 seconds video and i want to slow down 2:5 seconds video that 3 second video

First approach after searching is, Cut the video, then apply slow filter then concat it with original video. But this is a mid part not entire video. How can i modify below code

  ffmpeg -i Soon.mp4 -filter_complex
  [0:v]trim=2:5,setpts=PTS-STARTPTS[v1];[v1]setpts=0.5PTS[v1];[0:a]atempo=2[a]
  concat=n=1:v=1:a=1 -map "[v]" -map "[a] -preset superfast -profile:v
  baseline output.mp4

This slows down one part of a video and keeps the rest as is.

ffmpeg -i Soon.mp4
  -filter_complex
     "[0:v]trim=0:2,setpts=PTS-STARTPTS[v1];
      [0:v]trim=2:5,setpts=2*(PTS-STARTPTS)[v2];
      [0:v]trim=5,setpts=PTS-STARTPTS[v3];
      [0:a]atrim=0:2,asetpts=PTS-STARTPTS[a1];
      [0:a]atrim=2:5,asetpts=PTS-STARTPTS,atempo=0.5[a2];
      [0:a]atrim=5,asetpts=PTS-STARTPTS[a3];
      [v1][a1][v2][a2][v3][a3]concat=n=3:v=1:a=1"
  -preset superfast -profile:v baseline output.mp4

How does it work?

The trim and atrim filters cut the video into different parts, from 0–2 seconds, from 2–5, and from 5 to the end.
In each part a setpts/asetpts filter is applied, which, when using the option PTS-STARTPTS, "resets" the presentation timestamps of each frame in each part, so that they can later be concatenated easily.
Each part is given an output label (e.g. [v1] through [v3]).
For the video parts that need to be slowed down, every presentation timestamp is doubled (2*(…)), which effectively halves the speed of the video. If you wanted to speed up the video, use a multiplier lower than 1.
For audio parts to be sped up / slowed down, use the atempo filter, whose parameter is the speedup (e.g., 0.5 = half speed).
These parts are finally concatenated using the concat filter.


Should I be concerned about overheating when doing long render tasks? I bought a new computer recently and I'm very pleased with how quickly and accurately it renders. In my line of work, however, I find that sometimes my queued render tasks add up to more than 20 hours. Naturally, while rendering, my new computer runs pretty warm. My question is if this heavy workload will decrease the life of my computer.

I would like answers to give an assessment of both mobile computers, such as tablets and laptops, and an assessment desktop computers.

Specifically, my new computer is a Microsoft Surface Pro 4. I've been using a USB fan to help keep it cool during these extended render tasks. Should I continue this practice or am I wasting my time?

First answer to "My question is if this heavy workload will decrease the life of my computer."

Simply YES,
BUT any  work on a computer will decrease its life, but it does depend on the work being done and how intense it is, but on the other hand, computers are designed to work in different ways and workloads. Desktop Workstations like the HPs and Mac Pros are designed to run massive tasks and just chug away at the data, which is why you will see the pros using them in the big studios as they power they offer is fantastic. They can have 12 cores, tons of Ram, brilliant GPUs etc which a tablet cannot.

Now you can still get high powered desktops from the likes of home builds and retailers which will handle data happily and run all the time.

Tablets (including the Surface) are really designed to be a portable solution that is not a laptop and even though they have loads of power and do the job they are not really designed to sit and chug away at data for hours on end as the little fans and main boards are so close together and the heat that is generated can affect the components over time.

If it was me in this situation I would do my work on the Surface but I would have a desktop (HP, Mac Pro, home-build, etc) to send the work to render on over night and or all day and having the ability to upgrade or add in new GPU's more Ram multiple processors/cores will cut down render times about also increase your work as you can render on the desktop and still produce more work on the tablet.

Other option is sending the files to something like and online render farm to render them out and send back the finished product but this is a bit of a more expensive option specially if it is just smaller project and not rendering films like Pixar's Cars or Disney's Moana.

Obviously this all involves spending more money and have extra kit but it might prolong the life of the tablet and cut down render times etc.

Now this is all great in saying this but putting things into practice can take a long time to work out a good flow, I'm still improving my flows daily while I'm working.


How does one edit and save clips once and reuse in multiple videos with Adobe Premiere? I have many clips which all need basic editing such as adjusting the start and end. I would also like to reuse these same clips in multiple videos without setting the start and end again. I would like a portfolio of these basic edits once and simply use them as is. Of course inside premiere i would edit them again if necessary and so on without affecting the original settings. Is this possible if so how ?

Within a new project, create a sequence/timeline; call it 'Basic Edits' if you like, and make your trim edits on the source clips there. For each of your multiple videos, create a new sequence and copy-paste the trimmed clips from the first sequence.

Or if you want to use these clips in another project, you can import the sequence by the File -> Import menu dialog.

Of course, I presume that by Adobe Premiere, you don't mean Premiere Elements - the lite version - which doesn't feature multiple sequences in a project, as far as I know.


How do I mute my monitors while leaving headphones on? Very simply, I want to be able disable my monitor speakers and leave the headphones on.  This is obviously important when recording in the same room.

All the mixers I have come across place the main level controls before the phones output, which have their own level control.  This seems like a missed opportunity.

Sounds simple enough, but the thread Home studio mixer/mic/monitor/headphone setup questions, which is the closest I've found to a statement of the question, never addresses it.

  The biggest thing I am not sure how to do is set up my
  monitors/headphones on the mixer so that I can go back and forth when
  recording

Up to now, I have been driving my monitors from the 1&2 bus of a mixing console.  This allows me to turn down the speakers using the group faders.  But this console is broken, and I would like to replace it with something simpler that is strictly for monitoring (since I don't need the preamps or EQ, etc.)  It seems like a simple line mixer should be able to handle my requirements.  But even the line mixers with 2 aux buses don't have single faders for those sends.

What am I missing here?  How is this normally done?

you are in the correct track: a small mixer would do the trick. Basically you have the pfl button that would get the specific channel(s)/souce(s) selected to your headhones jack (monitors) without modifying at all your master (and viceversa). Another option would be something like the Mackie Big Knob, made specifically for what you want, but in this case you can only select to monitor a source, not individual channels).


Help reading analog video? I have a microcassette tape with some video on it that I'd like to digitize, but the camera I have that can play microcassette tapes is so old its drivers come on a floppy disk, which I can't read with any of my computers.

However, I can use a firewire cable to transfer the video, but none of my computers have a firewire port, so I bought a firewire-to-usb cable.

I've tried using WinDV VideoDub and dvgrab to capture the tape, however both WinDV and VideoDub suffer from the problem that Windows has no drivers for the camera, and dvgrab can't find the camera in Arch Linux, probably for the same reason.

Is there a way of using the equipment I have to read the video, or will I have to purchase a floppy disk reader to get the drivers?

Even with a floppy drive, you may be SOL -- it's likely the drivers won't work in your current OS. You might have to fire up a virtual machine with an older OS.

If the video is analog, consider a USB video capture device. Here's a whole page of them, or search for "USB video capture".


How can a GIF made from a vid be larger than the vid itself? iPhone 6S Plus
Tumblr app GIF creation feature used for taking vid and making GIF
9 seconds of video taken =949kB
3 second portion used for GIF =1.3MB

How?

my assumption is that app wouldn't use low res vids for high res GIFs
I ask because I figured GIFs would be smaller thus transmit faster and use less data when messaging.

There are several factors at play here. For example, your gif creation app may have a quality slider/setting that influences the size of the output. However, the most likely cause is the difference in compression.

The videos your iPhone records are probably compressed using a highly efficient codec such as H264 (I didn't find any information on what codec/file type the iPhone camera uses, but I'll take an educated guess and say it's mp4). This codec is very efficient at reducing the file size of a video while maintaining relatively high quality.

The gif-format, on the other hand, was built for an entirely different purpose. It was actually intended for small, animated graphics with limited color palettes, not complex videos. The original gif-format is lossless, meaning it stores every frame of the animation completely. Works great for those small animated graphics, but is terrible for actual video. Actually, because of this, many apparent gifs that you see on the internet aren't actually gifs.

In conclusion: Gif is a terrible format to store or transmit video, use a video format instead. Follow the link above if you are interested in the  technical side of this.


vhs to digital conversion flickers only when captured I have a Diamond One Touch Video Capture.  When I view the video on my computer is is great, but when I select capture, the video and audio flicker.  These are old home videos.  I tried a commercial movie video and it didn't flicker.  I don't think it is the One Touch because the videos do not flicker when viewed on my computer, only when being captured.  The capture software is Power Director and EZ Grabber.  I have tried two different VCRs.  Diamond has sent me a second One Touch.  Any suggestions?

So once captured the file plays without these issues it's only during recording ?

Or are you saying that while the video is playing from the recorder but the computer is not recording it's okay & then when you try to record it has those issues ?

It could be an incorrect field setting in the software or buffering during recording.

Have a look at the software recorders settings & see if there's something for fields "upper" or "lower" or possible even deinterlace.

Are you recording to an external drive or straight to your hard drive ? If you have the option try recording to a different drive.

And like Michael said if you upload a sample we can better see the issue


Change the duration of multiple images vegas I have 5 different video files on my timeline and I want to make every one of them to be only 5 seconds long. Basically squeeze each of them to be 5 seconds long each.

I am using Vegas 13, but before when I used premiere I had the option when I right clicked the video in the timeline called "Speed/duration". Is there something similar to this in Vegas?

If you want to change the speed of multiple clips - find a script that does this. Vegas Pro supports scripting and there a lot of different scripts out there, both free and commercial. For example, this one (commercial) can do this (enter the desired duration to  Duration control).


Can I run this in one command line (ffmpeg) I used this command ffmpeg -i thevideo.mp4 -c:a copy -vf 'drawbox= : x=0 : y=0 : color=invert:enable=between(t\,11\,39)' output.mp4 but it runs very slow.

So, I took another approach, I copy first and last part and run "drawbox" only on selected length, and then adding them all together.

ffmpeg -i thevideo.mp4 -ss 00:00:00 -to 00:00:10 -c copy cut.mp4

ffmpeg -i thevideo.mp4 -ss 00:00:11 -to 00:00:39 -c:a copy -vf 'drawbox= : x=0 : y=0 : color=invert' cut2.mp4

ffmpeg -i thevideo.mp4 -ss 00:00:40 -c copy cut3.mp4

ffmpeg -f concat -i mylist.txt -c copy output.mp4

content of mylist.txt:

file 'cut1.mp4'
file 'cut2.mp4'
file 'cut3.mp4'

Can I run it in one command and have the same speed or even faster but without cutting and concatenating the parts of the video?

Your current method using the concat demuxer while stream copying is probably the fastest (I'm just counting the ffmpeg time and not any time you take to enter the additional commands). Unfortunately, you have to perform several steps, but the advantage is that your non-filtered segments are not being re-encoded which preserves quality and results in fast processing.

It is possible to do it all in one command with the trim, atrim, and concat filters, but this will re-encode everything and possibly be slower. You will have to test. However, it may create a more "stable" output if you find your current method to be problematic (which would likely be fairly obvious upon playback). The filter is generally used instead of the demuxer when all streams are being filtered.

Example using concat filter:

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -filter_complex \
"[0:v]trim=end=10[v0]; \
 [0:a]atrim=end=10[a0]; \
 [0:v]trim=10:40,drawbox=color=invert[v1]; \
 [0:a]atrim=10:40[a1]; \
 [0:v]trim=start=40[v2]; \
 [0:a]atrim=start=40[a2]; \
 [v0][a0][v1][a1][v2][a2]concat=n=3:v=1:a=1[v][a]" \
-map "[v]" -map "[a]" -movflags +faststart output.mp4

Notes

If you get a weird output refer to the setpts, asetpts filters (search for PTS-STARTPTS).
If it is still too slow use a faster x264 preset. See FFmpeg Wiki: H.264 Video Encoding Guide.
I assume you're using OS X with the "tessus" build of ffmpeg from your previous FFmpeg question. The default AAC encoder for the tessus build is libvo_aacenc. The native FFmpeg AAC encoder is generally regarded as being slightly better. If you want to use it add -c:a aac -strict experimental. If you want the best supported AAC encoder, libfdk_aac, then use homebrew to compile ffmpeg. See FFmpeg Wiki: AAC Encoding Guide.


Term for upcoming TV summaries (broadcast design) Television broadcasters show short "outlooks" or "summaries" of the upcoming program, often right after the advertisement (w/ or w/o the Digital on-screen graphic).

What's the term for this short announcments?

I am not aware of any particular term for showing the schedule.  It's just a schedule of upcoming programs and may include playing teasers or previews, which are the video clips to promote upcoming shows.  It could also be referred to as filler since it is content that is run while the credits are going (which they have to display) but want to fill it with some more interesting content.


'"How to change the song in one time?" Audio Spectrum Visualizer (After Effect) I made an audio spectrum visualizer similar (After Effects) style like this one with multiple solid layers. But I have a problem: how to change the song in all layers at once? Every layer has different colours, glow and all other effects but the song is the same, so now if I want to change the song I have to go into every solid layer and change FX Audio Spectrum > Audio Layer > Song Name.

Using the Audio Spectrum plugin in After Effects, you can reference a layer (using the "Audio Layer" parameter) on your timeline as an audio source. To update all referenced audio sources in your project at once, you can precomp the audio track and use the new nested precomp as your audio source instead.

  1) On your timeline, highlight your audio track. Hit CTRL + Shift + C (CMD + Shift + C on OSX) to Pre-compose the audio.

  2) In the Pre-compose menu, name it "Audio Reference" or something similar, then select "Move all attributes into the new composition" and hit "OK"

  3) This new composition will be added in your Project panel. Use this composition instead of your audio file when working in After Effects.

To update the audio file project-wide with a couple of clicks, just open the reference composition you created and swap out the audio file inside. This will change every instance of that composition in your project.

Hope this helps! Let me know if you need clarification.


How do I fit the Comp length to a layers length in after effects? lets sayI have a comp in after effects with one layer. The layer appears to be longer than the actual comp. Is there any shortcut to make the comp automatically fit the length of the layer?

Thanks in advance!

This free script - rd: Comp Setter - should help.


After Effects: How do I add a Marker onto a layer? how do I add a Marker onto a layer in case I have no numpad?

Thanks in advance

Select Layer. Then from the top menu:

Layer => Add Marker

Or if you want to do it from your keyboard you can modify shortcuts using this article.


After effects: masking not working in select compositions Whenever I try to mask a clip or multiple clips in my main composition, the mask has no effect, neither does inverting the mask or any of the other mask modes provided. The same thing happens when I pre-compose a clip from my main composition. Masks do still work on adjustment layers though.

However if i take the same clip from my clips in the project section and create a new composition with it, masking seems to work fine.

I don't know if I have disabled a setting in my main composition that would have caused this (I can't find any difference between my main and any new compositions), and it seems that nobody else has had this problem or that the answer is simplistic.

Let me know if you need anymore information. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Regards

Most likely you have effects on those layers that are being applied and messing up your masks, anything from the distort effects will do this, and others as well...you can wither pre-comp your layers or use layer masks


Graphic music visualizer without after effects? I would like to make a YouTube video that has a music visualizer on it (like in Monstercat videos), but I don't want to have to pay for After Effects. Is there a free way to do it? I know I can get the trial, but I want to be able to use it more than 30 days from now. Also, I'm using OS X, so whatever it is can't be Windows only.

A free alternative for After Effects is Jashaka. It runs on every plattform and has some decent features. While it wont have the comfort of after effects for creating such an effect its certainly possible.
If you just don't want to spend all that much but still willing to pay a small price you can go for Apple Motion which costs 50$ and is a fairly powerful tool for animation and motion graphics for the price.
https://www.apple.com/final-cut-pro/motion/
Also here a tutorial on how make something react to music in Apple Motion: http://www.larryjordan.biz/motion-5-make-audio-move-video/
I personally have not worked in detail with both software so I can not give you guidance for actually creating the animation, expect for this tutorial.


Is CPU speed important for uploading a youtube video I know CPU and GPU speed are important for rendering and editing videos. My question is: is CPU speed always important for uploading a youtube video? and actually how much important? I've searched on the web to find this specific question's answer but I wasn't satisfied.

Sending your files to YouTube (once rendered and or exported) will be down to the upload speed of your internet service provide (ISP) / Broadband supplier. The faster the upload speed, the faster it can get to the YouTube servers for processing.

So the answer to the question is no, but there are other factors involved like those mentioned above.


How to render an After Effects composition without DRM protection How can you render a .wmv video file in After Effects without DRM protection, there doesn't seem to be an option when rendering.

UPDATE

This composition im rendering is basically a small animation i made from scratch, so i know im not rendering it with any pre-rendered files

I've never seen this kind of behavior in After Effects.  I'm going to assume that you are using a system that is typically used for producing DRM protected media and that the default options for your Windows Media format are setup to use a DRM system.  This would be part of the configuration of the encoder itself and should be available from the encoding and format options (not the exact name, I don't have AE on my current computer to check, but it's the setting right below quality level in the render queue.)

Without knowing the exact encoder being used, I can't really give any more direct feedback than that.  If you can post the exact encoder being used and the version of AE, I can give some more specific instructions later when I am at my home desktop.


Import Audio Markers or Cues to Audition CS5.5 I want to import Cues from an external source (CUE-File or mp4chaps Simple Chapter Text file) to Audition, or even better yet, permanently stick them to WAV files.

Looking through old documentation for Audition 3 (Windows), I noticed that there used to be an "Import" function for Markers or Cues.

This function is no longer available in Audition CS5.5, and I don't know if CS6 will bring any new functionality.

And as I spent the last two days hunting down a solution, I'll share it with you right away:

tl;dr: Use this cross platform & open source tool by the US Government (ya, really) to stick XMP Metadata in the WAV File.
http://bwfmetaedit.sourceforge.net/

WAV Files support the "cue " chunk, and this chunk is written by Audition, but I couldn't make it read from this chunk, and related chunks containing the cue names.

But Audition also writes the XMP Metadata, including a somewhat redundant copy of the Cue chunk. And it will also read it back.

So, by generating an XMP file containing the cue information, and sticking it in the XMP chunk of a WAV file, you can import that data to Audition.

For example:

<?xpacket begin="" id="W5M0MpCehiHzreSzNTczkc9d"?>
<x:xmpmeta xmlns:x="adobe:ns:meta/" x:xmptk="Adobe XMP Core 5.2-c003 61.141987, 2011/02/22-12:03:51        ">
   <rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#">
      <rdf:Description rdf:about=""
            xmlns:xmpDM="http://ns.adobe.com/xmp/1.0/DynamicMedia/">
         <xmpDM:Tracks>
            <rdf:Bag>
               <rdf:li rdf:parseType="Resource">
                  <xmpDM:trackName>CuePoint Markers</xmpDM:trackName>
                  <xmpDM:trackType>Cue</xmpDM:trackType>
                  <xmpDM:frameRate>f254016000000</xmpDM:frameRate>
                  <xmpDM:markers>
                     <rdf:Seq>
                        <rdf:li rdf:parseType="Resource">
                           <xmpDM:startTime>18645250f44100</xmpDM:startTime>
                           <xmpDM:name>Marker 01</xmpDM:name>
                        </rdf:li>
                        <rdf:li rdf:parseType="Resource">
                           <xmpDM:startTime>69088263f44100</xmpDM:startTime>
                           <xmpDM:name>Marker 02</xmpDM:name>
                        </rdf:li>
                     </rdf:Seq>
                  </xmpDM:markers>
               </rdf:li>
            </rdf:Bag>
         </xmpDM:Tracks>
      </rdf:Description>
      <rdf:Description rdf:about=""
            xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/">
         <dc:format>audio/x-wav</dc:format>
      </rdf:Description>
   </rdf:RDF>
</x:xmpmeta>

The format should be self explanatory.

If you want to write your own tool to automate this, follow the XMP specs from Adobe concerning WAV files and the XMP chunk, which, ironically is named backwards:

  The XMP in […] WAV is in a chunk with the ID "_PMX", encoded as UTF-8.
  Note that the ID is backwards, due to a bug in the initial
  implementation concerning processor byte order.

Here's an iOS App that will generate Audition-compatible XMP files:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/xmp-marker/id525322095?ls=1&mt=8


How do i stretch an image like this in a video on sony vegas pro 13? that's the image, but i can't quite figure out how to do this.

First off, welcome! I would like to state that in the future you should make you questions a bit more detailed.

From what I understand you either want to (1) stretch the image to remove the black bars, or to (2) scale the image.

Either can be done by dragging the clip on to the timeline and hitting the pan/crop button on the clip (it looks like a box, not the plus sign).

From there you will find a window where you can scale the clip according to the aspect ratio. If it does not conform to the 16:9 aspect ratio or the 4:3 ratio you want you can select one of those ratios from the drop down and scale the clip to remove the black bars. If you want, you can also disable the the current ratio with one of the buttons on the side of the window. From there you can adjust the image freely without an aspect ratio limitation. Bare in mind, This can cause undesired effects such as squeezing the image in either direction.


How to render Adobe Premiere or After Effects projects on Linux? I'm looking for automating video editing and rendering tasks on Linux. Is there a way I can use Nodejs to automate Adobe Premiere or After Effects on Linux?

BlackMagic Davinci Resolve and Fusion run on both RHEL and Centos, and have Python2, 3 and LUA integrated for automation.  The title of your question leads me to believe you're already using Adobe suite, but the body suggests otherwise.  There's a free version of Resolve with most of the features of the full version, so it can't hurt to try.  I honestly don't know if Linux is one of those limitations, but the full version of Resolve is only $300 for a lifetime license, so there's still not much risk.


show the process in a football feint or motion I am a football coach and need to make some videos over some exercises.
Here I would like to have some kind of "line" through the movement itself.
If you look at this little 5-6 sec. clips from 1 min and 40 sec. then it's something like what I think on CRAZY STRONG FITNESS MOMENTS - Youtube.

I agree that it is a clip where you have then taken some frames, which must be shown layer-on-layer from the tail and then removed when the video reaches the actual "movement" but are there any who can confirm this or know tutorials on how-to?

You would do this kind of thing in After-Effects or a similar compositing program (like Nuke or Fusion). Simply duplicate your video as many times as you want the move to be repeated, then offset the layers in time, and lastly roughly mask out the person from every shot except the very bottom layer.


What Animation techniques did Walt Disney Studios came up with? As far as I know, is Disney (Studios) pushing the envelope in every film they produce.
They allways try to come up with a new technique, with almost every film.
For example the "Multyplane Camera" in Snow White, the "Deep Canvas"-Method in Tarzan, the Snow animation in Frozen or the Hair in Tangled/Brave.

Has there been other technical development?

As far as I know, was the most progress made in the Disney Renaissance (Traditional Animation) or in recent years (3D Animation).

But what exactely(techniques) did they came up with?

Which methods did they invent?

I know Disney first make cartoon movie 60+ minutes (use public domain story) and created list of 12 principles of animation influence animation industry. But Disney Corp probably not first use these principles. 1914 Gertie Dinosaur animation use most principles already. Felix Cat cartoons from 1920s also use repeat background motion like Hanna Barbara, and use correct joint motion for characters instead hose style in later 1920s, animation cycles, and early 1930s (Felix Cat: Stone Age 1922). Fleischer Studio first use sound 1926, two years before Disney. Fleischer Studio also use real people with animation in the Out Of The Inkwell series (1918-29) and this series use limited animation method only redraw changing parts of characters (Hanna Barbara use this method from late 1950s).

Book Illusion Of Life tell about Disney animation invention and experiments with different animation effects (authors two Disney animators, maybe have bias). But I think Disney improve art quality and fluid motion in animation more than other company before.

Disney is probably first and best for cheat public domain (after take much from public domain) prevent their character become domain by buy politician in US Congress for extend their copyright (monopoly) two times.

Some modern methods at Disney Research (research paper):
https://www.disneyresearch.com/publication/


Premiere pro cc2015 preview lag I tried editing a video shot on canon 750d @1080p 25fps.
I am using premiere pro cc2015 , windows 10 , Intel i3 and Intel HD 3000 graphics . When I import the video into premiere and play there is a red line on the timeline and the video lags.
Please help me out.
Thanks.

1080p is a large resolution. Based on the information you've provided, you're likely hitting a hardware bottleneck and won't be able to do much to increase your performance.


Cut Loom screen recording at 39s, trim video around the edges to hide scrollbar and Loom stop button using FFmpeg I have a 1920x1080 MP4 screencast that has been created in full-size mode in Google Chrome. I wish to hide the Loom video stopping process (after 39 seconds) and also trim around the edge of the video, so the browser scrollbar and Loom recording button are hidden during the video playback. Essentially cropping the inner 95% of the video.

How can I cut (crop) 95% of the video so the inner section is extracted? The proportions for 95% of the video would be 1824px x 1026px.

Here is the command to cut the video at 39 seconds. How could I combine with a crop command to hide the Loom browser recording process?

ffmpeg -i LoomFullSizeScreenCast.mp4 -t 39 -c copy LoomFullSizeScreenCastCut.mp4

Here is the video in action

https://thirsty-heisenberg-58e54e.netlify.com/LoomFullSizeScreenCast.mp4

Cropping is carried out using a video filter. Also, a filtered video has to be re-encoded. So the command would be

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf crop=1824:1026 -t 39 -c:a copy output.mp4

See the docs for the crop filter for all options.


How can I remove the background of a video if the background is still? In example,
I have this exported Image from a video001

then someone enter to the room without move anything from the image and then leave.

There is a way to use the image as a keymap to remove every match from the video001 with the image?

The result should be only the differences between the video001 and the image.

I use Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2018, but if there is other tools to obtain that result, tell me please.
Thanks! :)

In your sequence, place a still frame of the background with your footage place above.

  V2: Footage
  V1: Still frame of background

In the Effects panel, find Video Effects > Keying > Difference Mask. Drag this effect onto your footage (the top-most track).

In the Effects Control panel, set the 'Difference Layer' to match the track with the still frame.

Hide the still frame (bottom track) using the 'Toggle Track Output'. The background will now be transparent.

Inconsistencies of lighting, shadows and movement of the background will have a big effect on the quality of the outcome.

Avoid casting shadows on the background by keeping the scene well lit. Be aware of objects in the background moving.

If necessary, use a combination of color keying (a wall with a solid colour that contrasts with the subject) as well as masks to hide parts of the footage where no movement occurs.


Merge multiple video files using ffmpeg by adding multiple compress options I would like to merge multiple video files, performing in the same time complex compressing options.

How can I do that? The following ffmpeg command resulting this error:

 Filtergraph 'scale=1280:720,setpts=0.20*PTS' was specified through the -vf/-af/-filter option for output stream 0:0, which is fed from a complex filtergraph.
-vf/-af/-filter and -filter_complex cannot be used together for the same stream.

The ffmpeg command that i used:

ffmpeg -i GOPR0003.MP4 -i GOPR0004.MP4 -i GOPR0005.MP4 -i GOPR0005.MP4 -i GOPR0006.MP4 -i GOPR0007.MP4 -i GOPR0007.MP4 -i GOPR0008.MP4 -i GOPR0009.MP4 -i GOPR0010.MP4 -i GOPR0012.MP4 -i GOPR0013.MP4 -i GOPR0015.MP4 \
   -filter_complex "[0:v] [1:v] [2:v] [3:v] [4:v] [5:v] [6:v] [7:v] [8:v]  [9:v]  [10:v] concat=n=11:v=1 [v]" \
    -r 24 -crf 18  -vcodec libx264 -vb 20M -vf "scale=1280:720,setpts=0.20*PTS"  -an   -map "[v]"   video_output_01.avi

All filtering should be performed in the same filtergraph. Each -filter_complex or -vf defines a different filtergraph. You can use

-filter_complex "[0:v] [1:v] [2:v] [3:v] [4:v] [5:v] [6:v] [7:v] [8:v]  [9:v]  [10:v] concat=n=11:v=1,scale=1280:720,setpts=0.20*PTS [v]"


How to use DJI Ronin MX in adverse weather Hi has anyone ever used a DJI Ronin MX in the rain? if so how have you protected it?

There are numerous simple solutions including shoulder mounted umbrellas and rain shields, or even ones mounted on the Ronin itself.

Obviously, in a complete downpour you may need to consider a waterproof camera bag. These are pretty cheap anyway.


How to turn off ffmpeg dithering? I am trying to convert a video to an animated gif, and I actually want it to have banding, so I'm trying to turn off dithering.
Here's what I've tried:
ffmpeg -ss 1:24 -t 2 -i *.mkv -filter_complex "[0:v] fps=15,scale=sws_dither=none:w=480:h=-1,split [a][b];[a] palettegen=max_colors=4:stats_mode=single [p];[b][p] paletteuse=new=1" avengers3.gif

Here's what the output from the above looks like:

It seems to me that definitely still has dithering, so how to turn it off?
It said in the docs that sws_dither is the flag to set to "none" to disable dithering - perhaps I'm passing that wrong?

https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-scaler.html tells you the sws_dither is the dither algorithm whereas https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-filters.html#paletteuse tells you to turn the dither off.
The answer to your question is to set
paletteuse=dither=none

BTW, http://blog.pkh.me/p/21-high-quality-gif-with-ffmpeg.html gives you the result of the paletteuse settings.


my client is unhappy with the video editing of the evening dancing as we havent used the actual audio but used songs that were playing that evening My client is unhappy with the outcome of evening dance footage since we didn't use a recording of the actual music being played that evening. Instead we used clean music, the original CD recording of the particular songs.

There is no contract signed, but client wants the actual audio recorded by the camera that evening, since it reflects the atmosphere of the evening more. The audio is mostly blown out though.

What would you do, offer a partial refund?

I would suggest trying to combine the two audio feeds.  If you layer the room audio with the clean audio, it will probably help make things more usable.  Otherwise I would give the customer what they asked for.  Ultimately, I don't think it is your failing to have had blown out room audio when there would be no good reason to use the room audio.

As an aside, you should also consider the legal ramifications of using either the room audio or clean audio.  Unless you have rights to the songs being played, you are most likely violating copyright and if they go posting it online, there is a reasonable enough chance to find yourself sitting on the wrong end of a lawsuit, again depending on jurisdiction and how much attention the video gets.


How to make an iPad like commercial video? We're looking to make an iPad like commercial video for one of our apps.

My Question is, what technologies are involved in making this kind of a video? Is it flash/after effects? or something else all together.

Also, if there is a tutorial which can help me build something like this video, it'd be helpful. cheers.

A lot of commercials involving electronic devices, like Apple advertisements, usually have simulated screens. This is usually done in After Effects or 3D software like 3ds Max or Cinema 4D.

You can do this animation and screen replacement yourself if you have the software and knowledge required. If you are an After Effects or 3D beginner, there are tutorials that can help you and ready-made project files you can download and add your app's footage to.

Example Commercial:

             -
Download Commercial Template: http://videohive.net/item/tablet-commercial/166585

Hope this helps! Let me know if you have any questions.


Extract streams from WebM I hope my question fits the theme of this SE.

Is there any software that can extract streams from WebM videos? I don't want to convert (re-compress), I want the streams intact. Thanks.

Quote: "Since WebM is a Matroska subset, mkvtoolnix should let you demux the files. It's open source, cross platform, and the author provides binaries for Windows."

Source: https://superuser.com/questions/412890/lossless-extraction-of-streams-from-webm


Choosing a Video Camera I am videoing myself giving instructions against a 10' x 10' green screen. I am about to purchase lights and now I need to select a video camera that will give me the best videos which will be put on a web site.
I have a $200 camcorder. Do I need to get a DSLR in order to get quality videos?
Thanks,
JB

Getting good, bright lights that can evenly illuminate a green screen is half the battle.  The other half is using a camera that will give you a clean key by not blending together too many pixels in its macroblocks.  Many low-end camcorders use 4:2:0 chroma sampling, which means the border between your key and your subject is going to be at least two pixels wide, and difficult to properly clean up.  Higher-end camcorders user 4:2:2 chroma sampling, and the best use either 4:4:4 or RAW encoding.

You can see for yourself how these different chroma sampling systems affect the edges you are trying to key.  If you are doing your own post-production for fun, and you have the time to futz with fuzzy edges, you can certainly spend time in place of money and get results that make you happy.  But if you are trying to do a live broadcast and you need keys that "just work", then 4:2:2 is probably the minimum color spec that you will want to work with.


Premiere encode in h264 using "ultrafast" preset Often I use Premiere to transcode or export media where the final size isn't the main problem.

I'm used to the ultrafast preset from ffmpeg, what I wonder is.. it is possible to pick the same options that I generally use: QuickTime as container and H.264 but set also the ultrafast option ?

My pc is very slow and this would be a lifesaver for encoding times.

Not out-of-the-box as far as I'm aware. Those presets are specific to the x26* encoders. Premiere bundles Mainconcept's H.264 encoder. You can try third party plugins which allow one to use x264 from within Premiere:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/x264vfw/

http://www.x264pro.com/


Video Production outdoor in driveway? Filming me working on my car? I've been planning on shooting a video in my driveway of me working on my car; How do I get the best lighting when I'm going to be filming all day?
I'm going to be welding, on the side of my car, replacing rust, and want to document for youtube. I've done so in the past, but the sun changing directions sucks.
I've thought about buying one of these ez-up tents, to get rid of sun glare, and get a soft box lighting kit to add my own light back in. But what are your thoughts on this? Am I on the right track?
I would close all sides, and drape one side over the portion of the vehicle that I am working on.

If the tent you get is white, like the one in the picture, you can point a light up into it, and then the tent becomes a giant soft box. The light loses a lot of energy doing this, because the tent material isn’t designed  to reflect 100% of the light striking it, but the same thing happens to sunlight going in the other direction, and any sunlight coming through the material will diffuse and contribute to the total amount of light. A setup like this runs the risk of being too soft, pushing into flat territory, so you’d want to add a second light to use as your key, and use tent as fill.
If you don’t want to have to buy a second light, you could try rolling up one of the sides of the tent, and using ambient daylight (not direct sunlight) to add contrast to the image.  The amount of contrast will vary through the day, however, and will require you to roll up/down the sides of the tent, assuming the tent sits in direct sunlight all day.
For close-up shots of work being done to the car,  an LED panel would be easier to position, and get in the way less than a large soft box, plus it would double as a work light.  The closer a panel light is to its subject, the softer the light appears, which is why they’re good for closeups.


Can I digitalize a video with a RCA-Jack adapter? I have a stereo AUX to Jack adapter that can be plugged to an old cassette-based video recorder

Would I be able to digitize my video with this AUX to Jack adapter?

I would run the casette on the video camera and use ffmpeg to get the Jack input.

The cable in the picture is an analogue cable, so it's getting an analogue signal from your camera. It's just a cable, so the signal at one end is exactly(ish) the same as the other. To digitise it you'll need a device to convert the analogue signal into digital code. There is a big range of these devices, from cheap USB dongles on ebay like this to broadcast standard boxes like this. The quality of hardware and software will vary, I'd hazard a guess that you'll mostly get what you pay for.

When looking for a converter you have to make sure that it is converting from analogue to digital. No cable alone can do this, it needs some sort of processing. Basically if you find something that has analogue sockets on one end (like the red white and yellow plugs on your cable, you call them AUX, but they're more commonly called RCA connectors. Professional equipment may have BNC connectors instead) and a digital plug on the other (usb, firewire, thunderbolt, etc. – but probably not HDMI because you generally can't record HDMI without specialised equipment) that you can plug into a computer then you're good to go.


Replicated circles are blurry in Motion I'm animating a circle in Motion. I'm using the Sequence Replicator and the Scale setting to make the circles become larger towards the end.
When I do that however, the circles get blurry, much like if I would use a pixel graphic rather than a circle from Motion. Does anyone know how I can prevent that from happening?
I would have assumed the circles stay crisp and sharp no matter what scale they're applied to. (Preserve scale is ticked on)

This effect occurs if the cell is screened as bitmap. It should be able to avoid it if you activate 3D Rasterization. Click the "3D" checkbox in the Replicator Controls.


What is the easiest, no-frills way to produce a simple video on Windows 8? My laptop has a camera. Since it can obviously take video of me (a la Skyping), it should be easy to create a video of myself (I am going to create a short video for a Kickstarter project).

My laptop runs Windows 7 and 8.

All I'm going to do is stand or sit in front of it and talk for a couple of minutes. What is the easiest way to accomplish that using apps that come with Windows or something free that I can download?

If you're looking for super simple and free. The Windows 8 Camera App will allow you to record video files which it then saves to the Pictures->Camera Roll folder.  It's no frills but will do the trick in a pinch.

When you open the Camera App there are two buttons one that looks like a video camera and one a still camera.  You click the video camera button and it starts recording immediately. When you're finished you click the button again and the video is saved to the location mentioned above.


Making a picture slide-show in Premiere Pro I know using Premiere for slide shows is kind of overkill, but a lot of times I am working on a project with both videos and pictures, and it is much more convenient to use one program for everything.

Does anyone have any advice for any ways to automate any part of the slide show production (like the features in Windows Movie Maker or similar) within Premiere?

For a slide show in Premiere the only recomendation that I have is that you set in Preferences > General > 'Still image default duration' to the amount of time that you want a image to appear, so you don't need to adjust after you drop them on time line.

Set the 'Video Transition Default Duration' to an appropriate time is also helpful.

And to finish, don't forget that Control + d (or Command + d on OSX) can be used to apply the default transition to the selected clip or image.


Are "mp2v" and "mpgv" valid MPEG-2 codec tags in an MOV? This question is related to What is the correct MPEG-2 FourCC? and to an open discussion currently on the ffmpeg-user mailing list:

  I am wondering if I should file a bug report about the MOV output. Open
  questions in that vein, though, are:

  ...

  Is it a bug that mpg2 and mpgv cause MOV output to fail or is that
  correct behavior?

There seem to be numerous possible tags in use for MPEG-2 video, in particular m2v1, mp2v, mpg2, and mpgv.

Now, ffmpeg fails with e.g. "Tag mpgv/0x7667706d incompatible with
output codec id '2' (m2v1)" when the output is MOV and either mpg2 or mpgv is specified:

ffmpeg ... -vcodec mpeg2video -f mov ...             # succeeds (m1v1)
ffmpeg ... -vcodec mpeg2video -vtag mp2v -f mov ...  # succeeds
ffmpeg ... -vcodec mpeg2video -vtag mpg2 -f mov ...  # fails
ffmpeg ... -vcodec mpeg2video -vtag mpgv -f mov ...  # fails

All of those succeed for AVI. Ffmpeg's default tag for MPEG-2 in AVIs is mpg2.

Part of a bug report that I am writing for ffmpeg's MOV output handling may include the mpg2 and mpgv failure behavior (with the desired behavior being success), but before I do that I need to be certain that this behavior is a bug rather than appropriate behavior.

So my question boils down to this: Are mpg2 and mpgv valid, allowable alternative tags for MPEG-2 video in an MOV file, and are there others? I am looking for official Apple sources and MOV specifications rather than anecdotal evidence or lists of generally observed FourCC's / codec IDs.

I know that, at least according to Wikipedia, MPEG-2 video in an MOV is an acceptable combination, I'm just not sure what the acceptable set of codec tags are in MOVs. This question is not about the "correct" MPEG-2 ID in general cases, it is about the allowable variants specifically in MOVs.

MPEG-2 doesn't seem to be an officially sanctioned codec for the Quicktime container. The official specification has a section related to MPEG-1 in MOV but not MPEG-2. The US Library of Congress also does not have an entry for the subtype MPEG-2 in MOV, like it does for MPEG-1 (just called QTV_MPEG).

So, there's no official word on "allowable alternative tags". One can only examine MPEG-2 MOVs and see whether apps, specifically, Apple apps, play them or not and prepare a survey report. Since each app has its own fiat on whether it plays a file with a certain codec ID or not, that report whould be categorized by app i.e. VLC, Quicktime player. FCP..etc.

As an example, VLC recognizes the following tags for generic MPEG-2 i.e. not IMX or XDCAM:

    A("mpeg"),
    A("mp2v"),
    A("MPEG"),
    A("mpg2"),
    A("MPG2"),
    A("H262"),


How can I put a camera with a standard tripod point on my head? I've got a video camera with a standard screw-in tripod point. I would like to put that camera on my head to make a video while cycling.

Are there any helmet mounts or similar I can purchase designed to work with a standard tripod mount?

(GoPro have lots, but I understand those use a different mount than the standard tripod point. If thats right, those won't be suitable.)

Not sure what size your cameras is, but a quick search at B&H turned up this:

Midland XTA-104 Vented Helmet Camera Mount


Convert variable framerate ~60 FPS to constant 60 FPS losslessly I have gameplay footage recorded with ShadowPlay (“GeForce Experience”) at 60 FPS, which as I understand results in variable frame rate, because the game drops frames sometimes. However, trying to use this video in Adobe Premiere results in the game audio severely falling behind the visuals, because Premiere treats it as if every frame was the same length.

I have tried HandBrake with these settings:

Quality: constant, RF 0 (lossless)
FPS: 60, constant
Detelecine: Off
Decomb: Off
Denoise: Off
Deblock: Off

But the output video is not only much smaller than the source video, but it's massively worse in terms of visual quality. Why isn't it lossless when I've set it to what it claims is lossless?

Input video info: http://pastebin.com/7Tss4brj
Output video info: http://pastebin.com/DKFEzDKk
(from Mediainfo)

How can I convert a variable framerate video to a constant framerate video losslessly?

To start with: your version of Handbrake is old. Version 1.0.3 came out very recently, it's got some improvements over that older version.

Second, CQ0 is not actually "lossless." It's aiming for "lossless" quality, but it's going to bump up against the data rate limitations of the H.264 Level, so while it might need, say, 100MbPS at a given point to achieve "lossless" compression, Level 4.0 might be capping it at 20MbPS or something like that. Note in the Encoding Settings readout on your export file it lists "vbv_maxrate=20000," that's where your bitrate is capped. So to get as close to lossless as possible you'd need something like Level 5.2.

So ratcheting up your H.264 level will improve quality, but Premiere may end up chugging very hard on it. H.264 is really bad for editing. It's very computationally complex, largely because it doesn't store each frame separately (called Intraframe compression) but it takes batches of frames (called a Group of Pictures, or GOP) and compresses them together, in such a way that any one frame within a GOP will depend on the surrounding frames in order to reproduce a complete image. This is called Interframe compression, and the number of frames in a GOP depends on the parameters set at encode time, and may even be variable (not typical), but you can see what those parameters in MediaInfo by noting the line that says "Format settings, GOP" ("N=30" means 30 frames per GOP), or looking at the encoding settings where it notes "keyint" (Keyframe Interval). So needing to decode all 30 frames to show you any one frame is very CPU and RAM intensive.

If you've got the storage I'd recommend considering using DNxHD, which is a "mezzanine" (editing friendly) codec that preserves quality, considered "virtually lossless," but has low CPU/RAM impact. The catch is very high bitrates. So we're talking ~130-200GB/hr at 1080p59.94. The other catch is that DNxHD has very limited supported resolutions and frame rates. There's also CineForm which is just as high a quality, but far more flexible, and both CineForm and DNxHD are natively supported by Premiere (CineForm in 2015 and later) but last I checked CineForm support in other tools, like ffmpeg, is lacking.

So are more editing-friendly solution would be to use ffmpeg to make DNxHD with a command line the following:

ffmpeg -i (input file).mp4 -c:v dnxhd -b:v 290M -c:a pcm_s16le -r 60 (output).mxf

That would make DNxHD with uncompressed audio in an MXF Op1a file. You could also whack .mov on the end there and make a Quicktime file instead just as easily. Note that -r sets the output frame rate. You could try using H.264 in ffmpeg by changing the video codec (-c:v), but you'll run into the same limitations as you would working with Handbrake, so I don't know if it's really worth it to go into that here.


Screen refresh rate above 100 Hz noticeable? Is a refresh rate higher than 100 Hz still noticeable for the human eye?

Tv manufacturers are still taking these refresh rates to new heights, but is there really a noticeable difference between a refresh rate of 100 Hz and 200 Hz, Let alone 400 Hz?

Are there any applications when a refresh rate should be as high as possible?

No, there is no practical limit that we know of yet to what would be best, there is however a practical limit to what we can capture and display.

In tests with airforce pilots, subjects were able to identify a plane from being shown a frame for only 1/220th of a second.1  They eye is able to pull information out of extremely short periods of time, but unfortunately our eyes are also very good at concealing lack of information (which is actually why video works in the first place), so it is extremely hard (possibly impossible) to determine the actual point at which we wouldn't benefit from more information.

Either way, it is almost certainly upward of the current 1/600 mark and often theorized to be beyond the 1/1000 mark.  The problem comes not from how much information we present, but that we don't have enough information to present.

Generally videos are normally not played back faster than 48 frames per second at the fastest and video games normally don't go beyond actually displaying 120 or so.  This is due to a lack of being able to store sufficient data and stream it in an efficient enough manner to display in an affordable manner.

Instead, to make things appear more smoothly, the TV interpolates additional frames to fill the gaps.  It looks at where one frame is and where the next frame will be and generates frames in-between to smooth it out.  The problem is, not all motion is perfectly smooth and interpolation isn't a perfect process.  The result is that unnatural artifacts appear in the video which we can detect and end up being unsettling and eventually start causing more harm to the persistence of vision than the extra frames help.

This is why, when you move in to higher refresh rates it is sometimes better to use a lower setting without the interpolation.  Video is about simulating reality for your eyes.  In reality, there is no refresh rate, any time your eyes chose to process, they get whatever is there at the time.  Thus, higher and higher frame rates will more closely emulate reality as long as the information is actually based around reality rather than something invented by electronics on the fly.

Eventually, we may exceed the "refresh rate" of the eye, but as of yet, we don't definitively know what that is and are pretty certain we haven't hit it yet.


Video Exporting takes too long in Adobe Media Encoder I'm using After Effects to create videos and export it via Adobe Media Encoder, but even a 2 min video takes a very long time to export.

I do use Motion Bro plugin, to get some effects, but that's just a transition effect to change from one screen to another.

How can I make it quicker?

Are you exporting to h.264? Try rendering to a master file in a intermediate codec like ProRes, Cineform or DNxHR. Rendering to h.264 involves referencing multiple frames to create the intermediate frames. When those frames have to be rendered first it adds an extra drain on resources, particularly memory.
Is the computer hitting the limits of available memory? This will exponentially slow things down. Check on the available RAM at render time, and if it's getting full you need to take steps to reduce your memory usage. One way is to pre-render sub-comps, another is to make sure images you use are appropriately sized for the output. Time-based effects like echo are big RAM hogs, you may have to pre-render layers with these applied.
Learn how to use the command line renderer aerender.exe (just plain aerender if you're still on a mac). This is between 10% and 4000% (no lie) faster in my experience than Media Encoder, particularly if you have enough memory to spin up multiple instances
since you're using the command line now, why not get MOAR COMPUTAHS on the job? Aerender can be used over the network, so if you have other machines that you can borrow you can create a render farm. You can also use the GUI network renderer if you're not ready to become a fully fledged command line ninja, but I will be silently judging you.
all of these steps assume that the workstation you have is a constant. The single best thing you can do is to get a better computer. Or several.


Command-line tool to split video at timepoints? I have an hour-long video that I want to split into individual clips at arbitrary timepoints. I could do this by hand in iMovie, or even borrow a machine with Final Cut, but there are upwards of thirty separate clips, so doing it manually strikes me as time-consuming and error-prone.

(It's a sequence of recordings for a language textbook, but it's all one file, and it's unwieldy not to be able to separately view, repeat, etc. the chapter-by-chapter clips. Currently it's an H.264 MPEG-4 but I'm not adverse to converting it.)

I know all the timepoints, and I'd like to feed a list of them to something, or build a script around the list, to produce the split clips without further human intervention. Linux would be okay but Mac OS would be ideal; Windows isn't really an option.

Suggestions?

ffmpeg is the obvious choice.

ffmpeg -i x.mov -ss 00:05:00 -t 00:01:00 y.mov

will split out a segment of the movie 1 minute long from minute 5.

I've not had much luck with lip-sync when doing this. I think there a problems with both decoding and re-encoding the GOP structure and the equivalent AAC or MPEG1 audio structures; but the underlying issue must be that the audio and video frame rates are not linked, e.g. 48 kHz for the audio and 29.97 fps.


Reduce render file size in After Effects I am making a simple travel map, like the one in the Indiana Jones movies. I followed this tutorial:

               (German)

When I want to save it as a video (render it), the video file is 5GB huge. However the length of the movie is only about 1min. I tried to reduce the resolution to a quarter, then the file is still 700MB large, but with very bad quality.

Should I use a different program to do this task?

You need to change the encoding settings. By default, AE uses the AVI animation codec, which is very good at retaining quality but creates incredibly large files. Using an intermediary codec like Apple Prores, Avid DNxHR, or GrassValley HQx would give you visually equivalent quality with a significantly smaller file size.

If that file size isn't small enough for you, then you may want to go to a compressed codec like h.264. Choosing h.264 with a bitrate of around 20-30Mbps would give you pretty good quality. The disadvantage of going to h.264 is that you'll lose a lot of visual information, making any additional editing such as color grading more difficult. You'll also be using a multi-frame encoding which makes scrubbing through an editing timeline very difficult.


Video with lower bitrate resulting from joining two video files I had a 595mb .MP4 video (data rate: 510 kbps, Total bitrate 638 kbps). And I joined it with another .MP4 youtube video with a lower quality(only the end part).. The resulting video file has a data rate of 389kbps and Total bitrate of 517 kbps.. The size is also significantly smaller; 494mb.. I used a program called Video Combiner.. And side by side I can see the original one is better quality looking.. so what am i doing wrong? any suggestions? I just wanna join 2 video files without loss of total quality.

Your program probably re-encoded the resulting video file from scratch and used whatever setting it considered okay.

If you want to have more control about the process and/or do not want it to re-encode the video at all (if both are of the same format), then I strongly suggest looking into ffmpeg for this.

For reference, https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Concatenate - the concat demuxer is what you want.

As the most simple example, copy both your video files (let's call them videoA.mp4 and videoB.mp4) into the same folder. Create a videos.txt file with just this content:

file videoA.mp4
file videoB.mp4

Now run ffmpeg with this command:

ffmpeg -f concat -i videos.txt -c copy videoOut.mp4

If all goes well this gives you a new file with both videos in one file, with the original encoding intact.


Frame transition in sony vegas Can someone help, by telling me can this transition, where frame is pushed up multiple repeatings, be made in Sony Vegas, and how?

Transition Here

I believe that the effect used for both the zoom in the beginning and the multiple vertical frames later on is the effect 'BlurMoCurves'. It's part of Sapphire OFX plugins and can be installed (and used) in Sony Vegas Pro. It's not a transition but thanks to zooming it can look like one.

The very last frames, when the clip goes down vertically, is probably one of Roll transitions which are a part of NewBlueFX plugins, also compatible with Sony Vegas. Here you can see the examples (the one I'd say was used is the second one in the Roll video). Hope this helps!


Is it good practice to have a film's supporters contact film festival program directors? I admit, I'm not sure this Q&A site is right for this question, as my question does not deal with technical aspects of film production... But the site description says, "Q&A for engineers, producers, editors, and enthusiasts spanning the fields of audio, video, and media creation," so I hope this is the right spot.

I recently helped a friend produce a short zombie comedy. Throughout the making of the film we have grown a small local cult following.

Now, we are ready to submit the film to film festivals. Is it good practice to ask our supporters to contact the program director of each film festival showing their support for the inclusion of our film into their festival?

My background in website design, so my thought was to make a simple form letter, where each supporter would simply enter their name and email address to have the email sent to the program director.

My worries, I don't want to show my lack of knowledge in the film festival arena, hurt the chance of the film's inclusion or be disrespectful to the the festival.

Thank you.

Informally, I would think this would be a bad idea - you really don't want to annoy the directors by spamming them with emails.

I speak to a lot of festival directors on behalf of my band (music, not video, but I feel the principle holds true anyway) and what they want to see is evidence of your following, examples of your work, and positive evidence that you will bring in a crowd.

So of high value are:

Social networking - creating 'the buzz' - on Twitter, Facebook etc - not just from you, but form supporters
Targeting high profile supporters or sponsors to provide advertising, merchandise etc
Providing a simple bio and materials for the festival to review and then use

And above all making it easy for them to put on your material and attract a crowd - don't annoy them, just show them why it makes sense.


Very Good Free Lossless/Lossy Video Encoding For Editing on Windows 7 (regarding fraps recordings) I am looking for a very good method to encode video recorded with fraps in 1080p into an intermediate format which I can edit in Avid Studio. Most video files load up into Avid, as far as I know, but Fraps recordings isn't one of them (on my computer at least). So I'm here to ask if anyone here knows of a guide, or is willing to write one as an answer on how to do that.

Assume that I have no previous codecs installed apart from the included ones with windows 7 home premium.

My problem, if anyone is interested, is that when I load fraps videos into avid, I get audio, but no video. I don't know much about video editing or encoding, only what I have learned in the past 2 weeks. Please feel free to link me to websites with required theory(I will read it), but I'm really just looking for a tutorial right now.

You want to use VirtualDub to convert your FRAPS files. Just drag the clip into the window, select video from the top menu -> compression. Change the codec to Avid AVI Codec 2.0d2 and then configure it to your desired resolution. BAM! The outputted files should work.

You can also try MediaCoder and XVid


Best strategy to keep aspect ratio consistent for all videos having any resolution I am using the following ffmpeg command to create multiple resolutions for the same video content.

ffmpeg -i ${f} -c:v libx264 -keyint_min 150 \
-g 150 -profile:v main -f h264 -dash 1 \
-an -vf scale=640:360 -b:v 750k ${streamsdirectory}/${filename}_640x360_750k.mp4 \
-an -vf scale=1280:720 -b:v 2000k ${streamsdirectory}/${filename}_1280x720_2000k.mp4 \
-an -vf scale=1920:1080 -b:v 4000k ${streamsdirectory}/${filename}_1920x1080_4000k.mp4

What is the best strategy to keep respect for the aspect ratio for any video content ?

If you want the output resolution to be 1280x720 and the video keeps its original ratio aspect as well:

ffmpeg  -v error -stats -i input -vf
"scale=1280:720:force_original_aspect_ratio=1,pad=1280:720:(ow-iw)/2:(oh-ih)/2"
output


Black fontcolor being transparent in drawtext in ffmpeg I am using the command below to drawtext with rotation. This works but when set fontcolor=black It becomes transparent color.
I am not understanding the reason.
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -filter_complex "color=black:100x100[c];[c][0]scale2ref[ct][mv];[ct]setsar=1,drawtext=fontfile='font.ttf':text='Test Text':fontsize=36:line_spacing=3:box=1:boxcolor=red@1:fontcolor=black,split[text][alpha];[text][alpha]alphamerge,rotate=45:ow=rotw(45):oh=roth(45):c=black@0[txta];[mv][txta]overlay=x='min(0,-H*sin(45))+100':y='min(0,W*sin(45))+50':shortest=1" output_video.mp4

The method in my old answer was a workaround due to a limitation in drawtext filter at the time of writing. It's easier now.
You're getting transparent text because the textcolor is used to set both the color as well as its opacity intensity, and since black represents 0, the text disappears.
Anyway, it's simpler after ffmpeg 3.1
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -filter_complex "color=black@0:100x100,format=yuva420p[c];[c][0]scale2ref[ct][mv];[ct]setsar=1,drawtext=fontfile='font.ttf':text='Test Text':fontsize=36:line_spacing=3:box=1:boxcolor=red@1:fontcolor=black,rotate=45:ow=rotw(45):oh=roth(45):c=black@0[txta];[mv][txta]overlay=x='min(0,-H*sin(45))+100':y='min(0,W*sin(45))+50':shortest=1" output_video.mp4


Lighting/Lens Tips for DSLR Noisy Video Canon EOS SL1/100D using the kit lens 18-55 f/3.5 - 5.6

I am trying to film indoor videos using the DSLR as it's image quality for stills is so much better than anything else I own (iPhone, really...).

I am only using overhead lights right now, and I only have access to that lens.  I also have a larger 75-200 (ish) but the f-stops do not go down as low, which really is pointless indoors.

I would like to know how I can best achieve a lower-light video indoors, similar to videos made with DSLRs online, like this one.

I know the camera has something to do with it, but I feel a run-of-the-mill current DSLR body can get me far.  I feel like the lens does really well for stills, but just isn't big enough for low-light videos.  I also know a 3-spot lighting technique can help me as well, but I'm unsure where I can start first to get the best results.

No matter what I do I realize that the ISO needs to come down.  Should a lower f-stop or better lighting get me further?  I would like to have the background blurry more than what I'm finding the 3.5 can do, which makes me think I need a different lens...  but that could also just be my inabilities with photography.

Feel free to take a look at a recent video I just shot with the setup described.  No worries, it's terrible.

An APC-C sensor size has a diagonal that's 1.6x smaller than FF35 (such as EOS 5d), which means that for a given field of view it behaves as if there's about 1.5 stops more depth of field.  Or, seen another way, if you are shooting indoors, you might use a 35mm lens on a FF35 camera and a 22mm lens on an APS-C camera, in which case the 22mm lens has about the same depth of field as if you stopped down the 35mm lens an additional 1.5 stops.  So your 18mm f3.5 gives you the depth of field similar to a 28mm shooting at f5.6 (which is pretty deep) and a 55mm shooting at 5.6 has a similar depth of field as an 85mm shooting at f9 (which is still pretty deep).  If you rack focus between the back of the room and an object 8" in front of the camera, you will see the rack focus effect, but if you rack focus between 6' and 8', the effect will be minimal.

Cameras such as the SONY A7 are low-light wizards, but nothing else does low-light like that.  And shooting with ambient lighting is a recipe for boring, flat-looking video footage that looks amateur.  Do study and learn 3-point lighting.  First and foremost it will bring your subjects to life.  Second, even the most basic cameras and lenses can capture good video of a well-lit scene.


Scrolling rainbow when projector screen is in frame We're doing rear-screen projection.  It looks great, but in tests with the canon t2i there's a scrolling rainbow in the video that changing shutter speed or frame rate won't get rid of.  Any advice?

You are seeing the scan line of the projector.  You need a camera with a screen sync feature in order to deal with the rolling shutter issue and depending on the technique used by the projector, it may not even be possible.

What you are actually seeing is what the projector actually does, it's just that it happens too fast for your eye to perceive it normally.  A video camera is however fast enough to catch it.

This is regularly a problem even for professional gear and it is not at all uncommon for video screens to be shot with the device off and the video on the screen composited in after the fact.


What to make: a film, short film, series, web series? I'm an independent indie film-maker with a strong ambition to advance onward, and I have no contracts whatsoever.

Is it better for me to create a feature film, short film, series, or a web series?

(This isn't exactly a question about opinions or one's thoughts.)

Which is more likely to be more successful, beneficiary, have a fan-base, and has a bigger revenue model, or which one is more valuable?

The thing I have in mind is a long story. Thus, I would perhaps want to eliminate the option of short film from my list.

How difficult is convincing a channel to broadcast a series with directors they do not know or have never heard of, or from another non-English speaking country.

Thanks.

One advantage to a web series is the absence of a gatekeeper. That is, you can upload (pretty much) anything you want to YouTube. You don't need to convince the website owner to include your work; you don't need to convince a TV station or movie studio to invest. In addition, sites like YouTube and Vimeo have built-in audiences.

To get a significant number of views, you would still need to do a lot of online promotion of your work by contacting bloggers, contacting "aggregation" sites that feature work like yours, posting on Twitter / Facebook / Reddit, and so forth.


Non-Linear Video Editor for Free or Cheap That Does These Things Background
I bought a couple of Handycams 6 months ago, and have since then been making videos and editing them and publishing them:

Sathyaish Chakravarthy

Over the period, I have downloaded and toyed with plenty of video editors that are available free of charge. However, I cannot find a single editor that fulfills all my requirements. As a result, I am not able to make the quality of videos I wish to. Also, it takes up a lot of my time.

I am a sole proprietor of a start-up and time is the only asset I have, so being short of time and money, I cannot afford to spend too much of either of them on non-core activities, video editing being one (it's a marketing activity for me, my core activities being learning/studying for the corporate training programs I offer, preparing for them, conducting them, making sales calls, calling into people, etc.)

Until now, I have tried the following software:
1) Jahshaka
2) Windows Movie Maker
3) Avidemux
4) Free Video Cutter
5) Free Video Dub
6) AVI Edit
7) Blaze Media Pro
8) AVI Trimmer
9) t@b ZS4 Video Editor
10) Video Spin
11) Virtual Dub
12) Wax

My Requirements
I require a non-linear video editing software that is either available for free or at a nominal charge (under $100) and allows me to do the following:

a) Use chroma key to change the background. Wax does it but I lose the audio in the output video file. I see it is a problem that many people have reported.

b) Edit the audio in the video file independent of the visual. For example, I may want to mute the audio for a couple of seconds, or replace the audio during a certain 4-second clip with a different audio file (mp3/wav/raw PCM in the audio editor).

c) Mix, append, insert at any point, another video from a different video file into the source video file.

d) Mix, append, insert at any point, only the visual from another video file into the source video file while having the audio of the source video file play for the duration.

e) Insert audio effects -- echo, reverb, generated sounds like bullet shots, etc. into the video.

f) Chop a frame of the video and split it into two vertical copies, one of which is transposed horizontally to create a lateral mirroring effect, and be able to edit each of the copies independently.

To explain point (f), please consider this.

I have a video of me sitting on a chair facing slightly towards my left. I want to take the frames from this video and flip them horizontally so that I now face towards my right instead. Then, I might want to slice each original frame into two vertical images -- the left one being the original image in the frame, and the right one being the laterally inverted/horizontally flipped image. Also, I want that one of the images, say, the laterally inverted image, be black & white instead of color.

Question
Is there a non-linear video editing tool that is available either for free or for less than $100 to do all of these things?

Update: I forgot to mention that I am a Windows user.

Both kdenlive and cinelerra should do all you need. If you can't make them so, try the consumer version of Sony Vegas, it's also still in your price range.


Displaying speedometer in Final Cut Pro I often see a speedometer in people's videos. I have time indexed speed data, is there any way to get it into the video (as text even) in Final Cut Pro?

Data is in TCX (or GPX) but I could easily write a script to convert that to another format.

You can use the free Dashware app, which is normally used to overlay telemetry data directly on footage.
As per the FAQ,

What’s the best way to use DashWare with another video editor, so I can do sophisticated edits?
How to make blue/green screen, gauge-only videos with DashWare:

Add your video and data files to the DashWare project like usual: synchronize, set up your gauges how you like, etc
Once you are ready to export, create a new “Green Screen” gauge. In this new, empty gauge add a Filled Rectangle component with the
dimensions of your video (e.g. 1920 by 1080). I use a bright, neon
green color for the fill. You want to pick a color that you are not
using in any of your other gauges.
Put this new gauge behind all the other gauges in your project and it will cover up your source video.
Export and now you will have a green screen video with only gauges.
In your favorite video editor use a chroma key filter to turn the green screen parts of the video transparent and presto you have a
transparent video with your gauges.


What is wrong with my "new" camera? My playback looks bad My old Canon mv690 camera recorder got broken. It uses MiniDV casettes. To play many old recordings I bought a used Canon GL2 Mini DV 3ccd camera to play my old casettes, but the image is not displaying correctly. Does anyone know what the problem can be?

This is what my videos looks like on the GL2 Camera:

I would try cleaning the playheads (there are special tapes you can put in for cleaning) and/or checking the playback speed.  Those are the two most common causes of that issue on my GL2.