How can you correct EBU R128 loudness in Premiere? I have to follow this directives on a Sony XDCAM 4222 50Mbit 25fps PAL timeline with 8 x 24bit 48kHz audio channels .

  Alignment Level (AL) shall be –18dBFS with respect to maximum audio coding level (PPM4 on a BBC PPM – IEC type IIa). The Permitted Maximum
  Level (PML - as defined in ITU-R BS.645-2) must comply ITU-R BR.1384.1
  and ITU-R BS.1726. Peaks should not exceed a level -10dB below the
  digital full-scale level (0 dBFS) when monitored by a “quasi-peak
  programme meter” as specified in IEC 60268-10.

  Loudness control on all audio formats The method to measure the loudness of an audio program is settled by the recommendations,
  ITU-1770, ITU 1771 and ITU-Document 6/175-E.

  Program Loudness Level represents the ordinary level of the program resulting from the measurement of the entire contents analyzed whole
  (from start to the end, and all audio channels making up the
  soundtrack).  The Program Loudness must conform to R128-EBU

  “Short-term” LKFS values shall not be higher than –21 LKFS for the whole program.  “Long-term” Loudness must be –24 LKFS ± 0,5. In both
  cases the gate must be active at a threshold at -8 relative to the
  target “Long Term” value (- 24 – 8 = -32 LKFS). Short-term and
  long-term LKFS shall be measured for each audio program accompanying
  the picture (ie: Dubbed stereo, original language stereo, M&E stereo
  tracks, etc.).

It is possible create and Adjustment Layer with Premiere CS6 or CC and easily make sure to fix the audio of all 8 channels to respect the limits?

Wich effect I have to use ? With wich settings ? It must be done for each audio tracks or I can use an Adjustment Layer or an Effect directly to the Master output ?

In general loudness correction is a two step process. (There's a little more to it for full EBU R128 compliance, but I work exclusively in the US and this all that is required for A/85 / CALM Act compliance.)

Measure the long term/infinite loudness of the asset.
Shift the level of the asset by the difference between the measured loudness and the target.

Premiere does not have a built in method for automatically correcting loudness. But you do have a few options:

You can use the built in Loudness Radar plugin to measure the long term/infinite loudness of the asset and then manually shift the level by the difference from the measured loudness and the target loudness.
You can buy a third party plugin to do the correction.
You can use FFmpeg as I paraphrased the last time you asked this question.
You can use Adobe Media Encoder.


Upload edited video to YouTube Please help.  I am sure I am not the only neophyte who has run into this.  I hope someone can.

I want to:

Download the video recording of a Facebook livestream.
Make minor edits in Adobe Premiere Pro (cut footage, add slides and/or music, and transitions)
Upload the final product to YouTube.

I need to do this twice a day, with a 30-minute livestream session each time.

The MP4 that I download from Facebook is small (around 70 MB) and has these properties:

Type: MPEG Movie File Size: 69.92 MB
Image Size: 640 x 360
Frame Rate: 30.00
Source Audio Format:
48000 Hz -
Compressed -
Stereo Project Audio Format: 48000 Hz -
32 bit floating point -
Stereo Total
Duration: 00;29;31;19
Pixel Aspect Ratio: 1.0
Alpha: None
Video Codec Type: MP4/MOV H.264 4:2:0
Variable Frame Rate Detected –

If I just turn around and upload this file to YouTube unchanged, it uploads and processes straightforwardly and quickly.  (My upload speed is 11-12 Mbps)

If I make any edits, though (today I took out 13 seconds of coughing from the middle):

The output file size balloons (to almost 1.88 MB) using the YouTube SD Pre-set.
I can reduced the file size to 342 MB by running it through VLC Convert/Save, using the VLC YouTube SD preset.

It has now been 6 hours, and YouTube is showing the file only 26% uploaded (though the progress bar surged to 72% at one point).  Not even at the point of "processing" yet.

This happens every time I edit.

I am a total newbie and don't have the luxury to spend time experimenting with settings, most of which I don't understand.  Based on what I gleaned from some How-To videos, I did play with various screen sizes (down to 640x360) and bit rates.  I have also tried different YouTube and Facebook Presets.

Can someone please help?  I want to reach the people in my congregation who use Facebook and those who will only watch YouTube.

I'm not familiar with facebook video, and maybe someone else can help with that. 70MB is insanely small for 30 mins of video. What are the properties of the source video (in Premiere, right click the source video, select Properties). Copy/Paste that info, and add it to your question if you can.

Leave the frame size / frame rate the same as the original - Premiere has a "Match Source" button in the output settings, just ensure it is ticked. Often scaling down the resolution lowers the quality too much, and I find you usually get a better trade off keeping the resolution and lowering the bit rate instead. What is the bitrate in the preset? For video files that need to be transferred, I usually output using H.264 codec, at 6Mbps target rate. That still gives me almost 50MB/minute (with audio), but retains the quality level where I need it. You could likely push that bitrate lower - try lower bitrates, see what your video looks like (if this is a fixed camera / fix background video, likely you can push the bitrate pretty hard without much impact to quality). But you won't get the FB file size with that codec, so that extra info would be handy.

For uploading, do you have Google Drive? You could sign up a free account there, and sync the files, which might make putting the video to YouTube easier than uploading direct: https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/5937118?hl=en


Adobe Premiere Pro CC - Crop a video and export at the exact cropped size I have a video that has 4 up-down-left-right black borders of different sizes.

I want to get rid of these black borders so the exported file has the exact size of the cropped area.

To do this, I used the "crop" effect (I would have preferred a tool that allows me to set the crop dimensions in pixels, but I guess that's not supported). But then I had a problem when exporting the video:

I'd like to be able to keep a hand on the parameters of the exported video, and ensure that the video will have the exact resolution of the cropped area. But I could not accomplish this.

Can someone tell me how to do this?

EDIT:
My source video is 1002 x 720 (so it's in landscape mode)
It contains a 316 x 562 portion I want to extract  (so, portrait mode)
The minimum I want is to be able to obtain a 316 x 562 video containing just the cropped section. The best I could obtain is a 632 x 1124 (or any other proportional scale) video on output.

I found that using Adobe Media Encoder is much easier when just cropping.
Add the video to the queue and open the export settings.
On the source tab you can crop the video and there you can also enter how many pixels to remove at each side.
Remember to set the correct output size in the video tab on the right side.

Here is a screenshot showing how i did it:


Is there any software for data management? Ok, so my workflow is around big files, these are sources from edutorial lectures, they weight a lot, one typical recording size is around 80 Gb.

I need to manage them, store and edit. My machine is 500 Gb SSD, 1 TB HDD and 25 TB network drive.

As I often need to edit many lectures, I copy them to my SSD or HDD for faster editing. Premiere can edit files directly from network drive, however, it has only 10 Mb/s access speed, so editing them is not very pleasant experience.

I have a great headache copying them around bothways. Everyday there are new recordings that need to be uploaded to the network drive, and there new lectures in queue for editing that are need to be copied locally. That would not be a problem, if not for the stupid Windows file copying software. Sometimes I accidentally close this dialog and then forget about what I was copying, sometimes it finds duplicates and messes me around.

So my question is if there any software that you use, that would allow setting directories for copying or moving bothways. Something like Google Drive would be ideal. It check automatically if the folder is uploaded, and if there is something missing, it uploads the rest.

I've taken a look on Robocopy (pre-installed Windows terminal tool), but I don't like with terminal interface that if there would be some action needed from me, I would not know. Also, I don't trust it working behind the curtains and doing something with my files. I would like something with GUI and status window, like Google Drive, again.

It would be nice, if it could:

copy files from previously set queue
pause or lower its speed on command for not interrupting me browsing this network drive
check two directories for duplicates bit-by-bit
scans specific directories (e.g. inserted media card) and copies them to the network storage with specific names and into the directory with today's date.
be failsafe, that means if I turn off my machine, it would restore the queue and continue from the point it was broken
have a nice GUI and a dialogs for viewing status and for resolving conflicts

While it doesn't cover all your criteria, I use a program called Total Commander for most of my file management needs and it works well for working with a very large number of files and huge file sizes.

Among it's features, it is able to do a directory synchronization that determines the differences between to folders, either by filesize/date or by content (though a content comparison across a network share is going to take a very long time).

It doesn't have the queue or resume functionality you want, but it handles duplicates well and is pretty easy to work with overall.

It does include a pause feature on the copies and lets you run multiple copies at the same time in the background.

It does include a variety of powerful file selection tools to let you choose particular sets of files that need to be copied.

It has a good UI and is relatively cheap.  It is available as shareware to try for free and last I knew it was $35 for a lifetime license.  My dad bought a copy when Windows 3.0 was still the current OS and hasn't paid again since.  I got my license in 2002 or so.


How to make video play with correct aspect ratio I have the following issue: I have a video file (h264) that plays with the correct aspect ratio in mplayer. However, if I load it into Intel's Computer Vision Annotation Tool, or if I re-encode the video using openCV, the aspect ratio is no longer correct.

"ffprobe -i" on the original file gives

  1440x1080 [SAR 4:3 DAR 16:9]

whereas for the re-encoded file I get

  1440x1080 [SAR 1:1 DAR 4:3]

I have other video files with

  1920x1080 [SAR 1:1 DAR 16:9]

that do not cause this issue.

Do I just have to modify the SAR in the header or is the problem more complicated? I would like to preserve the codec if possible.

For a H264 stream, use the h264_metadata bitstream filter

ffmpeg -i in.mp4 -c copy -bsf:v "h264_metadata=sample_aspect_ratio=4/3" out.mp4


Converting to Uncompressed Video Files I'm looking for a method to convert compressed video files (like h.264) into uncompressed formats for editing.

What are the best options to look at?

The answer to your question depends on the software you will use for editing.

Uncompressed RAW video is rarely used for editing for performance reasons. If you have actually recorded your media in 10-bit RAW format (some cameras can do that), then it can be subsequently used for processes that require as much colour information as possible (colour grading, for example).

Modern non-linear editors can be capable of working with H.264 (see Adobe Premiere and its Mercury engine), but you waste a lot of processing power that way.

At the time of writing, the most widely used codecs in the broadcast industry are:

Avid DNxHD
Apple ProRes HQ
AVC-intra

So depending on your operating system and software you may want to transcode to one of these codecs and then re-link your edit to the source H.264 files, to ensure that you get the maximum quality.

Additionally, if you don't have a powerful machine for video editing, you can convert your media to a low resolution codec (to make the edit with it), to later re-link the sequence to high-res media. This process is explained here


How do you subtitle a video? I am making a small video (not really a film) that has muffled/hard to understand dialogue. The video goes for about 2 minutes and I only need to subtitle roughly 2 sentences worth - so it's not a lot.

I'm using Final Cut Pro 7 and I know how to insert text. What I need to know is what font is typically used for subtitles and what size should this font be?

Subsequently, if two people are talking simultaneously, what is the best way to alter the subtitle so the viewer is aware which subtitle belongs to which character?

Subtitling is a horrible horrible thing, and there are loads of regulations and standards and other bull which can be found here.

As for the font, it really depends on your opinion - if I'm not mistaken Trebuchet Sans and Deja Vu Sans are as close as you can get to the standard DVD fonts.

But all I just said depend on your artistic point of view - if the subtitles makes part of the movie it shouldn't follow the general guidelines - I would strongly recommend using a font that makes sense with the movie (Example: Consolas would be great for a movie like Primer or Tron) and use free style subtitles - like the ones in classic adventure games.

If you're not aware about these games, check out Full Throttle Opening on youtube.

Then again, here's some ideas about people talking simultaneously:

If they are from opposite sexes you can use different colors for each character.
One character's lines could be on the right side of the screen while the other is on the left.
You can even use different fonts (not recommended)

But, according to the usual pattern you should identify the characters who are speaking with brackets and simply show both lines at the same time.

[John Doe] I love you Mary.
[Mary Doe] GTFO, I hate you.

But, as mentioned before, I strongly recommend creating a unique style for your movie, specially since it's only a few lines.


Is it possible to capture video signal waveform as audio for video replay? I am an electronic musician. For artistic purposes, I want to be able to record a video signal to a .wav file and replay that signal into a TV as video. It seems like it should be simple--if I reproduce the signal, it should turn out the same. Right?

I have an HDMI to RCA converter which works fine with my tv when used as expected in both NTSC and PAL mode. I take the yellow video cable from that and plug it into my audio interface with an RCA-1/4" adapter and record the signal as audio. When I replay the signal into my TV, it comes out like it's been subjected to Photoshop's motion blur horizontally at maximum, and in black and white. It's completely unrecognizable, looking only slightly better than static. If I use a recording from a black screen, I still get white in there.

If I turn on monitor mode, bypassing, although apparently not completely, the audio interface and just route the signal through, it is still black and white, and while still totally unrecognizable, I notice localized changes if I move my mouse around.

If I just touch the two cables together it works fine.

So I'm wondering, is this a sample rate problem? If so, what sample rate would be necessary? Or is it something else?

Using Komplete Audio 6 interface

Sample Rates    44.1, 48, 88.2, 96 kHz
Bit Resolution  16, 24 Bit

The short answer to your question is "no".  The sample rate of video is typically measured in MHz or GHz.  If you have a 1080p24 signal at 8 bits per pixel, the actual frame is 2750 x 1125 pixels (according to digital test equipment manufacturer Kramer).  Multiplied by a 24 fps refresh rate, this results in 74,250,000 pixels / second.  Multiplied by 10 bits per clock tick per pixel, this is a bandwidth of 0.74 Gbps.  As a "sample rate", that is approximately 1000x higher than 16-bit at 48K.  Hence the answer "no".


What's the difference between Blackmagic Fusion and Resolve? I'm a total noob to video production in general, but looking to get more into it.  I've become a bit confused looking at some software solutions, though.  I've seen great reviews for both of Blackmagic's products, DaVinci Resolve, and Fusion, which people say work great together, but I don't know enough to definitively tell the differences between them.

My question is this:  What are the specific domains covered by each product?  In other words, what video editing tasks are done in Fusion, vs. Resolve?  How do they complement each other?  Also, are these two pieces of software alone enough to create a full film?  (I'm wondering about audio and CGI in particular here...)

Firstly - Davinci Resolve (since v15) now includes Fusion as a sub-tool. Additionally some component features of Fusion are embedded within the Resolve interface and conversely some features of Resolve are accessible from within the Fusion tool.

So ... I will try and answer below - as if Resolve did not include any Fusion components:

Resolve has its well established roots in Color Grading, but both applications are ultimately editing and compositing tools which can generate, combine and manipulate source material to create desired visual & audio output. Resolve is targeted at Ease of Use, Media handling, Video Editing, Compositing, Color Grading, Audio Engineering,  Audio/Video Effects and Content Delivery. Whilst Fusion is targeted at advanced 2D & 3D Compositing, Visual effects and Motion Graphics.

Fusion is a more complicated tool and typically is slower to work with, but provides advanced functionality, precision, programming and control in the areas of VFX and MG. There are many end-to-end Audio/Video production scenarios where Fusion would not be required.

Typical Use Cases:

Resolve (minus Fusion):

Producing simple videos from source material
Editing complex video sequences
Color Grading / Color Correction (Simple -> Advanced)
Audio Engineering
Transcoding & Final Delivery
Applying Audio/Video effects to existing footage

Fusion (standalone):

Creating/Applying simple Computer-Generated Imagery (CGI)
Generating/Applying advanced 2D and 3D Video Effects (VFX)
Creating/Applying Motion Graphics (Animated Titles and Wurly Spinny things)

Fortunately - Resolve now includes Fusion - so you get the best of both worlds integrated in one hugely powerful application package.

And yes - you can complete an entire Film 'Movie/Short Film/Video' using just Davinci Resolve and Fusion tools.

** Fusion is also available as a standalone product, but the features & functionality of the standalone product are almost entirely available within Davinci Resolve.


How do I move (rearrange) the orientation of a video? I want to crop the video at some position and move the part next to the part that wasn't cropped. (See image, it explains better)

http://i.imgur.com/qhSZy.png

FFmpeg can do anything :D

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 \
-filter_complex '[0:v]split[top][bottom];[bottom]crop=iw:ih/2:0:ih/2[right];[top]crop=iw:ih/2:0:0,pad=iw*2:ih:0:0[left];[left][right]overlay=W/2:0[outv]' \
-map [outv] -c:v libx264 -crf 22 -preset veryfast output.mp4

The split filter creates two identical versions of the input video ([0:v]), called [top] and [bottom] for the purposes of the filtergraph. The first crop cuts the top half of [bottom] off, creating an output called [right]; the second crop removes the bottom half of [top], then sends it to the pad filter, which doubles the width of the video frame to the right and creates an output [left]. Finally, [left] and [right] are sent to the overlay filter, which places [right] on top of [left], on top of the black area created by the pad filter, creating the final output [outv].

Unfortunately I can't put a line break in the -filter_complex, since that would break the command.

-map [outv] tells ffmpeg to use the video output of the complex filtergraph; if you want to use the input audio too, you can use -map 0:a as well. All the -c:v and so on are video settings.

Here's a slightly shorter, but less clear version of the above command:

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 \
-filter_complex 'split[top][bottom];[bottom]crop=iw:ih/2:0:ih/2[right];[top]crop=iw:ih/2:0:0,pad=iw*2:ih:0:0,[right]overlay=W/2:0' \
-c:v libx264 -crf 22 -preset veryfast output.mp4


How Do I Film A Rotating Object With White Background? I often need to rotate object when making video and rotating with hands is not convenient. I wish there was a helping rotational hand spehere that would rotate as i film object where i could set rotational angles and in the end get to see an object with white background as it rotates. I want to place smartphone instead of that globus in the middle:

People suggested to do it with chromakey in software without studio or special equipment but it will take a learning curve and time to get familiarized with basics.


What actually happens to footage that is upscaled or downscaled? I was wondering if there was any hard number evidence for upscaling or downscaling footage to a certain raster size, and what happens to the quality or if any degradation or improvements are made to the output.
I know anecdotally that if you take a 320x240 video file and upscale it to 1920x1080 that the quality is lost - mainly from stretching pixels.
I know anecdotally that if you take a 3840x2160 video file and downscale it to 1024x576 that the quality in the larger areas remain, and but the finer details can be lost when compressed into a smaller pixel area.
I'm currently in an environment workplace that uses only SD outputs, but for some reason there is a push to take the incoming media (which can range from 320x240 all the way to 8k) and conform it to 1920x1080. When it is imported into the editor, it is an SD project, and burnt to DVD-Video.
For some reason the explanation of matching our output raster or device (DVD-Video) doesn't seem as sufficient evidence, so I wanted to know if there were any numbers or studies or factual papers I could use!

For the most part assume the conversions are performed with "off the shelf" converters, which most likely run ffmpeg in their processing. All resizes with in the applications too would be default - so Bicubic interpolation is most common.

May i understand your question as

How do i have someone/something that understands the missing puzzles from
my upscaled images?

If so, you are talking some intelligence/experience in upscaling or AI-upscaling. Then, plz take a look of AI Upscalers; it mentions

An open source AI upscaler (super sampler) based on a generative adversarial network architecture.
An open source image enhancer that seeks to restore lost texture details from known types
Commercial super sampler that uses artificial intelligence

Good luck!


FFMPEG - Use drawtext and complex filters I have a ffmpeg command that plays several videos from a folder to a live stream, but I would also like to add text overlays over it. The problem is that I used complex filter to concatenate the videos, and -vf to drawtext, but ffmpeg says I can't use complex filters and -vf in the same time. I can't use another method for concatenation, so how should I do ? (I don't mind about using several commands, as long as everything is done live and can be streamed directly)

By the way, here's an example command I use :

ffmpeg \
-i video1.mp4 -i video2.mp4
-filter_complex "[0:v:0] [0:a:0] [0:v:1] [0:a:1] concat=n=2:v=1:a=1 [v] [a]" \
-vf "drawtext=text='SOME TEXT':x=(w-text_w):y=(h-text_h):fontfile=OpenSans.ttf:fontsize=30:fontcolor=white" \
-map "[v]" -map "[a]" -deinterlace \
-vcodec libx264 -pix_fmt yuv420p -preset $QUAL -r $FPS -g $(($FPS * 2)) -b:v $VBR \
-acodec libmp3lame -ar 44100 -threads 6 -qscale 3 -b:a 712000 -bufsize 512k \
-f flv "$YOUTUBE_URL/$KEY"

The problem only comes from the -vf because it works well without it.

Just chain the drawtext, at the end.

ffmpeg \
-i video1.mp4 -i video2.mp4
-filter_complex "[0:v:0] [0:a:0] [0:v:1] [0:a:1] concat=n=2:v=1:a=1 [v][a];
[v]drawtext=text='SOME TEXT':x=(w-text_w):y=(h-text_h):fontfile=OpenSans.ttf:fontsize=30:fontcolor=white[v]" \
-map "[v]" -map "[a]" -deinterlace \
-vcodec libx264 -pix_fmt yuv420p -preset $QUAL -r $FPS -g $(($FPS * 2)) -b:v $VBR \
-acodec libmp3lame -ar 44100 -threads 6 -qscale 3 -b:a 712000 -bufsize 512k \
-f flv "$YOUTUBE_URL/$KEY"


Adobe Premiere is placing a faint 'X' on video transition I am transitioning 1 video to a still PSD in Adobe Premiere Pro.
No matter the transition, it overlays a faint red x (It remains there, even on export). I have tried everything to be best of my ability to fix it, though I can't seem to find a solution.

Seeking advice on how to resolve this trouble.
Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

The kind of X you are seeing usually appears when applying a demo-version of a transition of an effect. Are you sure you are not using some third-party transition pack that you simply haven't bought yet? Try using the standard cross-dissolve and report back if the X remains with native transitions. Cheers!


How to create Final Cut Pro files on Windows machine? I need to edit some video files and submit my work as FCP7 XML file (XMEML). In which software it can be done? I don't need any special and exotic features, I need only file cutting.

Only one thing I need: it must work on WindowsXP or Windows 7 (XP is better). Maybe exists something small, what can run on old machine?

If you have, or can rent Adobe Premiere you can export as FCP XML from that. Davinci Resolve does too, but I'm not sure if the capability is included in the free version.


How can I examine Quicktime file internals? How can I examine a QuickTime file: is there a standard utility?  Or passable third party utilities?

I'd like to be able to try to debug these problems myself before resorting to "randomly install all the codecs you can find."

I use Adobe Premiere (I'm on 5) and using OSX 10.8.5 .

Example:
I'm having a problem similar to the (unanswered) one in Can't import some .mov files into Adobe Premiere, it says “Codec missing or unavailable”:

  Adobe Premiere 5 says "codec missing or unavailable" when trying to
  import a .mov file… but the .mov file plays fine in Quicktime.

The go-to tool of my choice is MediaInfo. It's multi plattform, open-source and can analyze a big deal of formats out there, including QuickTime. So far I barley found an unsupported format. You'll get a lot of very usefull information for debugging format issues from this tool.


How to convert .scc closed caption subtitles into human readable text I'm trying to find a tool or library (possibly an open-source tool) to parse or convert .scc closed caption subtitle files to a human readable text, say .srt or xml or any text formats. Is there a strong tool or library to do that?

Previously, I was trying to use PyCaption library in Python. But it fails to parse certain .scc files.

Subtitle Edit can convert to/from .scc, .srt, and many other formats. It is GPLv3 (and possibly also LGPL licensed). It also has a BSD licensed DLL. The downside is that it is C# code.


How to calculate the overhead of wrapping multiple elementary streams? I run a web service which muxes multiple elementary streams (e.g., H.264 + FLAC) into a single matroska container/wrapper/file. There is no transcoding as I only copy the streams, using a process like ffmpeg  -i i.mkv -i i.flac   -map 0:0 -c:0 copy -map 1:0 -c:1 copy out.mkv.

The problem is that the service must provide the total file size (in bytes) of the file (out.mkv) resulting from the mux up front (i.e., before the actual muxing completes).  Is it possible to calculate it?

The only exact approach is to simulate the muxing. On a *nix system this would be

ffmpeg -i i.mkv -i i.flac -c copy -map 0:0 -map 1:0 -f matroska /dev/null

At the bottom of console readout, there's this line:

frame=152217 fps=71723 q=-1.0 Lsize=  551301kB time=01:41:28.66 ...

The Lsize is what you want. This operation is pretty quick as there's nothing written to disk.


What is the max video fps Nikon D5100? I want to play around with slo-mo videos but don't have proper gear for it. Is there a way to get my D5100 to shoot at a high fps (maybe by reducing the video res)?

I think you're out of luck.
Official specs say 30fps max, and I can't find any documentation of a possible hack.
http://www.nikonusa.com/en/Nikon-Products/Product/Digital-SLR-Cameras/25478/D5100.html
The most widely distributed slow-mo camera is probably the iPhone 5s-- I bet you could borrow one to play around with.


Video archive solution We are a community TV station, looking to improve our video archive. Currently we archive our master files on external drives. But to make the archive easier to access, both for saving and re-using, we are looking into a network-based solution.

We have a gigabit network and currently use about 18.5 TB (our exported files for broadcast already reside on another NAS). But we likely will need at least 30TB for now (we have about 34TB worth of disks available).

My question is, how to we best set up this archive, to make it available over LAN? RAID5? Do we need a RAID controller or can we get away with some kind of software/motherboard/PCIe RAID, as it's only for archiving? Is it better to buy a dedicated NAS solution, or to set up our own server with a good amount of swap drive slots? Or would we even need a SAN?

About six editing computers will on a more or less regular basis archive/backup to this archive server.

Our budget is pretty tight, so we're looking for a cheap, yet efficient solution.

Although we currently use Google Spreadsheets to track what's on each disk, a media asset management solution would probably be a nice addition to this as well :)

Thanks!

I haven't ever done exactly what you're trying to do, but I think I know how I could do it.  Hopefully this answer is useful, or at least starts some discussion from people that do have more concrete experience.
One of the important factors in your choice is going to be buying something that someone knows how to admin.  I think you'd be fine with a commodity fileserver appliance, where you admin it through a web interface or something, and just plug in hard drives + ethernet + power, and set it up to mail you when a drive dies.
If you use a normal PC, running Linux (with Linux's very excellent software RAID), and samba and/or NFS to share the files, you can easily stuff 6 hard drives in.  With any cheap PCIe SATA card, you can add another however many.  Your server will have lots of CPU time to spare, too, so you can have it do video encoding or something if you want.  Or just go really cheap on the CPU.  (Don't get slow RAM, though.  Copying around and checksumming data will potentially bottleneck on memory bandwidth.)
RAID6 is more CPU intensive, since the parity info has to use fancy modulo arithmetic, instead of just XOR, but again, with gigE as your bottleneck, and where you don't need the machine to have a lot of CPU time left over for anything else, it's fine.  You don't need an expensive RAID card, since cost per TB is more important for you than maybe 10% speed.  RAID cards often come with software to monitor them and send email when a drive needs replacing.  smartd from smartmontools, and/or mdadm can send email, too, if you set them up to do so.
gigabit ethernet is going to be by far the biggest bottleneck (100MB/s).  If you get a server with multiple gige ports, you could bond them (multiple cables all connected to the same switch), so multiple clients at once could read and write 100MB/s.
Since you're mostly going to be using this over gigE, and for video (big files read and written sequentially), something like WD Green hard drives would be most appropriate.  Lower idle and max power means you can more easily pack a lot of HDs into a case without overheating.  You'll have to shop for cases that can hold a lot of HDs, preferably with them accessible from the front for hotswapping.  Maybe a rackmount server case, esp. if you already have a rack.  I haven't ever looked into cases for boatloads of HDs, so there's probably stuff I'm missing here.
I think there are external chassis (with their own PS) for holding extra HDs, and they may even have SATA port multipliers.  If so, then you might be able to hook it all up to your mobo onboard SATA ports, since you'd have 4 or more hard drives on each of the 6 SATA connectors on your mobo.  I'm not sure this is how things work, so better read up.  (even sequential reads on current drives don't use the full bandwidth of 6Gb/s SATA, so the interface would be a bottleneck with 3 or more drives on a single SATA port.  But gigE is a bigger bottleneck.  And anyway, 6 mobo sata ports all running flat out would be helluva fast.)
edit: apparently not all SATA controllers support port multipliers.  e.g. a http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817182280 I was looking at for my own use has a manufacturer reply that mobo SATA ports often don't support port multipliers.
edit: The FreeNAS HW recommendations advise caution with SATA port multipliers.  Apparently they can eat your data.  That FreeNAS guide is exactly what you should look at for getting specific about hardware.  (But if you don't use ZFS, then tons of RAM is not very important.  Linux instead of FreeBSD will also probably have somewhat better hardware compatibility.  Remote management IPMI will be very valuable if anything goes wrong, other than disk HW failure.  Or even then, for determining which disk is failed.)
As for details of the RAID setup, yes, I'd suggest RAID5 is probably a good bet.  If you can afford to have at least a 2nd copy of your data somewhere, as a backup, then you don't need to be too paranoid about the reliability of either the main archive or the backup.  If not, well then you should probably go RAID6.
Even RAID6 still doesn't help you if someone accidentally deletes or overwrites the wrong directory on the shared server, or if a CPU or RAM failure leads to filesystem corruption.  RAID only helps you read back the data that was written.  If other errors lead to the wrong data being written, you are in trouble.
ZFS might be a good choice, for extra checksumming to detect corruption.  You can set it up to give RAID5 levels of redundancy (RAID-Z), or RAID6 (z2).  Linux BTRFS does basically the same stuff as ZFS, but its built-in RAID5/6 isn't mature yet.
If you end up using more than maybe 16 drives, you might want to think about breaking them into 2 smaller RAID5 or RAID6 arrays.
Off-site backups, updated at least weekly from your main storage server, are a really good idea.  For this special case of backing up video, maybe use the CPU time on your NAS to transcode your videos to lower bitrates for off-site backup, so you don't need so much space off-site.  Then if you lose everything, you have whatever you can pull off people's workstations that they had copied there, plus the lower-quality videos from your offsite backup.  Hopefully you never have to use it.
Oh, another idea.  The costs of having that much storage available online all the time is a bit of a factor (having to buy a server).  Possibly useful to use external hard drives as a 2nd copy.  Or even "internal" hard drives that you stick into a docking station.  (looks like a toaster, but takes SATA HDs instead of bread.)  Insert HD, sync some data to the drive, take it home for safe keeping.  Then if your studio burns down, someone has the data at home.  This might be easier than finding somewhere off-site to put a backup server for your archive.
Or just pay for cloud backups of your archive.  That might actually make the most sense, if your Internet connection can handle it.  (you could use the lower-bitrate off-site backup idea with cloud backups, too.)
This is all pretty theoretical, since my job as a sysadmin for some small Linux beowulf clusters was several years ago.
Anyway, remember that someone will have to admin this thing.  Being the admin probably won't mean any hours a week babysitting it, but you need someone that understands the setup and knows what to do if there's a problem.  Swapping a drive usually requires poking at the admin UI, not just physically changing hardware.
Have a spare HD ready to pop in to replace a failed one, so your data isn't going unprotected for long.  Probably you'd want a failed-drive email to go to multiple people, so whoever's around can replace a failed drive with the spare.  (If you have the drive in the NAS PC or appliance, then it's a hot spare and can get used automatically.)


Dash, Hls and pure Media Source Extension chunkless options i'm experimenting with dash-media source extension and purejs-media source extension and i have seen i have the choice between chunked and inline fragmented videos.

My questions is what codecs are support inline fragmenting, i mean that i have only one file per resolutions and bitrate and one ore two audio files (and no billions of chunks;)) and which ffmpeg options i must use for the options:

I hope and prefer free codes like vorbis,vp8,vp8,ogg,opus and so on and hope all containers (webm) can produce one-segmented-single-files:).

Thx

what you are calling inline fragmented videos are just the chunks concatenated into one file, The manifest then records the start position and length of the chunk. The "billions of chunks" tend to be more performant on a CDN.


Add an image overlay in front of video using ffmpeg I have many videos and I need to put an image in front of them for about 5 seconds, but adding it manually and rendering it each time would take really long, so I am asking if it is possible to do so via ffmpeg and if you could, please, help me out with it since I have no experience with ffmpeg. I've found some commands already but none of them worked.
This one for example.

ffmpeg -itsoffset 5 -i in.mp4 -r 25 -loop 1 -i intro.png -filter_complex "[1:v] fade=out:125:25:alpha=1 [intro]; [0:v][intro] overlay [v]" -map "[v]" -map 0:a -acodec copy out.mp4

You can do a simple image overlay using the following syntax:

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -i image.png \
-filter_complex "[0:v][1:v] overlay=25:25:enable='between(t,0,20)'" \
-pix_fmt yuv420p -c:a copy \
output.mp4

overlay=25:25 means we want to position the image 25px to the right and 25px down, originating from the top left corner (0:0).

enable='between(t,0,20)' means we want the image to show between second 0 and 20.

[0:v][1:v] means that we want the first video file we import with -i, in our case input.mp4 or how ffmpeg sees it video input file number 0, to be under video input file 1, in our case image.png. :v just means we want video 0 and video 1. [0:a] would mean we want the first imported audio track. Which would also come from input.mp4 but would point to the audio track instead of the video track in the mp4 file.

If you want a certain image quality/settings and not the settings ffmpeg chooses, add the image and or audio encoding options you want to use. The default video encoder will be x264. Check the H.264 encoding guide for possible settings.

The -acodec copy / -c:a copy that you have in your command f.e. would simply re-use the audio from the source file. Though you can't do that with the video of course (in this case), that has to be transcoded because we are creating a new video source.

If you want to transcode audio, remove the -c:a copy part. You may have to explicitly specify an encoder, e.g. -c:a aac -strict experimental. See the AAC encoding guide for more info.


How did cameramen manually focus in the film days? In the days before LCDs and digital cameras, manually focusing an interchangeable lens still camera wasn't a whole lot different than it is today. In most designs, you had a mirror that gave the photographer a through-the-lens view, allowing them to accurately focus. When the shutter button was pressed, the mirror flipped out of the way, exposing the film.

However, this method is obviously not usable for the continuous focusing required by video camera operators. Modern cameras solve this problem by using Live View. How was this problem solved in the film days?

Good quality film cameras have a reflex viewfinder system, where "reflex" means that you're viewing through the lens, and thus you can judge focus by eye.

To achieve this There are, er were, two basic strategies:

Split the beam of light from the lens with a prism or half silvered
    mirror, meaning that most of the light goes to the film, and a bit
    goes to the viewfinder.    Advantages: no shutter flicker,
    cheaper. Disadvantages: less light,    both for exposing the
    film, and a dimmer image in the viewfinder (in    low light
    situations it can make it difficult to focus or even see what's
    going on).    This is how my Bolex camera does it.

Position a revolving mirror between the lens and the film plane. While the film is being pulled down by the sprockets the mirror
moves into place, bouncing the light into the viewfinder, and once
the film is ready to be exposed, the mirrors swings around and the
viewfinder goes temporarily black. It's basically what an SLR camera
does, but instead of flipping up the mirror is rotating.
Advantages: more light for the film and the viewfinder, one less optical element in the light path, ability to vary the angle of the
shutter allowing for fine control over exposure without affecting
the depth of field. Disadvantages: More complicated
(=expensive), flicker in viewfinder (actually I think this is
something of an advantage, because you always could tell when the
camera was running, and also when filming video displays you could
make sure that the balck bar was visible in the viewfinder, and
therefore not visible to the film), some degree of rolling shutter.This is how my CP16 does it, as well as pretty much all professional
cinema cameras.

 the mirror is the thing that looks like a bow tie.

As you can see, both methods allowed the operator to see through the lens while filming, allowing for on-the-fly focusing. Video splits also allowed a live video feed to be set up, meaning the focus puller (and director etc.) could have a monitor, but this was relatively late in the piece. A video split is basically a video camera bolted on to where the eyepiece goes, or sometimes with a separate beam-splitter. Until video splits came along the focus puller checked the focus points in the rehearsal, made marks on the floor with camera tape, consulted their cinematographer's manual for the depth-of-field charts, and eyeballed it.

You'n whippersnappers don't know how easy you gots it. Now get off my lawn!


What sequence presets I must use with a GoPro and Adobe Premiere Pro CS 5.5? I use a GoPro which output is mp4 files.

I want to edit these movies into Adobe Premiere Pro CS 5.5. I'm a little lost about sequence presets to use.

I've got the choice between Digital SLR, AVCHD, XDCam, HDV... wow... I don't understand the differences between each other because when I use one or other, it seems to be the same. My gopro movie has a yellow bar at the top, saying that it needs rendering.

So, what's the difference with all of these formats and what's the best format to use with my GoPro ?

In Premiere, a possible, easy approach would be importing your footage to the library before creating any sequence, then right click a clip and choose 'New Sequence from Clip'. Premiere will automatically adjust the settings according to the clip's properties.

This is also recommended by Adobe (3rd paragraph).


Using multiple graphics cards in Davinci Resolve So I recently got a Nvidia 1050 ti for my editing rig but was wondering if it would be possible buy another 1050 ti and install it to get Davinci to use two graphics cards (perhaps using SLI?).

The free version of Resolve doesn't support multiple GPUs.  The Studio (paid) version does.  However, combining multiple GPU cards generally doesn't increase VRAM (i.e., if you only have 4GB per card, a pair of cards presents 4GB of VRAM).  If you are thinking about a second card to increase your VRAM, it won't work.

Also, the general story from the Resolve users group forums is that multiple cards are really only helpful if you are using lots of temporal noise reduction (which eats VRAM very quickly). If that's the case, you need both lots of VRAM and lots of GPU compute capacity.


USB Webcam not working with USB Microphone I have two USB devices: a webcam and a microphone.  I can play the webcam's video into VLC and GUVCView. However, I want to use the microphone for another application. The issue is that launching media capture with VLC or GUVCView blocks the microphone.

For instance, running the following before launching VLC/GUVCView:

arecord -vvv -f dat /dev/null

Shows what the microphone picks up. If I launch VLC first with the following command (webcam is on video0):

vlc v4l2:///dev/video0

And then monitor the microphone with the previously shown arecord command, I get nothing. It is the same behavior with GUVCView.

Doing the opposite, launching arecord before VLC, however shows the issue. I only get part of the webcam's image (like the few first lines of the image). Dropping the camera resolution shows more lines in the webcam's image.

It looks like I don't have enough USB bandwidth for both the webcam and the microphone. However, typing lsusb -t show that I have USB 2.0, which supports 480Mbps, and that the webcam only pulls 12Mbps.

I think I found the issue. One of the device is USB 1.1, and this causes the whole hub to fall down to USB 1.1 to accommodate it. I saw it using lsusb -v.

USB 1.1 has a max bandwidth of 12Mbps, hence the reading I get with lsusb -t. I'll need to either replace the USB 1.1 device for a USB 2.0 device, or plug in a second USB card directly in the motherboard.


Issues looping a stream with FFMpeg I'm trying to overlay a video on top of an image. The problem that I'm facing is that the video duration that I want is longer than my input video's duration.

To solve this issue, I try to generate a streaming loop and hardcode the duration that I want using the parameter "t".

I'm using the setpts filter to make sure that my container format (.mp4) accepts past frames by rewriting their timestamps:

ffmpeg -loop 1 -i image.jpg -stream_loop -1 -i video.mov  -filter_complex "[1:v]setpts=N/(FRAME_RATE*TB)[1v];[0:v][1v]overlay=x=main_w*0.44:y=main_h*0.33[out]" -map [out] -t 00:00:15  out.mp4

So the command reads as follows:

take one infinite input where each frame is image.jpg
take another infinite input (video.mov) by looping (-stream_loop -1)

Each frame will go through the filter:

setpts will re-write the timestamps for source 1 (video.mov)
overlay will put each setpts-ed frame from video.mov on top of each frame from the initial input (image.jpg - 0:v)

This should continue until a file with 00:00:15 seconds is created.

This command does generate that file but the video.mov isn't looped, once the first loop finishes the last frame is repeated until the output movie ends.

FYI: I made a couple more tests:

ffmpeg -stream_loop -1 -i movie.mov -filter_complex "[0:v]setpts=N/(FRAME_RATE*TB)[out]" -map [out] -t 00:00:30 output.mp4

This works fine, it generates a movie with 30 seconds duration with the input movie looped to fill the output movie

on the other hard, if I add one more input file:

ffmpeg -stream_loop -1 -i movie.mov -loop 1 -i image.jpg -filter_complex "[0:v]setpts=N/(FRAME_RATE*TB)[out]" -map [out] -t 00:00:30 output.mp4

This will not create a movie with 30 seconds, although one of the inputs is never used, ffmpeg creates a movie file with just one loop of movie.mov and the same length of movie.mov.

Any advices please ?

Thank you very much!

Ze

Try with the movie filter instead

ffmpeg -loop 1 -i image.jpg -filter_complex \
        "movie=video.mov:loop=999,setpts=N/(FRAME_RATE*TB)[1v]; \
        [0:v][1v]overlay=x=main_w*0.44:y=main_h*0.33[out]" \
       -map [out] -t 00:00:15  out.mp4


Error playing video from snapchat (.mp4) I have a video from snapchat that I have difficulties playing (on the computer).

It's a .mp4 and it plays perfectly on VLC and QuickTime - but not on anything else. I've tried downloading all sorts of codecs and stuff but i dont get it to work. It dosen't work when uploaded to youtube or facebook for example.

Often the first images are fine, but then the rest of the video is like this: http://i.imgur.com/iNjUxXh.png

It can also be the reversed. The first images dont show but the rest of the video is fine.

This is the video (for download): https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B2hzopfx_ybFLWpVMmJyTnctLUU

Does anyone have any idea?

Seems that Snapchat allows to select multiple clips of different parameters and stitch them together as one MP4.
Like you said, it plays fine in VLC, but ffplay here warns that

[mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2 @ 00000000005b0a00] Concatenated H.264 or
H.265 might not play correctly.
[mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2 @> 00000000005ba100] ignoring multiple glbl
[mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2 @> 00000000005b0a00] multiple edit list entries, a/v desync might occur, patch welcome

VLC fails to convert to a good file. Crude method would to screen-record the video playback and crop that, or Snapchat seems to allow to download the individual clips, which would be the best possible method for now.


AviSynth can't open my AVI file: "AVISource: Couldn't locate a decompressor for fourcc dvds" I simply want to open an AVI file with AviSynth and feed it into VirtualDub. However, when I open my .avs script (consisting of just one AviSource() call), I get the following error:

Avisynth open failure:
AVISource: Couldn't locate a decompressor for fourcc dvds
(H:\Videos\QTGMC\test.avs, line 1)

The required dvsd codec seems to be installed, according to software called GSpot (which identifies a video file's required codec's). Does anyone know why I can't open this file and how to fix it?

In case anyone has the same issue in the future, I solved it by installing Cedocida codec: http://www.cithraidt.de/cedocida/index.html#download.

Using DirectShowSource() instead of AviSource() also works.


Weird glitches in After Effects render was wondering if any of you knew how to fix this issue. When I render my comp in After Effects, I see these weird glitches in the render (like black triangular spots of missing video).

I have uploaded an example of the issue here:

Had the same problem. Put a black solid in the background. It worked for me.


After Effects is not changing the preview quality! I have the preview resolution set to quarter, frame skip set to 5 and yet After Effects is previewing at full resolution constantly. I have tried changing the settings through the sidebar and the bar under the preview.

I have purged the RAM, cache, etc. several times and even re-opening the program does not help.

The preview is indeed set to 'Adaptive resolution'. This is making the preview playback impossible since my footage is 4K.

Quarter of 4K is still 1080. Depending on your rig it still might chug thru playback. I would look into proxies as they are pretty quick to set up and would drastically improve workability.


How to add Letterbox to the Video I have shot? I would like to add letterbox to the 1080p video I have shot. How can I add it?

Which software should I use? I have Premiere Pro and After Effects.
What technique should I use?

There are various ways to add letterboxing in PP.

Some ways I have done are:

creating a Photoshop file (or finding one already made) and using an adjustment layer to apply it. ( I used this post http://whoismatt.com/cinemascopetutorial/)
when exporting you can use the crop function to chop the top and bottom off
using an adjustment layer again but cropping it in 132 from top and 132 from bottom ( believe)
make a new Sequence, using Custom settings that's 1920 x 816.
google has loads of sites if you do a quick search letterboxing in adobe premier

I hope some of the above help in a way


Remove coughing or sudden loud noises I was recording a series of videos while I was recovering from a cold and didn't realize how bad my cough would come out in post production. On a quite infrequent basis a loud coughing noise pierces the audio while the person who I'm recording is talking. How can I best remove or decrease these coughs and loud noises while maintaining as much of the other sound fidelity, ideally in Premiere Pro but if not with other software. I can provide a reference cough for a software solution.

i would attempt this by trying to find the frequency of the cough and then nuking it with EQ, turning the EQ on and off when needed via automation. You might have to dip the overall level for a moment too if its still too bad.

I'm guessing that in future having a second mic might help also so you can cut to that and it might get a better signal of the intended source.


Auto-Orient, Wrong Rotation on Last Keyframe in After Effects I have an issue with the Transform | Auto-orient option. I does work in general but at the very last keyframe the object's rotation changes apruptly.

How can I avoid that?

I am using After Effects CS4.

I found the issue. The rotation was caused by an expression I used to loop the animation

loopOut("cycle")


Scrolling the panel in After Effects I'm on windows using After Effects CS6.

I'm new to this software and am having a problem scrolling the window vertically or horizontally, Where is the scroll bar?

Alternatively I'm trying to scroll using the mouse wheel, but this seems to be zooming in and out. I read that I can hold the Alt or Ctrl button while moving the wheel, but that doesn't make any difference.

I just want to scroll the panel up and down so I can see what I'm doing.

After tearing my hair out I found the "hand cursor", now I can drag the panel around however I want it :)


After Effects on Mac: Use touchpad to scroll like in PS or Illustrator In Photoshop and Illustrator I can 2-finger scroll on the x and y axis. For zooming I can pinch-to-zoom which works seamlessly.

However, Adobe After Effects reacts totally different to this: Pinch-to-zoom results in zooming into the top left corner so the video output ends up "flying" out of the lower-right corner of the screen and two-finger-up-and-down-scroll zooms at the center of the video. two-finger-left-and-right-scroll, instead of moving along the x axis, has no effect whatsoever.

I could get used to that if I worked on a PC but why can't I make use of the wonderful touchpad on my mac? It works in other Adobe CC products that I own, so why is After Effects behaving so weird? It's not just that it behaves different, I see no reason why sidewards-moving is not working and why anyone would want to zoom into the upper left corner of their screen.

Example:

This is what happens when I pinch-to-zoom. The black rectangle in the lower right corner is the video and instead of zooming into the video, pinch-to-zoom leads to putting the video out of sight because it zooms into the top left.

I hope I've written this post somewhat understandable, it's pretty hard to explain but here a little summary.

What I want:

2-finger-touchpad-move: move along x and/or y axis
pinch to zoom: zoom into where my mouse pointer is
(like in Photoshop or Illustrator)

What I get:

2-finger-touchpad-move: zoom into video
pinch to zoom: zoom into the wastelands of the screen, away from the video

Maybe it's just some settings that I am unable to locate but I also googled for the issue and the only results are people asking about how to create zooming animations.

It's so weird the way all the Adobe apps require different muscle memory to do the same thing. Even things that are the same like panning around a work area or zooming. I understand it's because of the history of the apps, but Adobe's acquisition of AE was over two decades ago, they've had time to standardise it.

Until they fix this (and don't hold your breath) you'll have to learn the AE way of navigating your comp window: hold (don't tap) the spacebar and click-drag with the left-mouse-button / single-finger-trackpad to pan and scroll, scroll-wheel / two-finger-slide to zoom. It will zoom to the point that is in the centre of the comp window, unless you hold the alt key while you're zooming in which case it zooms to the cursor. If youy want to zoom right in to the frame level press ;, press it again to zoom out to the whole comp.

Also useful are the , and . keys which zoom in and out (it makes more sense if you think about the < and > symbols which also share those keys, but you don't hold shift) and ? which zooms to fill the comp window. You'll find that AE works best if you work two-handed. Dominant hand using the pointing device of your choice, the other working the keyboard. Efficiency in AE is all about keyboard shortcuts.


What's the ffmpeg command to extract PPM files from an existing video? What's the ffmpeg command to extract PPM (or Portable Pix Map) files from an existing video?

Like the reverse of this https://askubuntu.com/questions/971119/convert-a-sequence-of-ppm-images-to-avi-video

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 output_%04d.ppm

Output files will be named output_0001.ppm, output_0002.ppm, etc. See the image muxer documentation for more options and info.


Custom Animated Counter in Adobe After Effects I'm trying to create a counter that automatically updates to the next value once per second.  I have that part figured out:

string = "7609,7758,7916,8063,8217,8382,8545,8701,8871,9049,9241,9386,9533,9722,9911,10055,10196,10321,10327,10451,10646,10854,11005,11195,11411,11583,11740,11904,12051,12177,12308,12404,12484,12558,12637,12725,12805,12882,12982,13088,13212,13340,13486,13674,13840,";
array = string.split(",")
l=array.length;

sek = Math.floor(time);

if(sek<l){
            array[sek];
}else{
            "End of Data";
}

However, now I'm trying to animate it.  I've made simple counters that count from a starting number to a final number using Slider Control and keyframes, but is there a way to automate it?  The final project is going to have multiple counters going at the same time, with around 750 points of data in total, so automating would save so much time.

This will animate between the values in the array, hitting each value precisely at the second mark though the viewer won't be able to notice because the numbers will be moving too fast.

var dataArr = [7609,7758,7916,8063,8217,8382,8545,8701,8871,9049,9241,9386,9533,9722,9911,10055,10196,10321,10327,10451,10646,10854,11005,11195,11411,11583,11740,11904,12051,12177,12308,12404,12484,12558,12637,12725,12805,12882,12982,13088,13212,13340,13486,13674,13840];
var sek = Math.floor(time);
if (sek < dataArr.length - 1){
   Math.floor(linear(time-sek, dataArr[sek], dataArr[sek+1]));
} else {
    "out of data";
}

For bonus points you can add commas or culture-appropriate separators by replacing the line that starts with Math.floor(linear … with:

Math.floor(linear(time-sek, dataArr[sek], dataArr[sek+1])).toLocaleString("en-AU");

where you replace "en-AU" with your locale, e.g. for Chinese Decimal units use "zh-Hans-CN-u-nu-hanidec" and it will look like: 七,六〇九


After Effects Audio Ahead of Video in Preview and Render I was working on my first large-ish upload for youtube, put it together quickly and didn't notice until it was complete that almost the entire video was riddled with audio desync issues. You can find that HERE
I took another look at it today, and discovered a large factor may have been the video frame rate (Windows shows the video as 60FPS but when imported into AE it shows a frame rate of 59.993) HERE  is another example of the slight premature audio with 59.993 composition even after wiping all cache and stored data, starting a new composition, etc.
All of the footage except 1 clip was recorded in the span of 2 days, but yet some clips do not (or at least not visibly) suffer from the desync issue. The Waveform is in line with the out of sync audio.
Any idea what could be the cause? Or what I can do to get the issue resolved?
PC Hardware:
i9 9900k /
32 GB RAM /
1080ti GPU
RAW Video According to Windows:
2560 x 1440 /
195kbps bit rate /
48.000khz
Imported RAW Video According to AE:
2560 x 1440 /
h.264 /
48.000khz / 32 Bit U
Composition Settings:
1920 x 1080 /
Originally 60FPS, Streamable example was corrected to 59.993
Thank you,
Nexu

I think you’ve probably identified the cause. I’ve found when using mobile phone footage (And video conference captures) both premiere and after effects can incorrectly identify frame rates. If all the footage is around 59.93-60fps, I would try transcoding it all to 60fps first using a codec suitable for editing (like ProRes), making sure it’s all in sync after transcode, then re inserting it into your project (save a new copy of your project first though).


Terminology connected with camera movement As non-English speaker, the terms connected with camera movement are not always clear to me, and I believe that they are technical enough to be confusing even for some English speakers.

Please write what are the terms (eg. pan, tilt), what they mean and what is that specific movement used for while shooting.

For the three main rotations of the camera you have pan (rotation around the vertical axis), tilt (rotation around the axis passing left to right through the camera), roll (rotation through the axis passing through the center of the lens).

Then there are the three main movements along those same axis.  Pedestal is a movement along the vertical axis.  Tracking, trucking and dolly shots are all roughly synonymous and refer to moving the camera along either horizontal axis (or both).  Tracking generally involves maintaining a constant distance from the subject.

A crane shot is a shot where the camera is on the end of a boom that is being rotated around one or more axis.  In other words, the camera is moving around the outside of a sphere created by a boom mounted on a central point.

Follow shot is a shot that follows a subject at a set distance as they move.  Ie, the subject remains roughly stationary in frame but the rest of the surroundings move.

Dolly Zoom isn't exactly a specific kind of camera movement, but it involves doing a dolly shot at the same time as adjusting the zoom to keep the subject the same size.  This results in an exaggerated perspective shift while the subject remains the same size or roughly the same size.


About Video Formats and prevention of download of videos I have created a educational website in wordpress where I want to put videos for students. I have the following questions regarding this matter [I need help as I do not have technical background regarding this]:

1]. Which is the video format which will be accessible for students A]. without they having to install any software...B]. Which will be easy to play even on mobiles

2]. I want to prevent the students from copy pasting and downloading the videos. they should be able to read, see and hear...but not download / copy paste as I have copyrighted these material

3]. Are there any websites which have done this / which I could refer to ?

Awaiting your response
Thanks in advance
Harsha

If you don't want your stuff to be stolen, don't put it on the internet

People need to be able to watch your video on their computers. For that purpose, it needs to be downloaded to their computers. If it's on their computer, they have it.

There are ways to protect your video, but those are not failsafe and will inevitably result in a poor user experience. If I visit your site to watch a video and find that I need to install a DRM plugin before I can watch your video (cough Silverlight cough), I close the tab and don't come back. By being overly protective of your video, you are hurting your own views and you don't actually stop people who really want to steal your video for whatever reason. The most intricate of DRM systems can't prevent me from simply using a screen capture software.

Don't worry, be happy

Just put your video on YouTube or Vimeo and embed it into your site. This will also benefit your views, since your videos can get recommended to users on the hosting site, so they potentially create traffic for your website as well. Yes, people can download the videos. In fact, it's legal to do so in most jurisdictions (in Germany for example, it would be called a private copy). This doesn't give them the right to share it anywhere else and if they do, you can sue them. If you feel so strongly about protecting your content, you can even hire someone to search the internet for illegal copies of your video and have them sue the unlawful uploaders. Yes, I know, you can't search the entire internet. There may be copies of your video floating around on the deep web that you don't know about, but who cares? If it's hidden well enough that you can't find it, your viewers won't find it either.

You see the same thing in the photo community. People slap their huge ugly copyright notice, website link or logo on their photos to 'protect' them. But the people that care about that will just crop the copyright notice or blur it out. So the photographers make them bigger, have them cover the entire photo until it's barely visible any more. In the end, they are just damaging their own content. Don't do that.

Don't host your video yourself

It never works as well as a dedicated video hosting platform. It just doesn't.


Premiere workflow: Maintain multichannel sync from dailies through edit lock to sound? I am volunteer editing a production with professional sound recording and need to deliver picture lock to the audio dept so they can add foley, mix, and master.  I've delivered a few tests, but it's clear that the workflow needs improvement.  In the first test, I just edited and delivered camera scratch audio, but the audio dept isn't able to re-sync the master recordings to camera scratch.  Second test worked for them, but made my edit timeline a nightmare with 8x more audio tracks visible than necessary.  Looking for a better way to work.  Goals are:

• Sync Zoom 8-channel (per file) .WAV files to camera, either via waveform or timecode, maintaining camera timecode. This is the easy part.

• Combine synced A/V into “Merged Clips” (or any outside-the-box method of syncing audio to video) where the resulting clip channel format is “multichannel,” not “mono,” so that editing all eight channels into an adaptive audio timeline track results in a single track, not eight.

• Output stems for final mixdown with synced proxy video. Quicktime container format worked to transfer 8 streams of mono from 8 separate mono timeline tracks (A1-A8), but a better solution moving forward should use “8-mono mapped to Adaptive” clips, nested in adaptive audio timeline tracks (just A1). The resulting file must be multichannel, whether it’s 8 streams of mono or one stream of 8-mono, etc.  I’d prefer a more compressed video codec than prores proxy.

•Give the sound guy an .AAF, .XML, or similar, which accurately conveys the edited timeline with references to the original 8-channel .WAV files.  This is the ultimate goal.  The particular DAW he's using is Reaper, but DAW-agnostic answers are preferable.

The Subsequence Method:

This is the first method I developed to work in this situation.  I'm posting it as an answer here because it might be a sufficient answer for someone with a similar problem.  However, I do not consider it a good or elegant solution.  It has serious drawbacks which complicate the editing process (Subsequences don't display audio waveforms on the timeline, using Shift+O to open in source monitor is awkward, e.g.). I mention Reaper in this answer because it's the specific DAW we're targeting, but the advice might be generalized to other DAWs. Vordio is a translation tool which works in this context, but I cannot comment on its efficacy in others; YMMV

Select all of the Zoom audio, right-click on it, and “select modify audio channels.” Change number of audio clips to 1, set clip channel format to adaptive, click OK.
Create a new sequence from the file menu, making sure that the audio tracks are adaptive.  This first sequence is just for sync dailies, so you only need one adaptive (or stereo) track on A1 for camera scratch, and a Poly on A2 for Zoom audio (with # of channels depending on how many sources used by the recordist.
String out the video by selecting it all, and clicking the automate to sequence button.  The camera scratch audio should land on A1 when you do this.
Drop Zoom audio on A2 and sync each clip, one-by-one, either by using the “syncronize” command, or by lining up slates
Once you’re done syncronizing, delete A1 camera scratch.  You don’t need it any more.
Select each A/V clip pair in turn and “Link”.  This step’s kinda optional, but without it, the Subsequences generated in the next step won’t be linked.
Select each linked pair in turn and “Make Subsequence”
Re-name all of the subsequences.
Now, make a new timeline for editing.  Since double clicking subsequences in the project browser doesn’t open them in the source viewer like regular clips, you’ll want to use Shift+O (That’s an Oh, not a zero) instead.

Edit your material

Once your edit is locked, you need to flatten the subsequences before sending to reaper.  Follow these steps.
Basically, make sure the “insert and overwrite nested sequences as nests or individual clips button” is disabled (white, not blue)
Make sure selection follows playhead is enabled
Lock any tracks you don’t want to affect, and make sure the sequence targeting is active for the track you do want to affect
Repeat the keyboard sequence: [ x ] [ f ] [ . ] [ shift+3 ] (ex, eff, period, shift key and number three together) for every clip in the timeline.

Now, to export a project for mixing, follow these steps:

Command+M
Set Format to Quicktime, Chose Apple Prores Proxy from the Preset dropdown. Under the “Basic Video Settings” section of the “Video” tab, uncheck the box next to width and height and change either number to a quarter of their original size.  The other number should scale by the same amount automatically.  If it doesn’t, make sure the link icon is active.
Under the “Audio Channel Configuration” section of the “Audio” Tab, change “Output Channels” to match the number of channels in the poly wave.  Make sure all of the other, “Basic Audio Settings” match the quality of audio the recordist started with.
Hit Queue, and let Media Encoder do its thing.
Now, to translate via Vordio for Reaper, follow these steps:

In Premiere, do File->Export->Final Cut Pro XML.  Use the default Final Cut XML version.

Download Vordio if you don’t already have it (http://vordio.net/download/) , and open it.  In the “Convert Project” tab, click “Browse” by the “Source File” field, and navigate to wherever you saved the XML.   Browse for an Output Folder the same way, and click convert (all of the other settings can be left at default)


Why recording a still image using a mobile camera is taking up more space? I know basic video compression technique .In that it reduces spatial redundancy and temporal redundancy.If it is so why recorsing still image using camera takes more space.Why compression technique cannot remove temporal redundancy in the still image video.

A still image doesn't have any temporal redundancy to exploit - it is a snapshot of a single point of time! Also, the quantization parameter will be low. Video compression uses higher quantization parameters since each individual frame is seen for a fraction of a second, so in a normal playback mode, the user doesn't get to focus on the details within each frame. Both of these contribute to the lower file sizes for the average image in a video.


Static frame video and a motion-intensive appendix: how to render fast? A frequent task is to render a 5–30 minutes video from a single image + soundtrack and then append a pre-rendered outro logo animation sequence.

Output is hd720 h264 mp4 for YouTube.

What would be the fastest aproach to combine a lo-motion static image part with motion-intensive tail animation and produce a quality result?

I tried rendering the image part and then concat the outro:

ffmpeg       \
  -loop 1    \
  -r 24      \
  -i $IMAGE  \
  -i $AUDIO  \
  -t $AUDIO_LENGTH  \
  -c:a aac   \
  -profile:a aac_low  \
  -ar 48000  \
  -b:a 192k  \
  -bsf:a aac_adtstoasc  \
  -strict -2 -y  \
  -c:v libx264  \
  -profile:v high  \
  -preset veryfast  \
  -tune stillimage  \
  -crf 24  \
  -x264opts bframes=2  \
  -pix_fmt yuv420p  \
  -safe 0  \
  $RENDER

ffmpeg  \
  -f concat  \
  -safe 0  \
  -i <(printf "file '%s'\n" ${RENDER} ${OUTRO})  \
  -c copy  \
  -y  \
  ${OUTPUT}

This renders rather fast but the appended logo reveal gets garbled. That's because of the h264 compression settings, I guess.

Maybe I could somehow imitate the two-pass rendering of h264 mp4? I know the exact length of the first part and it contains zero motion. There's the second animation and I can "prepare" the 1st pass for it ahead.

Please advice, how would a ffmpeg Pro aproach the task?

Upd. here are the properties of the appended outro:

Input #0, mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2, from 'outro.mp4':
  Metadata:
    major_brand     : isom
    minor_version   : 512
    compatible_brands: isomiso2avc1mp41
    encoder         : Lavf55.14.101
  Duration: 00:00:03.19, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 263 kb/s
    Stream #0:0(eng): Video: h264 (High) (avc1 / 0x31637661), yuv420p, 1280x720 [SAR 1:1 DAR 16:9], 77 kb/s, 24 fps, 24 tbr, 12288 tbn (default)
    Metadata:
      handler_name    : VideoHandler
    Stream #0:1(eng): Audio: aac (LC) (mp4a / 0x6134706D), 44100 Hz, stereo, fltp, 181 kb/s (default)
    Metadata:
      handler_name    : SoundHandler

As I can see, you know duration of your song, it good.

I can suggest this trick:

Generate 5 second of video with static image. With good settings, good fps, slow encoding and so on. Video must be without audio.
Join this video with itself as many times, as you want, so duration will be a little more of your clip. This operation not requires reencoding, so can be performed very fast.
Split your clip to exact size as you need. (no re-encoding)
Join outro to file
Join your file with audio (without re-encoding for video, but audio you can modify based on your needs. If you want to upload it to youtube, you can not reencode audio, youtube does it itself)

This can be pretty fast.


Recommandation for on-premises video file transcoding server accessible via REST API? I am looking for a video file transcoding solution that I can run on an on-premises server and access via a REST API.

While I found lots of commercial cloud services (e.g. https://www.filestack.com/products/audio-video-transformations/ or https://zencoder.com/en/), I could not find an on-premises video transcoding server, neither open source nor commercial.

Do you have recommendations? Do you use a custom built solution?

Telestream used to make one called FlipFactory that I have used (a long time ago). I believe it's called Vantage now. https://www.telestream.net/vantage/overview.htm
A lot of people do this kind of thing in the cloud now using things like Amazon's Elastic Transcoder
https://aws.amazon.com/elastictranscoder/


What is more important number of CUDA cores on GPU or VRAM for video editing and graphics? What is more important number of CUDA cores on GPU or VRAM for video editing and graphics? What are benefits from good graphic card? Better preview when working with 4k files with effects on them?

I am using Adobe Premiere and After Effects, sometimes Davinci Resolve...
Rendering times is not important to me much as smoother preview of 4k files when I edit them on timeline, smaller lagging when I put Magic Bullet Looks or something similar on clips...

It depends entirely on which software you are using, as well as plugins. Adobe Premiere takes advantage of CUDA, which radically increases rendering speeds and playback of specific file types.

But if you've applied filters, or 3rd party plugin filters that do not take advantage of CUDA optimization, your bottleneck will be the speed of your CPU.

Alternatively, certain 3D platforms are only accelerated by NVIDIA cards, others, require AMD.

The amount of VRAM affects how much data the card can handle in one single load (typically 1 frame), which comes into play mostly with 3D work.


Animating Latitude and Longitude points - how to do it? What tools? This is my first go at asking a video production related question...

I have a programming / data science background.

I have about 30,000 spatial co-ordinates (i.e x , y coordinates) These have come into existence over about 15 years.  I want to animate this.

So, I need a programmatic approach - there are just too many points.

Also, when each point appears...I want it to initially appear at say 100% opacity and then over about 15 frames fade to about 30% opacity.

What tool is the best to do this in...?

I am not sure if After Effects has sufficient programatic control..?

What about Flash..?  (i.e Adobe CC Animate).

Eventually, I want this animated series of points to be a layer and I will stick it on top of a base map. And do some other stuff.  So eventually, the layers will be composited in After Effects.

What tool should I use to create this animation...?

Thanks,

Mark

I would do this in Blender, which uses Python as a scripting language.  This gives you a powerful way to "fly" through the data as it animates.

If you are happy with just a static perspective of the map with the points being animated, R has an extraordinary range of graphing capabilties that can be used to generate animations.


How to change frame rate of MJPEG segments with/without re-encoding? I'm trying to record segments using a webcam and save these segments with a lower fps. I've tried this command, but it keeps giving me an error:

ffmpeg -f v4l2 -input_format mjpeg -video_size 800x600 -i /dev/video0 -c:v copy -c:a copy -f segment -segment_time 10 -reset_timestamps 1 -r 10 -strict -2 test_%04d.avi

The errors I get is:

[segment @ 0x15bf0e0] Non-monotonous DTS in output stream 0:0; previous: 86, current: 73; changing to 87. This may result in incorrect timestamps in the output file.
[segment @ 0x15bf0e0] Non-monotonous DTS in output stream 0:0; previous: 87, current: 74; changing to 88. This may result in incorrect timestamps in the output file.
[segment @ 0x15bf0e0] Non-monotonous DTS in output stream 0:0; previous: 88, current: 75; changing to 89. This may result in incorrect timestamps in the output file.

Anyone know how to do it right?

It's a warning, not an error (if it would be an error, FFmpeg would abort).

“Non-monotonous DTS” means that the DTS (Display Time Stamp) of some frame is less than the DTS of the previous frame.

This situation may cause many problems (with playback, seeking, etc.), so
FFmpeg fixes timestamps by rewriting some of them.

Here are your 3 warning messages:

[...] Non-monotonous DTS ... ; previous: 86, current: 73; changing to 87. This may ...
[...] Non-monotonous DTS ... ; previous: 87, current: 74; changing to 88. This may ...
[...] Non-monotonous DTS ... ; previous: 88, current: 75; changing to 89. This may ...

in a graphical form:


How to defeat the display info overlay on the HDMI output of the Canon XA25 including the status indicator? How to defeat the display info overlay on the HDMI output of the Canon XA25 including the status indicator.

An IT/AV colleague of mine needs to send the HDMI output of a Canon XA25 for streaming but can not get a completely clear video source void of the display overlay. He was able to shutdown everything else but the status light.

Actually two questions.

1) is it possible?

2) if so, how?

Please advise.

The only thing I can find about it is to set the Output OnScreen Displays to Off in the settings.  If that isn't doing it, then I'm not sure that it is possible.


What do I need to learn in order to repair an ogv or ogg video that is defective? Where to start? I recorded a video chat session with recordmydesktop in linux, but it is somehow defective. I give more details in a (big) footnote down here. I badly need to repair and play that video.

Please put me in the right direction, what should I learn about, which internet sites provide that information, and any clue on what you should thing the problem could be. I don't shy away from doing any learning efforts, but the question of Video Production is just too wide. Any help on narrowing the search for the probable cause would be very helpful.

This is the capture of the konsole during the recording:

  inma:~> recordmydesktop

  Initial recording window is set to:

  X:0   Y:0    Width:1366    Height:768

  Adjusted recording window is set to:

  X:6   Y:0    Width:1354    Height:768

  Your window manager appears to be KWin

  Initializing...

  Buffer size adjusted to 4096 from 4096 frames.

  Opened PCM device default

  Recording on device default is set to:

  1 channels at 22050Hz

  Capturing!

  ^CShutting down.

  Cached 72482 MB, from 215345 MB that were received.

  Average cache compression ratio: 66.3 %

  Saved 54287 frames in a total of 54245 requests

  ....

  STATE:ENCODING

  Encoding started!

  This may take several minutes.

  Pressing Ctrl-C will cancel the procedure (resuming will not be
  possible, but any portion of the video, which is already encoded won't
  be deleted).

  Please wait...

  Output file: out.ogv

  [89%]   [Cache File 141]

  Encoding finished!

  Wait a moment please...

  Done.

  Written 921301705 bytes

  (885658169 of which were video data and 35643536 audio data)

  Cleanning up cache...

  Done!!!

  Goodbye!

But now I try to play the file:

  inma:~> mplayer out.ogv

  MPlayer svn r34540 (Ubuntu), built with gcc-4.6 (C) 2000-2012 MPlayer
  Team

  mplayer: could not connect to socket

  mplayer: No such file or directory

  Failed to open LIRC support. You will not be able to use your remote
  control.

  Playing out.ogv.

  libavformat version 53.21.1 (external)

  Mismatching header version 53.19.0

  libavformat file format detected.

  [ogg @ 0x2b4a70f82940]Codec not found

  [ogg @ 0x2b4a70f82940]Codec not found

  LAVF_header: av_open_input_stream() failed

  Ogg : Warning found none bos page from unknown stream 1091944242

  libavformat file format detected.

  [ogg @ 0x2b4a70f82940]Codec not found

  [ogg @ 0x2b4a70f82940]Codec not found

  LAVF_header: av_open_input_stream() failed

  Exiting... (End of file)

What is happeing with this recording? Will

It appears you do not have the necessary codec to play the video in mplayer. You will need to find a codec that can decode it. I can't tell from the posted information what codec it is.


Premiere Elements "Debug Event": Keyframe error I have encountered a probable bug in Premiere Elements 10, and fortunately I've also found a workaround which is why I wrote my own answer below. But since I haven't been able to solve the underlying problem, I'd be very glad for additional ideas on how to fix the problem. Now here's the question:

How can I salvage a Premiere Elements project file (.prel) that can't be opened because of the following error:

Premiere Elements Debug Event
Premiere Elements has encountered an error:
[d:\pre\mediacore\mediafoundation\api\inc\Keyframe/Keyframe.h-142]

This error appears to occur sporadically on non-US versions of Windows. There is no previous indication during the editing session that anything may be wrong (saves and auto-saves work fine), but on the next restart, the project can't be opened. Other projects appear to be unaffected.

According to other users who have seen the same error (Google for "premiere debug keyframe" and you'll find some), there might be some connection with the introduction of DVD menus into the project, but I'm just speculating here.

Analyzing the files that fail to open in contrast to those that do open just fine shows one glaring problem: All lines in the project.prel file (which is just an XML file) where there should be decimal numbers in <StartKeyframe> or <Keyframe> tags are damaged. Example:

Correct version:

<StartKeyframe>-91445760000000000,100.,0,0,0.,0.,0.,0.</StartKeyframe>

Defective version:

<StartKeyframe>-91445760000000000,100,,0,0,0,,0,,0,,0,</StartKeyframe>

So apparently Premiere Elements at some point got confused by European locale settings and decided to save decimal values using the European decimal separator (comma) instead of the US decimal separator (dot). Of course it's then impossible to open that file correctly ever again.

Fortunately, at least in my tests, there are only three kinds of decimal values in .prel files:

integer floats: 1., 0., 100.
the single value 0.5
double precision floats: 0.16666666666666666, 1.000000000000000000000000

This makes it possible to fix the file using a regular expression replace. If your editor supports Perl-style regular expressions, you can search for

,(?:(?=[,<]|\d{10})|(?<=\b0,)(?=5\b))

and replace all with

.

This will replace all erroneous decimal commas (i. e. those that are either followed by another comma, an opening angle bracket, a decimal fraction of at least 10 digits, or the number 5 (but only if that comma is preceded by the single digit 0)) with a decimal point.

After that (be sure to back up your .prel file before you do this!), the file can be opened again correctly. However, as soon as it's saved again, the error is re-introduced.

Therefore, if someone has an idea how to actually fix this problem instead of patching it up with an admittedly wonky regex, I'd be most grateful.

One hint as to what the underlying problem might be: Around the time the error was introduced, Premiere spontaneously opened a little dialog window that said (in German) something like

"Premiere Elements is updating a component. Information is being transmitted..."

While this window was displayed, two Win7 UAC boxes popped up, asking me to allow the Windows Regserver to update my system. The actual commands it needed approval for were

C:\Windows\System32\regsvr32.exe /s
   "C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Premiere Elements 10\mc_dec_mpa_ds.ax"
   "C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Premiere Elements 10\mc_dec_mp2v_ds.ax"

and

C:\Windows\SysWOW64\regsvr32.exe /s
   "C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Premiere Elements 10\32\mc_dec_mpa_ds.ax"
   "C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Premiere Elements 10\32\mc_dec_mp2v_ds.ax"

(line breaks inserted for clarity).

The first time around, I allowed these actions (which in retrospect may have been a bad idea...); now this happens every time I'm trying to open a "patched" project file. It doesn't matter whether I now allow or refuse it - either way, Premiere writes a corrupted project file when I save my project.


Workflow for batch extracting many short clips from long footage I have longer video footage from which I would like to extract many short clips. To add some context, this is for a sign language research project where I have several long source videos, about 1 hour of footage each. I would like to extract individual signs from these videos and keep the main (long) footage intact. I would also like the ability to rename or fine tune the clip selections later on, if needed.

Can anyone recommend a video editing workflow that would allow me to select clips from the footage by setting in and out points for each clip with the option of naming each clip as I go. I need to have the ability to custom name each clip, a serialized name won't work in my situation.

Here's what I'm hoping for in my overall workflow:

Apply any needed color correction or other adjustments to the main
footage.
Apply a custom crop to the main footage.
Select and individually name short clips from within the main
footage.
Export the selected clips.

Thanks in advance for any help. I'm on Mac OSX and would prefer a solution that uses Final Cut, but I'm not sure if FCP can do this or not, or if it would require a plugin or something.

Here is the solution for Final Cut Pro, to export out all individual clips on your Timeline.  There is a FCP plugin called Primaries Exporter, in the App Store, which will very easily export all individual clips on the Timeline, to any folder you designate.  I've been using it myself for a couple of years now, and it works great.


What kind of external microphone can I use with my Galaxy smartphone? I'm feeling a bit stupid.

I want to make video podcasts using my Samsung Galaxy S3 but of course the internal mic isn't much good.

So i need an external mic.

Can I use pretty much any battery-powered mic and plug it into my phone (maybe needs an adapter?)

I bought an Edutige ETM 001 but it wasn't compatible. I'm told i need an Edutige EIM 001 but I'm in Asia at the moment and can't find one here...

I'd be grateful for your help!

Consider a couple of products from Australian microphone maker Røde.

Røde VideoMic Me: http://en.rode.com/microphones/videomicme
Røde smartLav+: http://en.rode.com/microphones/smartlav-plus

Røde makes pretty high-quality products and are leaders in making new products like these mcicrophones which are designed to plug directly into the TRRS connectors of smartphones.

I have no connection with Røde except as a satisfied, paying customer.


60fps and 30fps clips exported into one file? I have two cameras: one films in 30fps and the other in 60fps. These settings cannot be changed (why the manufacturer did that I don't know).

When I export the finished product, which is the better setting to go by? HD 30fps or HD 60fps?

I am using Sony Vegas Pro 13.

Export to 30p. 29.97 to be exact if there is the option. Exporting at 60fps is only going to bloat the file size (twice as many frames) per second-- if it's 60p and not 60i of data to encode.

Secondly, viewers are akin to watching media playback in or around the 24-30fps range. It's what our eyes are used to, so your viewers wont be distracted as to why the 60 fps has less jutter than your 30 fps material.

Lastly, exporting at 30 fps will convert your 60 fps content to 30 fps by dropping out every other frame. Doing the opposite would mean doubling each 30fps content... and it will not look quite the same.

There are filmmakers that have rallied for moving towards a higher frame rate, lower resolution per frame exhibition format. The Hobbit was one of the most recent films (only one I can think of) that was actually screened in what they coined as HFS (High Frames per Second). I saw it in theaters in this format, and to be honest, it didn't feel like film because of it.

Go 30p. 29.97 Progressive.


Final Cut Pro X editing multiple overlayed images This is less a direct problem more a query on the best way to handle things.  I do a lot of videos that end up with a lot of overlayed graphics, the videos are a boardgame and the overlays are the cards held in the players hands.  I cant video the hands so I scan the cards and overlay them afterwards in FCPX and then animate them in and out as required, but this leads me to have loooooads of layers in the end.  Im wondering if there is an easier way at all to handle this?

You could try to use a compound clip for the hand of one player with the cards inside. That would reduce the main timeline from look confusing with too many clips attached.


Center Spin turntable I am doing now a Turntable video Project similar to https://www.jamesallen.com/engagement-rings/solitaire/14k-white-gold-15mm-comfort-fit-engagement-ring-item-22606

I am right now working a lot time to make sure that the item is exactly entered on the turntable so it should look good

Is there any software that could fix the video if it was not centered while capturing?

see here https://arqspin.com/product-tour/manage/dewobbler/ this website does a good job but it converts it to images, and even if you export it as a video it will become bumpy like a gif...

Or does anyone have any experience or ideas how i could make sure that it is exactly centered?

Thank you in advance

I would think you could make sure it's centered by having a horizontal object (just a dowel, or something) placed at the center of the item. Turn on the turntable, then look at it through your camera's viewfinder. If the dowel moves back and forth horizontally, then it's not centered on the dowel.

As for fixing in post, it's certainly possible, though maybe a little time consuming. BTW, the "fixed" video in the dewobbler example still has a small amount of wobble that I personally find more irritating than the original large wobble. But maybe it's just me.

To fix it in post, you need to mentally define the center of your object. Then as it moves back and forth, move the center of the object to the center of the frame and set a keyframe. The keyframes will probably create a periodic pattern like a sine wave or something similar. In fact, it seems like that's mainly what they were doing in the dewobbler video - just setting keyframes for moving the center. This can be done in most video editors or motion graphics apps like FCPX, Motion, Premiere, After Effects, etc. Just use the normal transform tool.


Why to use lower case "1080p" and "1080i" but not capital "1080P" and "1080I"? I'm curious about why we mostly use and see "1080p" and "1080i" over "1080P" and "1080I"? (and the same on 720/480/360) Does anybody know any professional reason of that?

I've seen some capital ones, but mostly with lower case, I'm wondering the reason why, but didn't find an answer.

For example,

Wikipedia uses 1080p and 1080i，there is no single 1080P or 1080I in these two pages
European Broadcasting Union use 720p, 1080p, 1080i in their tech doc
Netflix uses 1080p, 720p in the Help Center(Resolution under Netflix Features)
Youtube uses 1080p in their Help Center
Apple Supports also uses 1080p in their doc, HDV use 1080i / 720i on the logo
Google and DuckDuckGo prompts keywords with only 1080p even I input 1080P!

For above examples, I refer to some huge companies or organizations, but to be honestly I didn't browse all their public materials, so I'm not so sure they do only use "1080p" but not "1080P", just want to show the resolve I found.

Really appreciate if somebody can resolve my question, many thanks.

Here are my starting premises.

In the scientific community, There are some standards in the assignation of letters for units.
Normally a capital letter is assigned if the unit cames after the last name of a person, like Kelvin or Newton, and a lowercase letter in the case of just words like the case of a meter.

In the case of the liter, where it is not based on the last name of a person, the usage of capital L is permitted to avoid confusion with the number 1.

There are also some conventions on the usage of acronyms, where you should use Upper Case letters, for example, PPI.

And there are some more on the usage of abbreviates, where lower case letters should be used.

My assumption is that convention 1 and 2 are the most important in this case.   Although in this case, they are not units, the reasoning could apply.
p and i, in my opinion, are not acronyms, so the capital letter would not override the first 2 conventions. They can also derive just from an abbreviation so premise 4 would also apply.

Regarding the K in a 4K resolution, according to one note in the wikipedia it is just an informal way to say thousand, but with an implied unit, in this case the implied unit could be a pixel, 4kpx. It is based on the idea of the kilo but does not use the standard notation.
But something curious is that it is the common practice to denote a Kilobyte and not kilobyte. Probably to make it more uniform with some other prefixes in Uppercase, like Megabyte and Terabyte.
One idea about prefixes was that lowercase prefixes were used to define smaller than the base unit, and Uppercase to define greater than the unit... but the kilogram has a really strange history. Add that the unit for temperature is a big K.
It could also be just a gimmick. We were used to see the capital M (based on the standard prefixes) regarding resolution, for example, "a 24Mpx camera". Using a lower case letter probably has less impact than using a capital letter.
"Goodbye to the old 1080p, Wellcome the 4k"
"Goodbye to the old 1080p, Wellcome the 4K"