How can I crop and export a video to be 480x480 in Premiere? I've seen several posts regarding how to resize a video to have a 1:1 aspect ratio, but all of the posts show how to do it by making a Sequence in Adobe Premiere Pro CC and crop to 1080x1080 or 720x720. My video is 774x632, and I'd like to export it to 480x480. I tried importing a 480x480 image and overlaying it on the video, then cropping the video to fit that, but when I went to export it, the settings were stuck at 720x480 with black spacing on the sides of the video, and I couldn't change settings. Is there a good way to do this with Premiere or any other software? For what it's worth, I'm a DevOps engineer and not proficient in video editing so there may be an obvious solution I missed, and any advice would be appreciated!

Downscaling video

By scaling down a video, you are essentially compressing an amount of pixels to a less amount, which per definition means quality loss. While modern techniques and algorithms are not bad at their job, scaling videos, especially to odd multiples, can give odd results. But if you are really sure that this is what you want, here's how you can do it in Premiere Pro:

Setting up the sequence

In Premiere, you first create a new sequence of the desired resolution for your video. In the New Sequence pop-up, under the Settings tab, select Editing Mode: Custom. Now fill in the Frame Size to 480 horizontal and 480 vertical. Fill in other values in the screen as desired and appropiate for the project.

Resizing the video

Add your video to the just created sequence. Now we need to calculate the values at which we are going to scale the video:

480 / 774 ≈ .62 as vertical scale value
480 / 632 ≈ .76 as horizontal scale value

So then we simply fill in these values in the Effect Controls of the video. (Make sure the Uniform Scale option is not selected, otherwise you wont be able to set a different value for the width.)

And thats it! You can now export the sequence, Premiere Pro will automaticly take over the sequence settings.


Canon XF105 streaming Can the Canon XF105 be used for streaming to Facebook Live and record the service simultaneously?  We are trying to utilize an existing Canon XF105 to stream to Facebook Live during our services while connecting sound to a digital sound mixer.  Thanks.

Looking at the capabilities of the XF105, there is no reason you could not simultaneously record to memory card and use the SDI or HDMI output of the camera.  It appears that you can get clean outputs on those feeds to avoid menus and such being present on the output.

The XF105 can't directly stream however, so you will need some type of device to create the stream.  You can either use a computer with a capture card or use a dedicated stream encoder that generates the stream directly.

For audio, if you have the ability to send an aux output from the mixing console, I would suggest using the XLR inputs on the XF105 in line mode to take a direct audio output feed from the sound board itself.  This way both your recording and the stream will have direct audio from the console.  If possible, doing a custom mix on an aux output is slightly preferable since ideal levels will vary slightly between the room vs a direct recording, but using room levels will produce sufficiently high quality results if you don't have the manpower to do both mixes simultaneously.


What software to use for lighting and rendering 3d animation shorts? I am new to 3d animation. I have always wanted to make 3d animation shorts (cartoons) and have now made the plunge. Over the past few months I have learnt to model, rig and animate characters (Maya/zbrush). I want to take it a step further and learn lighting and rendering. After doing research for the past week, I have realised I have no choice but to ask here as several forum posts just mention that big studios use their own proprietary pipelines and softwares, while many indie-animators use all kinds of softwares from NUKE to after effects, V-ray to mental-ray. The thing is that people are using such software for all kind of VFX (like NUKE for live-action and v-ray for photo-realism). Can someone please guide me on the following questions:

For 3d/CGI animation shorts, what it the right lighting and rendering software to learn?

Do you recommend any tutorials out there that I can look at for those specific softwares? I do not want to be looking at a 10 hours video tutorial series on v-ray if they are teaching interior design lighting examples instead of how to light up a cartoon cgi animation. So unfortunately google has been unable to help me find specific tutorials on this.

I do not want to compromise on the quality so difficulty level and price of the software doesnt matter (not yet anyways).

There seem to be a few basic misconceptions here.  For cartoons you don't need anything fancy as long as cell-shading is supported, which is typically a camera filter.

Lighting is actually done in your 3d animation software.  The job of a render engine like Mental Ray or V-ray is simply to process the scene you build to generate the final image, but it takes the geometry, light sources, materials, and cameras that you have defined in your animation software.

I'm personally a big fan of Mental Ray in general, but that's just because of the fact it is included with my 3d animation package of choice (SoftImage).  I thought it was included in most editions of Maya as well, but it might not still be.  I don't remember which render engines are included with Maya, but they should be more than sufficient for your purposes.  For cartoon rendering, you really don't need a hyper-accurate ray tracing engine that can do good physical simulation (which is the point of most of the third party render engines).

Lighting and rendering is also a complex and broad topic that can't really be covered in a couple of simple tutorials.  The basics are very similar to building your model, you just choose the types of lights you want and place them throughout the scene and then place one or more cameras to allow you to render viewpoints.  Lights and cameras can also be animated, just like your characters and scene.

Do your lighting in Maya and try rendering it out in Maya.  If you run in to any specific issues while working on trying to get the look you are going for, you can always post a screen shot here with a specific question and we should be able to offer more directed feedback about how to accomplish what you are trying to do.


ffmpeg - Problem with zoompan I'm trying to create a video from a set of images, adding texts to each image that slide from one side to the center ( one left to right, another right to left ), with fading between each videos ( not between text but between video ).

Actually I have this code that generare a simple video, with text sliding and fade:

ffmpeg -y \
    -loop 1 -t 10 -i img001.jpg  \
    -loop 1 -t 10 -i img002.jpg  \
-filter_complex \
"\
[0:v]\
drawtext=fontfile='IndieFlower.ttf':enable='between(t,0,5)':\
text='Caption 1 Scena 1':\
fontsize=60:fontcolor=white:\
x=t*300*lte(t*300\,(w-text_w)/2)+(w-text_w)/2*gt(t*300\,(w-text_w)/2):y=h-line_h-10:\
shadowx=3:shadowy=3:shadowcolor=black:\
boxborderw=10:box=1:boxcolor=red@0.8,\
drawtext=fontfile='IndieFlower.ttf':enable='between(t,5,10)':\
text='Caption 2 Scena 1':\
fontsize=60:fontcolor=white:\
x=(w-(t-5)*500)*gt(w-(t-5)*500\,(w-text_w)/2)+(w-text_w)/2*lte(w-(t-5)*500\,(w-text_w)/2):y=h-line_h-10:\
shadowx=3:shadowy=3:shadowcolor=black:\
boxborderw=10:box=1:boxcolor=red@0.8\
[final1];\
[1:v]\
fade=t=in:st=0:d=1,\
drawtext=fontfile='IndieFlower.ttf':enable='between(t,0,5)':\
text='Caption 1 Scena 2':\
fontsize=60:fontcolor=red:\
x=t*300*lte(t*300\,(w-text_w)/2)+(w-text_w)/2*gt(t*300\,(w-text_w)/2):y=h-line_h-10:\
shadowx=3:shadowy=3:shadowcolor=white:\
boxborderw=10:box=1:boxcolor=black@0.8,\
drawtext=fontfile='IndieFlower.ttf':enable='between(t,5,10)':\
text='Caption 2 Scena 2':\
fontsize=60:fontcolor=red:\
x=(w-(t-5)*500)*gt(w-(t-5)*500\,(w-text_w)/2)+(w-text_w)/2*lte(w-(t-5)*500\,(w-text_w)/2):y=h-line_h-10:\
shadowx=3:shadowy=3:shadowcolor=white:\
boxborderw=10:box=1:boxcolor=black@0.8\
[final2];\
[final1][final2]concat[final]
" \
-pix_fmt yuvj422p -t 20 -map '[final]' o.mp4

It works well, but now, I'd like to add a zoompan effect to both of the images; so I change the code as follow:

[0:v]\
format=yuvj422p,
scale=iw*10:ih*10,\
zoompan=z='min(zoom+0.0015,1.5)':d=500:x='iw/2-(iw/zoom/2)':y='ih/2 (ih/zoom/2)':s=640x480,\
drawtext=fontfile='IndieFlower.ttf':enable='between(t,0,5)':\

...

[1:v]\
format=yuvj422p,
scale=iw*10:ih*10, \
zoompan=z='min(zoom+0.0015,1.5)':d=500:x='iw/2-(iw/zoom/2)':y='ih/2-(ih/zoom/2)':s=640x480,\
fade=t=in:st=0:d=1,\
...

but this does not work; in the final video there is only the first "video", with the zoompan, the second video does not appear at all!

What I'm doing wrong? I'd like to create a simple zoompan between two video.

zoompan is a weirdly designed filter. It operates on individual frames, whereas most filters operate on a sequence of pictures, whether they are fed from a video file or an image sequence. pzoom should be used for a looped image, and frame sequence generation should be stopped by making d=1.

Change to

zoompan=z='min(pzoom+0.0015,1.5)':d=1:x='iw/2-(iw/zoom/2)':y='ih/2 (ih/zoom/2)':s=640x480

This will fix the zoompan.


Batch processing in Camtasia Studio or others I am making some tutorial videos for which I need to have same production setting. Like
1. Noise cancellation. Camtasia studio has a option where it automatically cancels the noise.
2. Intro and Conclusion. I want to add some intro slide/video before the starting of the video and same with the conclusion. Though I can do it individually it will take quite significant time adding to each and than rendering.

Is there an options where by default I can have these actions performed on my every video and batch process them. Or if some other software which can do the same.

so Batch processing is very possible in Camtasia Studio.
Here are my personal step-by-setp instrcutions:

Import the videos you wish to Bacth Render into a new Camtasia Studio project file.
Add the first video to the Timeline and then save it as a Camtasia Studio Project file.
Remove that video from the timeline and import the other video you imported onto the timeline and save it as a different Camtasia Studio Project file.
(You can repeat these steps as many times as you need to to have all videos you wish to Batch render)
Find the 'Tools' tab and hover the cursor down to 'sharing' and a 'Batch production' should be avaliable to click. Click it.
Click on the 'Add files/projects' button and select the files you made earlier.
Click "Next" after you have selected all the videos you wish to Batch Render.
Choose a preset from the top drop down menu.
Clcik "Next".
You can choose the location the rendered videos will be saved to and if you want to have each video into sub-folders.
Click on the "Finish" button.
Your videos should be rendering.

I hope I helped and hope you have a nice day :)


Best render settings for youtube I am using Vegas Pro as an editing tool for my videos. What codec (currently using x264vfw) and settings are best to render 1080p 60fps video for YouTube if I don't care about either rendering time or file size/upload time?

I think this article should help you:
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1722171?hl=en


Do video formats support colour profiles? Recently, I was reading a wiki, dedicated to one popular cartoon show and stumbled upon an interesting problem:

From left to right: frames from the US iTunes, Australian iTunes and US iTunes version with CC in a video player

As you may see, it's the same frame, but colours are different. So, it makes me wonder: does H.264 standard / MP4 container supports any kind of colour profiles (like, ICC in JPEG) and if yes, does any player support it? And what about DVD/Blu-Ray disks? Or there is no way to watch the same version of any video, as it was shot by it's creators? Thanks. :)

No most video formats (nearly all) do not allow custom ICC color profiles to be embedded. (Improvemet/correction: MP4s can have color profiles tagged in the metadata of a video file.) most video on the consumer end is intended for the REC.709 color space. sRGB is similar and uses the same primaries. transcoding (including compressing) will almost always result is a slight shift in color accuracy, saturation, gamma curve, or black and white level shift. This is made worse due to converting between RGB and YCbCr color spaces.


ffmpeg: How to convert quicktime (iPhone) video to mp4 format? I need to convert quicktime (.mov) video file recorded by iphone, into mp4 format using ffmpeg in php.

I tried several commands but it did not work for me.

I tried following command that converted into .mp4 but just audio was there. No video was playing.

exec("ffmpeg -i input.mov out.mp4");

Any help in this case will be appreciated.

Thanks

I'm new to ffmpeg, but if you want the codecs to remain the same and the data wrapped in mp4 instead of mov, I believe the following will work:

 ffmpeg -i video.mov -c copy video.mp4

The command you posted may have worked just fine, but your computer is having trouble playing the video data. This is almost always a codec issue.

You can compare the data in the mov input with the mp4 output using ffprobe. Compare the output of the commands ffprobe video.mov and ffprobe video.mp4. If the above command works as expected, then the data should read the same under the codecs. Only the container related data should be different.


The ProRes of Premiere Pro? I'm going to be editing more and more DSLR videos, most notably music videos for my band as we start releasing singles and want to know if there is an intermediate format for both cutting and exporting that rivals the kind of features found in ProRes 422 used in Final Cut?

Is it possible to use ProRes in Premiere Pro anyway (with the same advantages in editing speed and bit-depth)?

I-frame encoding/decoding for speed.
Higher sample depth for making image modifications.
Intended for 720p 60fps H.264 footage captured from Canon EOS 60D.

If ProRes itself can be used in Premiere Pro, I have all the tools I need to begin transcoding. Just wondering if anyone has some workflow/codec tips for using an intermediate editing/exporting format in Premiere instead of directly editing .MOVs.

I'm not using an overly powerful Mac but it seems to do the job with editing MOVs and AVCHD files directly (mostly using preview renders). 60fps shots and other HD with effects applied start to make it crumple without rendering previews. It's a MacBook Pro 13" 2.53Ghz Core 2 Duo, 8GB DDR3, 1TB internal 2.5" drive (slow).

I intend to use ProRes or similar footage on an external 7200rpm FireWire drive.

There's a philosophical difference between delivery codecs (e.g. mpeg4, avchd), editing codecs (e.g. DNxHD, ProRes, Cineform), and capture codecs (e.g. r3d, DVCPROHD).  While almost any codec can be used for each of these three stages, your workflow needs will help you decide which are best suited for each stage.

The question you seem to be asking, is "Which editing codec should I transcode to for an online edit?".  Editing codecs are generally less compressed and larger on disk, to make playback simpler from a processing perspective.  It's definitely possible to use ProRes in Premiere, and coming from DSLR (as of July 2011) 422 is probably (technically) overkill, but it is a reasonable default choice.  Another editing codec option to consider is Cineform, since you can get the 1920x1080 codec for free now, as part of the GoPro Cineform Studio package.

There are even specialized tools to help you with transcoding batches of files, such as Magic Bullet Grinder.  If you're concerned about editing speed, there's even a chance that Premiere and your computer will be powerful enough to slog through your capture files as-is without transcoding, saving you from this step altogether.

As always, try it for yourself, and test, test, test, your workflow before putting it into production.


Overlay an image onto live video feed I want to take a live video feed (say from a security camera) and overlay an image over the top of the live video. Is there hardware/software to do this realtime? I don't care about storing the data, and I can't store it to disk first, it needs to be live video in/out with overlay composited on top. Any suggestions?

Gstreamer offers the ability to overlay images on videos and has also excellent live streaming capabilities.

Some useful links:

https://coaxion.net/blog/2013/10/streaming-gstreamer-pipelines-via-http/

https://developer.ridgerun.com/wiki/index.php/Fast_GStreamer_overlay_element#Picture_overlay_examples


Can Davinci Resolve convert a movie into (png) pictures...? I'm a new user of Davinci Resolve. I would like to know if I can use it for converting a video into its pictures ? Do you have a tutorial that explains to me how is the workflow ? maybe on Youtube ? very thanks.

From the Blackmagic Forum "You can only export TIFF files (which then can be converted to png's with an external tool), not PNG's directly. "


Export to wide screen (16:9) from Final Cut pro X Apologies for the noob question but I've just started trying to learn FCP and couldn't find the settings to export my movie in 16:9 aspect ratio.

Can anyone tell me the quickest way to go about it?
(source material has a variety of different aspect ratios)

This answer assumes that the video that you're editing is already in a 16:9 ratio, otherwise when you export there will be black bars on the sides or above and below your video.

A 16:9 ratio is the standard for HDTV and Full HD. You're probably familiar with the Youtube video qualities - 360p, 480p, 720p, 1080p, etc. These are all 16:9. Therefore, all you have to do is export in one of these resolutions - 1080p is Full HD and 720p is HD.

For more reading on common aspect ratios, reference this Wikipedia page.


MP4 / h.264 patent issues? I know this is not a legal forum but I'm assuming this is a daily issue for most people on this site since h.264 video (AVC / MPEG4 part10) is so ubiquitous (and there is a legal tag here).

I've read about patent issues with h.264 video, but am a bit confused about it. Is there any problem with creating a video (using ffmpeg or any other tool) for commercial use? Or is the problem only for anybody writing software that creates this video type?

IANAL, but as far as I understand it, if you're charging viewers for h.264 / MPEG-4 AVC content you may need to pay license fees. Even though x264 / ffmpeg are Free with a big F, they are just software libraries for encoding video streams into the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC format, which is covered by the MPEG patent. But the threshold for when fees are applicable is fairly high.
According to MPEG-LA, the license holders for H.264 / MPEG-4 AVC, the license fees applicable are:

Where End User pays for AVC Video:
Subscription (not limited by title)

100,000 or fewer subscribers/yr = no royalty;

100,000 to 250,000 subscribers/yr = $25,000;

250,000 to 500,000 subscribers/yr = $50,000;

500,000 to 1M subscribers/yr = $75,000;

1M subscribers/yr = $100,000

Title by Title

12 minutes or less = no royalty;

12 minutes in length = lower of (a) 2% or (b) $0.02 per title

Enterprise cap:

$3.5M/yr 2006 - 07,
$4.25M/yr 2008 - 09,
$5M/yr 2010,
$6.5 million per year 2011 - 2015

They also stated that they:

…will continue not to charge royalties for Internet Video that is free to end users (known as “Internet Broadcast AVC Video”) during the entire life of this License.

So if you're putting it on the internet free you don't need to pay them license fees, ever.
There's other fee schedules for software developers (though Cisco have released free source code and binary implementations of h.264 encoding software and have said they will not pass on any licensing charges for it).


H.264 slow scrubbing and playback performance I have two videos, both roughly the same spec:

A: H.264/AAC 1920x808 24FPS ~3015kb/s
Using Quicktime player I can scrub through this movie smoothly and with fine detail. Jumping from one position to another, playback will happen immediately.

B: H.264/AAC 1920x1080 25FPS ~3662kb/s
This video can’t seem to handle the scrubbing as well. Dragging the playback head hangs constantly, I keep getting a beach-ball when jumping from one position to another.

I realise that the data rate on B: is higher, but is there anything I can do to improve it’s performance other than re-encoding at a reduced data rate?

Are there any tools available other than VLC/Quicktime media info, that will show me more detailed encoding options so I can further optimise B: based on A: if I have to re-encode?

Usually in these situations I'd say maybe you have a bottleneck from your storage media. But with those bit rates any Ssd or hdd should be fine unless the files are really large. Thus it sounds to me that you have either a bottleneck with your GPU, Cpu, or Ram. All are equally important for smooth playback. I'm guessing the issue is the increased resolution of the second clip.

Without knowing more about your specs I would say your best options are to create low res Proxies. In premiere it's pretty easy, you just have to modify your project ingest settings. You might as well create Proxies for all the files, it won't matter anyways as it will relink on export.


Reduce File Size of Dxtory Video Without Causing Lag I'm making videos while playing on my computer. Everything is working well, however 15 minutes of video consumes 50GB, which is too much space. I use Dxtory with Lagarith Lossless Codec.  If I use the default Codecs I get lag.

How can I reduce this 50GB without causing lag?

The problem with compression is that it is a double edged sword. It can reduce the space required to store video, however it also takes processing time to perform the compression.

When you are running a game, however, the CPU and GPU are already busy keeping the game running smoothly. In order to shrink the file size, you must either reduce the quality or increase the compression. If you increase the compression, the computer has to take more away from the game and you start seeing lag.

The only ways around this are to:

a) reduce the resolution of the video you are recording.  Throwing
away information is free and will also make applying further
compression less processor intensive.
b) move the encoding to another system.  Some recorders can send the data to another computer and have that computer perform the encoding.  I am not sure if Dxtory supports this or not though.
c) Continue to use the uncompressed files and transcode the video after you record a clip.

Of these options, c is probably the easiest way to maintain maximum quality.  You can use a program like Handbrake to take the large file and compress it down to something of reasonable size, just so long as you don't have to record more than you have room for at a given time.  Note that this process can take quite some time depending on the quality level you choose and how fast your computer is.


Vegas Pro 13 : Project's and Timeline's framerate are suddenly not the same So here's the thing : I'm editing on Vegas Pro 13, 25fps according to my origninal files. I just imported some sound I "mixed" externally.
And now, my timeline acts in 24fps although my project is still in 25fps. I don't know if it has something to do with the files I imported but the ctrl Z option is dead now. I can't figure out what the problem is, it's the first time I see anything like that in Vegas. The timeline should act according to the project setting, right ?  As shown in the screenshots bellow, I can't control every frame.

Are you sure that your footage is in 25 fps? If so, try and see if you can change the interpretation of the clip like in premiere. Other than that, a restart is the only thing I got left to propose.


Rendering video with custom data provided by user I want to create a website where the user could input some data like texts, images, and based on that the video that contains that data will be rendered and downloaded.
Is there any services that could generate such a video based on project created on, for example After Effect, which will be display some user data in that film. The service must communicate via http in order to receive the data that will be presented on that video?
I thought about the rendering farms and After Effect scripts but I don't know if I will be able to do this using these tools?
Any suggestions?

The most sensible thing to do would be to host the service on your own. If you want users to input text, images and maybe even videos, you need a storage-unit which writes and reads these files incredibly quickly. An SSD-based server with a raid security would be appropriate. For the rendering: You could set up a standard After-Effects or Nuke Project. For After-Effects, you would need to do a lot of scripting to change the individual elements from your comp, but for Nuke, it should be easier, since Nuke is entirely in python and deals well with custom python-scripts. You'd then have to automate upon request that, first off, the Nuke-Script gets duplicated for the running instance, then replace the contents (text, images, etc.) accordingly, and render out. For rendering, I would recommend a GPU or CPU-based rendering-cluster with as many gpus or cpus as you need.
There probably are services that kind of do something similar, but they are either crazy expensive and not adjustable, or deviate from what you want to do.
Just don't expect this ordeal to be cheap and you won't run into bad surprises.


Looking for a tile slideshow transition effet i am looking for a way to produce this transition effect for a slideshow :

i mainly use After Effects and Final Cut but i couldn't find a way to do it.
Also i am ready to use any other software, free or not.

does anybody knows ?

thanks

Here is something similar, http://www.mihaipanait.com/portfolio-items/hexagon-transitions/

I know Noise Industries used to have that effects with squares and I am sure you could make the squares into hexagon shapes if you wanted...but their website seems to be down at the minute

Also check out videohive.com they have some pretty cheap templates for transitions etc and you may be able to find something that you can tweak to make work


'Seamless' loop hangs/pauses at beginning of clip I've got a short video that I'd like to export as an mp4 and use in a seamless loop.

The content of the video is very abstract so it doesn't really matter where the loop occurs/what parts of the clip are butting against each other. In practice with the same file, within editors and elsewhere, edits are always seamless.

While working within both Premiere CS6 and After Effects CS6 the clip loops seamlessly. It's when I export and view the media that the short pause/stutter is visible.

I've tried to output the video in many file formats (H.264, Quicktime, MPEG4, etc.) using various export settings. The resulting file always has a short pause at the beginning of the loop when viewed on OS X Quicktime and VLC, as well as when embedded as HTML5 video (but don't get distracted by the web component.)

An example mp4 file is embedded here: http://mechaneyes.com/vid/ . It's slight, but the video is 2 seconds long, so you'll repeatedly see the hiccup. If needed you can right click on the video and save it to view elsewhere.

Thanks in advance for any assist you can give!

Within an editor each frame is complete in itself, but in the output formats you mention, the video is almost always compressed in such a way that only certain frames (called I-frames) are complete and independent. The rest are 'difference' frames that rely on information from surrounding frames.

At a loop point there's often a need for the player to start over, to refill its buffers and prime the engine. You can often help out by ending your segment with a I-frame. But the only sure way to replicate what you see in the editor is to output only I-frames. MJPEG is an example of a codec that always does this, but there are other codecs that can be instructed to. The downside is that the video will be considerably larger.

Try MJPEG and see if it does what you need.


Video player that has a cross dissolve option when changing the clip so I need a Video Player, that can change Videoclips, using cross dissolve or overlay. It will be used by a DJ and he would like to be able to switch the Videos live by himself but not having any hard cut.
Do you have any ideas?

Thanks

The functionality you seek is standard for a item called a Video Switcher.  Video switchers can be found as both standalone units (low-end to 4K broadcast) and as software (also low-end to high-end).  In the latter case, the computer running the switcher needs video I/O functionality, which typically requires adding one or more special cards (video I/O is different than a graphics card driving a computer monitor).


What is the best way to record from a single fixed camera? I run a video system at my church that consists of two fixed robotic cameras among other things. The person who installed this equipment didn't have experience with video production, only display, so instead of a video mixer we have video input switchers, needless to say that doesn't work well for recording. The end result is that currently I'm only recording from a single camera.

An example of my work is here: http://www.mbcdet.com/media/. I'll disclose this is a Christian sermon so if you don't agree with what is said in the video I understand but I would appreciate if the feedback is pertinent to the question, thanks.

I know that ultimately recording from the second camera at the same time and mixing the inputs is a good way to go, or purchasing a video mixer and mixing the video inputs real time is also a good way to go. What I'm looking for is an answer on recording the video from a fixed camera in a way that doesn't seem boring, so to speak.

There isn't really a good answer to that.  There isn't a whole lot you can do with a fixed shot and making adjustments on a live shot is always a danger of being distracting, even when controlling it by hand as an experienced operator.  Making adjustments via a Pan Tilt Unit while the camera is live is going to be anything but smooth and will be very distracting.

I'd recommend either recording from both to edit in post or picking up one of the Black Magic Studio ATEM's (under $1000 HD video switcher with built in H264 encoding).


How to make a video from a still image and an audio file? I have an image file (png) and an audio file (aiff).  How do I combine them to make a video file that shows the still image and plays the audio file?

Target operating system: either OS X Lion or Ubuntu, using only free software, must be command-line driven (no GUI solutions please).  Thanks in advance!

To expand upon ObscureRobot's answer, use ffmpeg like so:

ffmpeg -loop 1 -f image2 -r 2 -i input1.png -i input2.aiff -c:v libx264 -c:a copy -shortest output.mp4

-loop 1 -f image2 -r 2 -i input1.png tells ffmpeg to loop input1.png forever, at a frame rate of 2fps. -c:v libx264 tells it to use x264 to encode the video, and -c:a copy tells it to simply copy the audio, without encoding. -shortest makes ffmpeg stop when the shortest input ends - input2.aiff in this case.


Is H.264 subject to exploits / are some H.264 codecs subject to exploits? How safe are H.264 streams from exploits? More exactly, are the consumer-grade H.264 codes generally "safe"?

I am currently gratuitously transcoding A/V files to avoid being exposed to possible exploits. This was after I noticed that some older video files will have very curious errors in them, errors that make me wonder if they are indeed exploit attempts ("strange, why's there a STRING in the middle of the stream?"). I do know that in some older formats/codecs, there were indeed past exploits.

Since H.264 codecs are a bit more modern than some of the older ones, I would like to know if such an elementary stream is safe in the "usual suspect" players: Windows Media, VLC, Quicktime and the major browsers (I use Chrome and Firefox, but should include Safari and InternetExploder just in case).

In that case, if the video is an H.264 elementary stream, I would not need to do a sanitization transcode step, and just create a new MP4 container. This would at least remove any container-based exploits. In other words:

ffmpeg -i <file> -c copy newcontainer.mp4

(or -c:v copy, and transcode the audio, etc).

Clearly, white room safety would require transcoding everything, but that's getting all Felix Unger.

All anyone might be able to say is that there are no known holes in the various players.  (I don't know if that's true, just that it's impossible to know that there are no undiscovered bugs in a complex piece of code.)  H.264 streams are complex enough to have lots of corner cases.  They're parsed with speed-optimized code written in C and assembly.

You're quite correct that this is a HUGE attack surface, esp. when you allow arbitrary input formats, including ones with crufty old demuxers / decoders written by some random guy a long time ago, who might or might not have had security in mind.  This article about ffmpeg security fixes is quite interesting.

re: ascii strings inside video files.  That's not uncommon at all.  x264 output embeds a string like

x264 - core 142 r2455 021c0dc - H.264/MPEG-4 AVC codec - Copyleft 2003-2014 - http://www.videolan.org/x264.html - options: cabac=1 ref=6 deblock=1:2:2 analyse=0x3:0x133 me=umh subme=10 psy=1 psy_rd=1.00:0.50 mixed_ref=1 me_range=24 chroma_me=1 trellis=2 8x8dct=1 cqm=0 deadzone=21,11 fast_pskip=1 chroma_qp_offset=-4 threads=6 lookahead_threads=1 sliced_threads=0 nr=200 decimate=1 interlaced=0 bluray_compat=0 constrained_intra=0 bframes=6 b_pyramid=2 b_adapt=2 b_bias=0 direct=3 weightb=1 open_gop=0 weightp=2 keyint=250 keyint_min=25 scenecut=40 intra_refresh=0 rc_lookahead=60 rc=crf mbtree=1 crf=25.0 qcomp=0.60 qpmin=0 qpmax=69 qpstep=4 ip_ratio=1.40 aq=1:0.50

And of course strings will find lots of sequences of characters in the ascii range, just by random chance.  Some containers use sequences of ascii characters as the magic values to indicate what type of object something is.  e.g. mp4 has "moov", "mdat", and other atoms.  If you can pick any sequence of 4 bytes for your format, you might as well pick ASCII characters to make things easier to debug.

I think transcoding all incoming video would incur a HUGE quality / CPU / storage overhead.  Transcoding with nightly builds of ffmpeg would potentially shield you from known bugs in the typically old version of ffmpeg in VLC stable releases, and whatever bugs are in closed source stuff from Microsoft and Apple.

Remuxing is not a bad compromise.

There's also a balance between destroying metadata vs. passing through more potentially harmful stuff.  (e.g. chapters, subtitles, ...)

If I were actually doing this, I'd probably store my output in mkv files.  Using a different container is maybe better insurance against any weirdness from an input mp4 getting passed on to an output mp4.

Also, if you're actually doing this, I guess you'd run ffmpeg (or MP4Box for just mp4->mp4 remuxing) in a sandbox chroot or vm, or even just as an un-privileged user, so successful exploits are contained.


Transport moving object/person to another video For a video.How can i keep a moving person from a video,and move that person (moving person) to another video.I mean something like that

What software i need and what i have to do to accomplish that.

The answer you're looking for is called "masking."

You can find this tool in the majority of professional editing software, but I personally recommend adobe after effects. There is also a chance that some of "moving objects/people" are already presented on green screens-- where as masking would usually be necessary, a "chroma key" would instead take the job.

Simply "cutting out" the moving figures isn't the only technique seen in this video. If you plan to execute a video in this fashion, you'll need to both cut out the "moving figure," but also motion track these figures onto the new composition. From there you'll need to manipulate their positions in order to make a convincing and visually appealing effect.

Good luck!


Trying to improve choppy ipad screen capture I'm trying to improve the choppy screen capture that I'm getting on my ipad.

The screen capture plays smoothly when viewed on the ipad itself, however it is choppy when played on my pc in vlc, and even worse when played in filmora. I have tried the native screen recording function in iOS and third party screen recording software apps, some noticeably better than others.

Converting the file in handbrake improves it quite a bit, and I have experimented with various frame rates such as constant frame rate, 29.97, 60, etc, but the choppiness is still noticeable, and the speed is different than the original, and the still space between motion is truncated.

I'm looking for suggestions on how to solve this issue.

When your recording plays smoothly on one device, then the recording is unlikely to be the issue. What are the specs of your pc? Make sure that you have a powerful cpu and gpu as well as enough ram. Also, what container is the file in? Is it a quicktime (.mov) file? (at least I assume so given that you're using an ipad). If so, try loading up the footage with in the quicktime player instead of vlc. Also, try using premiere or a similar program that allows you to switch through resolutions for your preview (you can select an 8th of the original quality and see if it plays smoothly).

Once again though, when your file plays smoothly somewhere, but causes problems on your pc, it might be an issue with codecs (which I doubt since you got it to play) or with the periphery. Nothing wrong with the video though.


Premiere Pro: How to match splits between two clips? Premiere newbie, just trying to learn how to be productive. :)

I have 4 tracks

Live Video File (+ bad audio)
Screenflow capture
Good audio

Since I had to wait for a Screenflow to render an export I synchronized my good audio with my video and began splitting so that I could sift quickly once the screenflow export was ready for import.

I've now synced my screen capture in the timeline, but I have to re-split.

I'd like to split it in exactly the same places as the other files.

Is there some sort of hotkey or script I can create to split one track to match where another is already split?
Is there I can make the magnet sticky to splits so that I don't have to zoom in and out for each split I'm re-creating?

There are several ways this can be achieved:

Holding the Shift key while scrubbing the timeline marker with the mouse.
Holding the Shift key and using the up and down arrows to move between clips. This gives more precision over using the Shift key and scrubbing.
Double clicking between two adjacent clips. For me this can be quicker when there are many clips and cuts and no shortcut keys are required.

Ctrl + K will cut all selected tracks and Ctrl + Shift + K will cut all tracks from the playhead.


"shift +" while rendering in ffmpeg, how to undo? I was rendering a video in ffmpeg and accidentally pressed "shift" and "+", and the below started happening.

What is this doing and how do I stop it and is it creating something I need to delete or worry about? And what do I do to delete it if so?

Don't worry, all you did is increase verbosity. The Shift had no effect, but the + increased it. Press - to cycle back to a lower verbosity level.

Press ? to see a list of all available commands.

If you want to not worry about accidental keypresses, you can add -nostdin to the command. Don't do this if one of your inputs is a pipe.


Adobe Premiere Pro CC aspect ratio streched Couple of last times I rendered with Premiere Pro I notified that aspect ratio is stretched by height. I'm rendering 1280x720 at 1.333 aspect, and it worked fine every time till now, I didn't change any settings or anything, video previews are looking normal, and only output is stretched. I'm getting really frustrated here, any help? Here are images of sequence settings and export settings:

I would check up in the Output window (second image). In the top left there is that option: Scale to Fit. Try changing that. Also check the "Fit" option in the bottom of the window right under the video.


Camera settings instead of RAW I have come across several articles in which the camera settings for shooting video are explained. If the camera does not provide RAW footage it is recommended to set Contrast, Brightness and Saturation as low as possible, and also change the midtones curve adjusting lowlights to high and highlights to low, in order to get an image as flat as possible.
This way it is claimed that the footage can be easily post-produced.
I wonder if that is a valid way, or if it is better to adjust as desired the image on camera.
Any thoughts would be appreciated.

It highly depends on your Bit-depth and scene and post-production. If you're trying to maximize for dynamic range and avoid clipping highlights for example, you should reduce contrast as much as possible (and also expose for the highlights). However, by doing that you might lose details in the midtones (separation of colors and luma), which might lead to banding issues after post-processing the footage (adding contrast and saturation), especially if you are recording 8-Bit per channel, which most consumer cameras do.
From my personal experience if you are recording 8-Bit you are probably better off getting your exposure as finished as possible in the camera and only do little post-processing to avoid banding or similar issue. If you're recording 10-Bit, you have way more information to play with and could use LOG profiles (which are another way of reducing contrast and saturation) instead.


Checking duration of a marker-created subclip in Final Cut? I just went through a long video clip in Final Cut 7, adding a marker as the speaker went into the next bullet point of his talk. I'm supposed to convert the clip into video podcasts less than 10 minutes apiece, either by posting each section individually or combining the shorter ones, so I needed to check how long he spent on each bullet point.

But when I click the disclosure arrow next to the video clip in the Browser to list the marker-generated subclips, there is no time listed next to them in the Duration column. I had to double-click each marker individually and drag the playhead to the end of the Viewer timeline for final cut to tell me how long each section was - not a big deal admittedly but I'm suspicious that I'm missing something. Is there a place in the Viewer or Browser windows I can get the length of each marker-generated subclip at a glance?

The reason you cant get the durations is because a marker is just reference to a point in time, not a time range. This time around you will need to find the durations manually either by opening the clip or subtracting the time of the previous marker form the current one.

You can give markers durations, but not as effortlessly as just placing a single marker while watching through the video:

  Place a marker by pressing M then at the end time hit
  Option+M, this will extend the duration of the
  marker to wherever the playhead is.


Whiteboard animation: how to zoom and draw a motion? I want to make a video that will mix a whiteboard drawing animation in the style of RSA Animate videos (so speeded-up drawings) and stop-motion. I think I'm almost ready to start but I still have two questions I can't figure out an answer:

when I want to make a drawing move in stop-motion, do I have to erase it and draw it again a little bit on the right, then erase it and draw it again and again? In some videos like this one

             , the motion is very fluid, how do I know how many drawings I have to make to get a fluid motion like this?
What's the best way to move the field of the camera to draw in different areas of the whiteboard, like what you see here

             ? If I manually move my camera I feel like the transition will not be very smooth, but if I do it by software I could have problems in terms of resolution?

Erase and redraw

If you play the first video frame by frame (by pausing the video and pressing the left or right key) you see that moving objects are erased and redrawn again and again. The line properties (thickness, straightness) change a little bit between frames, hinting that the line is redrawn each time (best seen at 0:45).

Camera motion

About the 2nd video you're correct that manually moving your camera will be not so smooth. If you have a jib you could achieve much smoother motion.
However, I don't think they used that in this video. The biggest output size is 720p meaning that the frame has a size of 1280x720 pixels. If you have a camera that can film 1920x1080 pixels you have quite some room left in which you can crop and move the frame.


How to find clip of video belongs to full video? I want to check is there any way to compare portion of video(video clip) with full video?
for example: if i have a particular video of scene in a movie and full movie video, how to check whether these clip belongs to that movie. if i have thousands of clips and thousands full movies, how can i find which clip belongs to which full video.

If the clips both have the same audio track, you can use audio fingerprinting techniques to identify them. Apart from that, OpenCV can do similarity checks on video: http://docs.opencv.org/2.4/doc/tutorials/highgui/video-input-psnr-ssim/video-input-psnr-ssim.html

And BTW. if using the audio fingerprinting method, as you can see with Shazam or musicbrainz.org seems to be managable from the amount of data.


How can I batch remove from videos all material that comes before the first all-black frame? I have many hundreds of videos, each a few minutes long and to which was appended an intro and outro sequence that I would like to automatically remove. There is always an all-black frame immediately following the intro sequence and immediately preceding the outro sequence.

Is there a way to batch (for all videos in a folder, macOS High Sierra) detect and remove all the material preceding the first black frame in a video? (I have the same question for removing the outro sequence, if a workable solution exists.)

Thank you.

You can try using ffprobe scene detection tool to find the black frame time, then use ffmpeg to seek and trim.

I'm not very good at scripting, but here is something you can try. It is very important that the black frame be only a single frame for this to work! Also, ffprobe's scene tool is very picky about file paths, so make sure there are no spaces or special characters in the filename or file path of any of the videos you need to edit.

Copy and paste the following code into a bash or command script file. I'll walk through each step to explain what's happening after.

#!/bin/bash

echo "Enter Source Folder"

read input

cd "$input"

mkdir -p "$input"/output

dir="$input"/output

for video in *; do

if [[ -f "$video" ]]; then

filename="${video%.*}"
extension="${video##*.}"

mkdir "$dir"/"$filename"

dest="$dir"/"$filename"

ffprobe -show_frames -of compact=p=0 -f lavfi "movie="$video",select=gt(scene\,0.9)" -show_entries frame=best_effort_timestamp_time > tmp.txt

sed -e 's/.*best_effort_timestamp_time=\(.*\)|tag:lavfi.scene_score.*/\1/' tmp.txt > chapter.txt
rm tmp.txt

file=chapter.txt
while read line
do
    time+=($line)
done <"$file"

ffmpeg -i "$video" -ss "${time[0]}" -to "${time[1]}" "$dest"/middle-"$filename"."$extension"

rm chapter.txt

fi

done

Breakdown

Determine the folder that contains the videos you want to trim and set it as the working directory.

#!/bin/bash
echo "Enter Source Folder"
read input
cd "$input"

Make output directory

mkdir -p "$input"/output
dir="$input"/output

For each file in the folder do this:

make sure it's a file and not a folder
save the filename and extension as a variable
create a new output directory for each video

for video in *; do
if [[ -f "$video" ]]; then
filename="${video%.*}"
extension="${video##*.}"
mkdir "$dir"/"$filename"
dest="$dir"/"$filename"

Find any frames that are 9/10 different than the frame before and save the time to a txt file.

ffprobe -show_frames -of compact=p=0 -f lavfi "movie="$video",select=gt(scene\,0.9)" -show_entries frame=best_effort_timestamp_time > tmp.txt

Clean up and replace text file.

sed -e 's/.*best_effort_timestamp_time=\(.*\)|tag:lavfi.scene_score.*/\1/' tmp.txt > chapter.txt
rm tmp.txt

Create array variable from the text file times.

file=chapter.txt
while read line
do
    time+=($line)
done <"$file"

Cut video between the two black frames.

ffmpeg -i "$video" -ss "${time[0]}" -to "${time[1]}" "$dest"/middle-"$filename"."$extension"

Delete no longer needed text file and end.

rm chapter.txt
fi
done


Recording Video of iPad I am trying to record some video of an iPad with a Canon 60D. The camera is mounted on a tripod about 100cm above the iPad. Everything next to the iPad is sharp, but the display itself seems a little fuzzy. I can't seem to focus the lens so that the icons are sharp.

Does this have to do with the image repeat rate? I tried a 35mm 2.0 prime lens but that did not help.

When I take a picture with the same setup everything is sharp as can be, but as soon as I go into video mode it becomes fuzzy.

Thanks for any ideas on how I can get the icons and what is on the screen sharp?

You have two things going on here, both related.  The first is that the native resolution of the display you are filming is higher than the format you are capturing in.  You are immediately losing 1/3 of the image information on the iPad.

This is further compounded however by the natural anti-aliasing that filming a screen at similar or lower resolution produces.  Since the pixels of your camera don't line up with the pixels on the display exactly, each pixel of the camera's video file is going to have contributions from multiple distinct pixels on the display (as many as 4).  While the resolution of the video may be near 2mp, it is going to get information slightly blurred together as pixels become less sharp from this blending.

This isn't an issue when you are using much higher resolution because the amount of pixels in your image that are covering multiple pixels of the display are minimal and the majority of each pixel is sharply exposed, but in the case of a video that is 1/3 smaller, as many as 9 pixels on the display may be getting blended for each pixel in the final video.

The ideal way to overcome this is either shoot in a substantially higher resolution or use a direct output from the iPad that will preserve pixel alignment.  I believe there is an HDMI mirroring option and you could then capture the HDMI feed with an HDMI capture card unless they are using HDCP on the HDMI output.


Software or method to detect sequences of non-black frames in a long video I have a large video file (about 6 hours long), it's a record from surveillance camera, the camera itself has no illumination features, though surveiled area has pretty good light which is triggered by motion detector.
So now I have a large video file that is mostly just a black screen, but it might contain some action.
Which software and or approach should I use to locate all action areas of the video (to watch 6 hour footage does not appeal to me).
I was thinking about video player that generates timeline of thumbnails or has built-in function to find non-black frames.
I prefer solution to be free and opensource, but I have searched for a while and I am kind of desperate now, so anything (that will get the job done) will do.

You can use ffmpeg's blackdetect for that:
Let's say you are interested in blackscreen with a duration greater than 2 seconds (d=2):
ffmpeg -i "surveillance.mp4" -vf "blackdetect=d=2:pix_th=0.00" -an -f null -

output (example):
[blackdetect @ 0x7fac3b555380] black_start:40 black_end:53.44 black_duration:13.44


Lighting a subject far away from the camera My wife is starting to make exercise videos. We set up a great location in the basement but lighting has been an issue.

She needs to be spaced pretty far away from the camera (about 10 feet in front) so her entire body is in frame. Also there is a wall directly behind her - I'm guessing a ceiling light shining down on the wall and floor will reduce shadows from the front lights?

I'm wondering what the best kind of lighting would be for this setup. I'm thinking LED but not sure how many lumens, or how large the LED panels should be etc. I looked into softboxes but from what I've seen, they are better suited for closer camera distances.

She doesn't want to spend too much on lighting at the moment, so something bright and affordable would be ideal.

EDIT: What about some long fluorescent tubes stood up vertically on both sides of the camera?

Any suggestions? Cheers.

This is hard to answer without knowing the sensitivity of your camera, the ISO, the aperture of the lens, the look of the room, etc. But most importantly, the look you want.

I don't think a flat wall directly behind her is the best background. Take a look at this search. Almost every photo has quite some distance to the background.

So. First of all, try to have some distance to the wall. Let's call the spot where she will be standing as "X"

Second. Imagine what is the things you want the viewer to see? You could have some strip LEDs on the sides of X. Are you shooting vertical? Like for TicToc? or horizontal like norma video. Do you want the strips of light to show? Do you have enough space to put them away from the frame?

The same with softboxes. Do you want a "sporty" look? Put them on the sides of X and not so bright, Do you want a happy look? Put them at 45° very bright. You can use or make a ring light for an urban look.

If you have white walls on the sides, you could use a reflector bouncing the light on them, the same as the ceiling. But bounce them far from X, so you do not have a hotspot on them.

I am sorry I can not really answer. Look for tutorials about lighting, and search for a look you like.

But here are some things that you need to take into account.

Some Led lights have low CRI, this is the colors will be dull, look for LED lights that have a CRI above 90.

You can also be creative and add gels to color some lights, a bit warmer for the background.

Do not put the lights on the sides of the camera, except on the case you want an "urban look". It is the least flattering light there is. It is just a flat light.


ffmpeg convert 1 jpeg frame to 10 sec video I have a 952x600 jpeg image, generated by a PHP script. I want to create another PHP script that uses ffmpeg, which converts that jpeg image to a mp4 video, which has only 1 frame that lasts for 10 seconds. Which options should I provide to ffmeg, if the input jpeg is called input.jpeg and the video output.mp4?

found here: https://talotics.com/post/videos/ffmpeg-add-call-to-action-image-after/
Create a 5 second video from a png as follows:
ffmpeg -loop 1 -i image.png -pix_fmt yuv420p -t 5 promo-image.mp4

This will create a video called {promo-image.mp4} from {image.png} with a duration of {5 seconds}


Apply effects to multiple clips (automation/batch/macro?) in Adobe Premiere CC I have a Folder with dozens of Action Camera Clips. For each clip, I'd like to apply the same effects (lens distortion correction, warp stabilizer and color correction). But I want to create individual output clips, so starting with 50 Clips in Folder Source, I want to end up with 50 recoded matching clips in Folder Target, keep File names.

This is a painfully repeating job doing that clip by clip. Do you see any method of automation I can apply here?

you can add\modify the filters on one clip then from the effects tab select the effects > "save presets" and apply those to the other clips.


drawtext ffmpeg 'Unable to parse graph description substring' hi im trying to add text to live video stream but i keep getting error with my command, i already tried -filter_complex but no success
ffmpeg -loop 1 -i img1.jpg -vf 'pad=ceil(iw/2)*2:ceil(ih/2)*2:[0:v]drawtext='text=hello:fontsize=90:x=20:y=20:fontcolor=white@0.2'' -vcodec libx264 -vprofile baseline -x264opts keyint=40 -acodec aac -strict -2 -f flv rtmp://localhost/hls/test -y -stats -report
the error i get is
Unable to parse graph description substring: "drawtext=text=freedome:fontsize=90:x=20:y=20:fontcolor=white@0.2"

For simple filterchains, where one filter operates upon the output of an earlier filter, no input pads (like [0:v]) should be used. Also, there is an errant colon at the end of the pad filter. It should be a comma instead, so
-vf 'pad=ceil(iw/2)*2:ceil(ih/2)*2,drawtext=text="hello":fontsize=90:x=20:y=20:fontcolor=white@0.2'

In drawtext, you may need to specify a font if fontconfig is not available on your system.


Smartphone app for JVC Adixxion For JVC Adixxion, there is "ADIXXION sync." app, available for Android and iOS devices. The app's page states, that it is dedicated to JVC GC-XA2.

Will this app work also with GC-XA1 model? Are there any limitations, or features, that would not work with XA1?

"ADIXXION sync." does not work wit XA1.

However, another app, WiVideo works with XA1. It is available for Android and iOS. For PC, the camera comes with Windows version of WiVideo.


What software can I use that provides easy to use art and animations to make videos like this? Any advice on software that can help make videos like this? I don't think it is Adobe software because I believe the software provides a lot of art and animations so that you don't have to be an illustrator / animator to tell a story through video.

Any advice greatly appreciated.

If you are not an illustrator, or at least willing to tweak illustrations to fit your purpose, yes, you need to actually use the clips provided by one specific vendor.

There are some online tools like www.vyond.com (former GoAnimate) but it can become pretty expensive if you do not use it very often.

An interesting program is What was at some time Crazy Talk Animator, but is now Cartoon animator https://www.reallusion.com/cartoon-animator/default.html it has some built-in characters, but you need to buy some other models if you want to change the style, or you can create your own. Both options add to the price.

You also can use free programs like Blender and Inkscape with great results, but you need to invest in the time to actually create the assets yourself.


Errors in Windows Movie Maker This is my first time of using Windows Movie Maker so, I'm not sure what the problem is. What I want to do is to make a video with 5 short videos, each lasting 3-4 seconds, with a background music. But when I edit some videos three to four times, like adding effects, they show errors. It's not that I can't play my video anymore. It's just I can't edit it. So, how can I fix that kind of error?

Chances are, the corruption was just caused by a hiccup in the program while it was placing the effects into the project file. In my experience, all versions of Windows Movie Maker beyond the one bundled with Windows XP SP2/3 are incredibly buggy and should be replaced with a better video editor. Problems like this are ridiculously common in the Vista version of Windows Movie Maker.

To answer your question, you should try closing and reopening the file, and if it is still corrupted, you'll obviously need to start over. The issue may be that Movie Maker inserted malformed properties into the project file, causing Movie Maker to not be able to parse it correctly.


remove black frames from vob files with ffmpeg I have a few .vob files with "black frames" (it seems that an issue during the acquisition from VHS did that).
I can get where these black frames occur with the command

ffmpeg -i source.vob  -vf blackdetect=d=0:pic_th=0.70:pix_th=0.10 -an -f null - 2>&1

which gives me

[...]
[blackdetect @ 0x7fab5b40a3e0] black_start:137.68 black_end:137.72 black_duration:0.04
[blackdetect @ 0x7fab5b40a3e0] black_start:161 black_end:161.04 black_duration:0.04
[blackdetect @ 0x7fab5b40a3e0] black_start:181.96 black_end:182 black_duration:0.04
[...]

(black_duration is always 0.04s for some reason)

I've built a script that cuts the parts between black frames and creates one file for each.
basically, for the three lines above, it runs:

ffmpeg -i "/Users/simon/Documents/projects/encodage VHS/source.vob" -ss 00:02:17.720 -t 23.28  -f avi -c:v libx264 -c:a libmp3lame -crf 0 -preset veryslow -vf "setpts=PTS-STARTPTS" 13.mpeg;
ffmpeg -i "/Users/simon/Documents/projects/encodage VHS/source.vob" -ss 00:02:41.040 -t 20.92  -f avi -c:v libx264 -c:a libmp3lame -crf 0 -preset veryslow -vf "setpts=PTS-STARTPTS" 14.mpeg;

then I merge those files with the concat plugin of ffmpeg.

My issue is: I'm sure the values I use to cut are right, but running the blackdetect filter again, I can see black frames at the beginning of some fragments.

Do you know why I'm still getting those black frames ? Is there a better way to remove them than cut and concat? I'm using a Mac.

What you experienced are called dropped frames.  These shouldn't be confused with drop frame video formats (such as 29.97fps NTSC video, which is otherwise known as 30 fps drop frame (because a frame is dropped to get 29.97 frames per second.)

Dropped frames occur when the system capturing is not able to keep up with the rate of playback.  They are duration .04 because it is a single frame, which works out to around .04 seconds.

Dropped frames are a relatively tricky issue to deal with as they interfere with the flow of the video and also the audio sync.  Even if you clip them out of the source material, it results in a spatial and auditory gap of .04 seconds that is often detectable by a viewer.  Due to this, the best practice is to re-capture if you experience dropped frames during capture.

If re-capture isn't an option, your best bet is to interpolate a frame to fill the gap by averaging the preceding and proceeding frames of video.  This frame often doesn't come out super well, but it is still often less jarring than removing the frame entirely and allows the audio to continue normally (provided the audio didn't also cutout for the dropped frame).

As a last resort, you can simply cut out the dropped frame, but as previously mentioned, this results in a .04 second gap in your footage and is non-ideal.


How to record OBS Studio in full screen? I'm new to OBS Studio and have just recorded a video.
Once the recording completed, I realized that the produced video was not in full screen.
There is a blank area mark with X as shown in the screenshot below.

I only noticed this issue when I replayed the recorded video with VLC.
How do I fix this problem?
I would like to record the video in full screen, not half of the screen size.

Right click on the blank area > Resize output (source size)


How to move a layer only in one direction? Is it possible to just move a layer along one axis, eg x?

I need to move many layers individually in a 3D space, but only along one axis. It would be much quicker if I could lock all axis but one, and then move along that.

You can move any object by dragging on the Position coordinates in the object's timeline.

Alternatively, you can constrain to a single dimension when moving an object in the canvas by putting your cursor over the appropriately coloured arrow (R, G, B, = x, y, z).  Wait for your cursor to show a letter next to it, then drag the object.


How to avoid problems when filming in a bath house I'm going to cover a concert early June inside a bath house. I've visited the location and it's both quite hot and humid. The plan is to bring in at least three video cameras and have them running constantly for an hour or so (there will be a Panasonic GH2, a Canon  HF10, and probably some fairly cheap sony video camera). I will also use a couple of self-powered michrophones (such as the zoom H1).

External power is of course something I will have to abandon, but are there any other tips what I should think of to keep this event safe and high-quality? What kind of problems can I expect to run into?

Get underwater housings for your cameras. Since it doesn't sound like you will actually be dunking the gear under the water, you can probably get away with the cheap bag-type housings.

To avoid fogging up the lenses, let your gear warm up to the ambient temperature, then clean the lens.


How to find same video but with other format and resolution from very big video collection I have enormous video collection dating back from 2003. until today, almost 9 TB on material from varios sources with various formats and resolution. There are also some shortened version of same video (documentaries that was cut), and i think that there is a lot of duplicates.
I would ask you is there any tool that can find which videos are same or which short video clips are part of one bigger video file?
After lot of searching I found only one tool called Video Comparer that is able to do that job, but it has limitations in number of videos processed (except pro version) and also is not free.
Is there any free tool that can do that job ( it may be for windows or linux) ???
Thank you

Paid tools exists for this because it is not an easy job. With such a large library and the extent of your use case, you will need a budget to accomplish the job.


How can I become a video editor with Adobe Premiere? I want to become a freelance video editor. I love editing video and have done a couple of projects.  My question is:  If I learned Adobe Premiere, should it be enough to get work done?

What should I learn in this program to get started as a professional?

Is there any other software, besides Premiere, that I should learn?

Premiere is simply a tool. While learning how to use it will give you some experience and you can experiment to find out techniques, it will not teach you how to be a video editor.

Same with the other video editors.

If you want to become a professional video editor, there are college courses in this, some lasting 3 years or more, which will give you techniques, skills, training etc in concepts, the mental and artistic processes you will require etc., as well as training you in the tools.


Dark Video/Gama Shift from Davinci Resolve to YouTube I've asked a version of this question before, and found a workaround solution that worked for a while. But now I'm at a point that I'd like to find a real answer to my problem.

So I edit and color my films in Davinci Resolve 12, and I publish to YouTube.

My workaround workflow has been as follows:

Shoot with my Canon SL1
Copy the footage to my hard drive and then into Davinci it goes (I don't transcode cause I don't have room)
Edit, color, do everything within Davinci
Export from Davinci using the default QuickTime MPEG4 Video setting
(Convert to x264 using Handbrake, send to client to watch via Google Drive; make changes as requested)
Final convert for YouTube using MPEG Streamclip
Upload to YouTube

If it helps here's the settings I use for MPEG Streamclip:

That workflow has worked well for 1080p videos up until this point.

The problem is, I'm trying to upload a 4K video now. When I try to convert this video, I get a screen that says compression error. (and nothing else) Since I never really liked this workflow from the start, I thought I'd take this opportunity to figure out the right way to do this.

The problem that made me use my workaround workflow in the first place:

Whenever I try to upload videos I've converted using Handbrake to YouTube, they look fine when I play them locally with VLC on my computer, but on YouTube they look pretty bad; the dark parts of the image become far too black.

I've researched this a lot and I think the problem has something to do with changing the RGB levels from full to limited. (0-255 to 16-235) From my understanding, this would change everything in the video below brightness value 16 to totally black. That makes sense as far as what's happening to me, so I think that's what's happening when I upload to YouTube.

So, my question is: How do I get exactly what I watch in Davinci to exist on YouTube when exporting in 4K?

Any help would be appreciated. Thank you!

The MOV you exported from Resolve is tagged as Rec 601 (despite being UHD).

So, I transcoded your MOV using the command below, preserving all color characteristics and uploaded that to Youtube. Downloaded YT's transcoded video and compared it to the MOV, and in ffplay, VLC or Potplayer, they look the same.

ffmpeg -i Untitled.mov -crf 18
       -color_primaries 6 -color_trc 6 -colorspace 6 -color_range 1 resolve-upload.mp4

P.S. I also uploaded your MOV and downloaded its transcode from YT. Turns out that the transcode is flagged as Rec. 709, which is wrong, despite the MOV being tagged as 601. The rip of my transcode is tagged as 601.


How to use Avisynth+AvsP with VirtualDub frame server? I'm trying to improve some VHS-C home video recordings for my mother. I used VirtualDub to capture the recordings as avi files and now I wish to modify them with Avisynth but I can't get the frame server function to work. Has anyone got the VirtualDub frame server connection with Avisynth working in Windows 10?

I've tried this with the latest versions of VirtualDub, Avisynth, and both AvsP_v2.0.2 with bugfix3 and AvsPmod. Also, I've tried it with VirtualDub_1910.exe, Avisynth_258.exe, AVSPluginPack.exe and AvsPmod_205.exe from AnimeMusicVideos.org (AMVapp31.zip). I'm using Windows 10 64-bit however I've only downloaded 32-bit version software and codecs because that seems to be the generally recommended route. (Is the AVSPluginPack necessary? If so, is there somewhere other than AMV that maintains it?)

In VirtualDub, I open homevideo.avi, "Crop to selection" for a desired range of frames and then File > Start frame server... and name the Avi-File Handler video.vdr.

In AvsP and AvsPmod the commands:

video = AVISource("c:\VHSC\video.avs")
return video

where video.avs is a file that contains only the line AviSource("c:\VHSC\video.vdr")

produce the error message:

Avisynth open failure:AVIFileSource: couldn't open file 'c:\VHSC\video.vdr'
(C:\VHSC\video.avs, line 1)
(New File, line 1)

However, replacing video.avs with homevideo.avi does display the frames in the AvsP/mod window.

I've seen this similar question AviSynth can't open my AVI file: "AVISource: Couldn't locate a decompressor for fourcc dvds". The virtualdub website < http://www.virtualdub.org/docs_frameserver.html > says "Use the AVISource filter. DirectShowSource is unreliable". I've tried both.

To capture the VHS tapes in VirtualDub I followed a YouTube tutorial, which involved the following steps:

Downloaded and install Virtual Dub + Lagarith codec
File > Capture AVI
File > Set capture file[name]
Device > [chose my capture device]
Video > Video source > [chose the source]
Video > Capture filter > PAL_B
Video > Compression > Lagarith
-then in Configure > [mode=]YUY2;
-Checking both Use Multithreading and Prevent Upsampling When Decoding.
Video > Set custom format -- settings: 820 576 YUY2*
(*actually set as UYVY [the default setting] because YUY2 is not compatible with my capture device)
Capture > Settings > 25.0
At the bottom of the capture window -- selected 44.10 kHz, 16 bit, Stereo
Start: Capture > Capture video
End: Capture > Stop capture

Did you install the frameserver support with auxsetup.exe? You can test if it is working by trying to open your video.vdr with another instance of virtualdub.exe.

From your description it doesn't look you really need the frameserver. You can trim the video with avs itself (e.g. Trim(100,200)), this is more robust and efficient.

Btw did you know there is active avisynth community on forum.doom9.org, forum.videohelp.com


MXF files in Premiere Pro cs5 mac only playing/dispaying audio Hi I'm having issues with my MXF files in Premiere Pro cs5. When I bring my mxf files into my project its only playing back audio, i can't even see video. It's like its only reading it as audio.

If I play the mxf file outside of Preimere in VLC I am able to see the video and audio.

Is there an extension I need or something?

Premiere Pro cs5
Mac OSX Yosemite 10.10.2
Shot on Cannon c300

Thanks

you could also try an intermediate workflow, like transcoding the MXF files into an appropriate ProRes container. This most likely would be 422Proxy.

The Canon C300 codec is a variation of XDCAM (source: http://www.premiumbeat.com/blog/editing-with-canon-c300-footage-tips-for-when-it-all-goes-wrong/) I personally do not like to edit in Long-GOP or predictive frame codecs. So transcoding to an inter-frame codec like ProRes or DNX is always a safe bet.


Looking for the fastest way shoot video on a camera and review it on a laptop Our freestyle ski team is looking to invest in a system that allows athletes to immediately review their competition ski runs with their coach after they get to the bottom. While they're playing back the video of their run, the camera will need to be available to shoot the next athlete. In an ideal world, a tethered camera would record directly and automatically to a folder on a laptop so that the athlete would be able to replay their run independently of the camera, leaving the camera free to keep recording the next athlete.

I've experimented with a Canon 5Dmk4 and the EOS Utility, which seems to automatically detect when the camera finishes shooting a video, and then prompts you the option of saving that file to your computer. This involves a lot of manual interaction, can take 30+ seconds to transfer a minute of footage, and ties up the camera during that transfer, preventing you from shooting the next skier if the transfer isn't completed in time. It's also a bit tedious and requires a coordinated effort between the videographer and the coach doing the video review.

We are hoping to invest in the GH5 due to it's slow motion capabilities, but am uncertain if this will pose new challenges (i.e. file sizes), or offer any solutions.

I'm familiar with the Ninja recording monitors being able to save to an SSD, but I'm curious of a solution that would allow me to instantly view recorded footage on a laptop, while leaving the camera free to shoot more video. I'm open to anything that would allow us to achieve what we're after as cheaply as possible!

look for a camera that can trigger recording on/off by it's HDMI output (used when you have something like a atomos recorder), not sure which current models can/can't but any dslr that's marketed as a video camera should do it.
run a hdmi cable to a hdmi capture box ( I think HDMI can do 15m without a repeater )
hook the capture box to a laptop
use software that will start recording when the camera presses record.
use software like stream to me
coaches can use another device ( tablet/laptop etc ) to display the recorded run

Using this setup you can have the camera recording runs while multiple people can stream any previously recorded run at the same time. As long as the software can detect the record flag from the camera the whole process is automatic, playback can begin for a file the moment after recording has stopped.

I'd recommend a black magic thunderbolt ultra studio mini
for the capture box, it comes with Media Express software which will auto trigger when it receives a record flag from the camera. The mini is bus powered & small so it's keeping your cables down & means everything is running of batteries if needed

Stream to me is an iOS app for the playback but the companion app Serve to me is Windows & Mac & that lives on the laptop watching the folder that Media Express records too. Alternatively I'm sure a bit of google will find an android substitute for this part of the link.

All that reasonable cheap, meets the need of recording while simultaneously playback (actually a pretty hard thing to do without spending big bucks) & once it's setup should take care of itself, while you concentrate on practice.


How to combine so many ffmpeg filters in 1? I dont even know if it's possible, but if anybody could help me would be really great! :)

So first of all i resize my video with this command:

CODE №1

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c:v libx264 -crf 20 -crf 16 -vf scale=750:1334 output.avi

Then i add Gif overlay with chroma key to it like that:

CODE №2

ffmpeg -i input.avi -ignore_loop 0 -i watermark.gif -filter_complex "[1:v]colorkey=0x54FF5F:0.1:0.2[ckout];[0:v][ckout]overlay=x=705:y=25:shortest=1[out]" -map "[out]" output.avi

And then 2 more overlays:

CODE №3

ffmpeg -i input.avi -i arrow.png -i Dots.png -filter_complex "overlay=x=310:y=1230,overlay=x=705:y=25" output.avi

And for the last part i concat vid that i've made with another one like this:

CODE №4

ffmpeg -i "concat:vid1.avi|input.avi" -c copy output.avi

Would be really great if anybody could help me to show few examples on how to merge all those scripts in 1 :) Or atleast №3 and №3. Thank you in advance!

Use

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -ignore_loop 0 -i watermark.gif -i arrow.png -i Dots.png -filter_complex "[0]scale=750:1334,setsar=1[v];[1]colorkey=0x54FF5F:0.1:0.2[ckout];[v][ckout]overlay=x=705:y=25:shortest=1[gif];[gif][2]overlay=x=310:y=1230[arw];[arw][3]overlay=x=705:y=25" -c:v libx264 -crf 20 -crf 16 output.avi

You should do the concat separately.


Is there any way to stop Media Encoder creating this launch preventing file? Media Encoder seems to bug out create this file which stops it launching.

I have to either have to manually delete it or launch this BAT file every time I want to launch the program.

Is there any way I can stop encoder from creating this file or does adobe have to fix the launch error?

Thanks in advanced

Solution presented at https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1268390:

  Open the file (C:\Program Files (x86)\Common
  Files\Adobe\SLCache\X19zbGNfZmVhdHVyZXNfXw==.slc) in any text editor,
  delete all of the contents, save it, and set the file to read-only.


How to convert large iMovie-imported videos preservig aspect ratio? I have a camcorder that does 1024x576 videos imported from a camera on a MacBook, using iMovie. But, those videos are H.264 encoded (I think), and that's not convenient for sharing where most of my viewers use Windows.

I tried to convert it of course, but every program (even Mac OS) think my video is 720x576-encoded, so when I convert them the aspect ratio is not conserved.

As you can see on this screenshot, took from QuickTime info, the "normal size" of that video is "1024x576". But all other programs, including Mac OS, only see the 720x576 (in the Format line here).

Mac OS :

Any Video Converter Ultimate :

SkySoft iMedia Converter :

I get stuck.

Do you know a way to convert large-width iMove imported videos to other formats preserving aspect-ratio ?

I spent my eveening but finally found a working software. That's not a freeware :( 69 boxes, but it works so I'll buy it. This is Wondershare Video Converter Ultimate.

Don't hesitate to edit this answer if you feel that my answer is too spammy.

Happy converting


4K Workflow in FCPX - crop down for multicam angles Shot an 80min interview @ 4K 422LT (271GB)on BMPC and want to create 3x 720p angles for multicam. Unsure if it's best to create them as compound clips cropped from the one 4K master clip inside of FCPX or Render out the 720p's as standalone clips then reimport.

Once the Blackmagic ProRes422LT 4K clip has been imported and a LUT + Noise Reduction applied it gets unwieldly (to say the least)

Is it best practice to Render out a new 4K clip via Compressor with those corrections baked in, OR

Create cropped 720p compound clips (from the effects applied 4K) for each of the angles for use in Multicam, OR

Crop the 4K down to 720p angles and Render those out via Compressor as individual clips and reimport to make multicam angles on interviewee.

If there is 1x 4K master file that has corrections (LUT+NR) applied - would it be better to render out a new 4K version with those changes baked in, and then make 720p multicam angles from the corrected clip - I guess that's my question.

Always looking for ways to make everything work faster.

2013 MacPro 28GB RAM / 30TB LaCie T2 RAID - not sure what upgrade options are available.

I'm a little confused.  Perhaps it's the terminology you're using.  Are you really talking about cropping (throwing away the top, bottom, and sides of the image), or do you mean scaling?  Are you creating three angles from the same camera (which explains why you'd crop, but I can't imagine happening in an interview scenario), or do you have one BMPC and two other 720p cameras (which would explain why you'd scale the BMPC)?

In either case, you should probably skip the compound clips.  FCPX doesn't play nicely with CC's stacked inside of multicam clips.  Just make sure that when you create the multicam, it's the size of your desired output.  When you add higher-resolution footage to a lower-resolution multicam clip, FCPX scales the new clip down to fit within the smaller bounds automatically. But you can always use your transform tools to scale the image up afterwards, effectively cropping it.  There's no speed or image quality penalty for this type of operation because FCPX doesn't apply these transformations sequentially, it does them simultaneously at render.  For this reason, it's usually good to keep your multicam output size the same as your smallest angle.

I also wouldn't render any corrections beforehand.  Each render you do is going to degrade the image quality through compression and/or error.  If it's the NR and color correction that's slowing down playback, you should just disable them while you edit and re-enable them before you render.  If your computer bogs down with vanilla 4k prores LT, you could try working with proxies, but you'd save yourself some headache by just upgrading your computer.


What do I need for facebook Audio Live streaming? I would like to do audio live streaming on facebook.
I intend to get audio feed from myself, from a guest sitting next to me, from a guest over the phone and a guest on Skype. And then stream it on facebook.

In terms of equipments: I got a laptop which has 8th Gen Intel® Core™ i7-8550U mobile processor, 12GB Memory and Intel® HD Graphics 620
An internet connection which has upload speed 300 kbs to 1.2 mbs. (Not steady :( but enough for audio, I think.)

I got OBS software, but it is designed for video transmission not audio.

What else do I need?
Any equipment, software, etc?

I would consider just using your phone (use Wi-Fi depending on situation) :)

I found this great video of how to do Facebook Live Audio cast (click here).

For your situation I find it quite suitable to use your phone instead of your laptop. It will make it easier since both you and the guest are using a phone. Then it makes the whole process seamless.

You can buy external stereo mics for phones to improve audio drastically.

You can gradually build up a better setup over time once you get more comfortable with Facebook live. To be very good... it takes time :)

Try to have at least a 5-10mbps for a video live stream.


Does After Effects expressions follow BODMAS In algebra the well-known BODMAS acronym represents the priority / order that operations are calculated in:

Brackets
Order
Division
Multiplication
Addition
Subtraction

When writing expressions in After Effects, will operations follow this order, or in what order are they calculated?

After Effects (as of version 16, released 2020) uses the V8 Javascript engine to interpret expressions. This is the same as used in many web browsers, such as Chrome.
It's pretty easy to test if it follows BODMAS (The O in which stands for Order BTW). On a text layer alt / opt-click the stop watch for text source and paste this:
let brackets = 2 * (1 + 1);
let order = 1 + Math.pow(2, 2);
let divMult = 1 + 2 * 2 + 4 / 2;
"Brackets: 2 * (1 + 1) should be 4, result: " + brackets +
"\n" + "Order: 1 + 2^2 should equal 5, result: " + order + "\n" +
"Division and Multiplication: 1 + 2 * 2 + 4 / 2 should equal 7, result: " + divMult

Spoiler alert: it does.


Capturing speech audio and video with a smartphone? I'm interested in using a smartphone as an expensive tool to capture speech audio and video. Perhaps equipped with a tripod, add-on wide-angle lens and wireless microphone for the speaker.

Anyone with experience in doing something like this willing to share your experiences?

Are the add-on wide-angle lenses any good for this? I have a Galaxy S8. What about video capture software? Is the built-in camera app ok for this purpose or should I use a 3rd party app?

Any experiences with non-bluetooth wireless mics? I'm worried about BT range and other connectivity issues.

Were I work we used an iPhone 7 and a Samsung S8+ for an experimental web series  to capture video. The result was awesome, specially when you use stuff like the DJI Osmo Mobile 2 Smartphone Gimbal. (The series is not yet released, will updated when the editing is finished)

At first we used Bluetooth microphones but there is a lot of issues with the range and sound quality. We used the Sennheiser ew 112-p and recorded the audio on a Tascam DR-05 . This is a little expensive, an alternative will be to use another cellphone and record the audio there with a wired microphone.

No need for a third party app, specially on the Samsung S8, where you can manually edit all the settings. You should consider the Samsung S8 has a 10 minute time limit when recording 4K video.


Final Cut- How to start audio fade from higher than 0db? In Final Cut Pro, I drag the fade handle at the beginning of an audio clip to fade in.

However, I want the audio to fade in Starting at -20 and fade up to 0. I don't want it to start from 0.

How can I do this?

If it helps, what I'm trying to do is increase the level of an audio clip several minutes in to it. The clip is playing at -20db because there is narration speaking above the level of the audio. Once the narrator is finished speaking, I want the clip to fade from -20 to 0.

So, I thought I would use the blade tool, split it into 2 audio clips, and on the second put the fade from -20 to 0. If there's a better way, I'm all ears.

Thanks

You need to use keyframes.  It's been a few versions since I used Final Cut, but they are generally represented by a little diamond indicator.  If you add a keyframe at the point you want the level to start increasing and another at the point where you want it to stop increasing, you can then adjust the value at the later point and the volume adjustment should automatically be performed over the time in-between the two keyframes.

More information on audio keyframes in FCPX is available from Apple here.


Add a timestamp to a video file? I have some video footage from my phone's dash camera app. In the app, the video plays with the timestamp showing. However, exporting the file to my computer does the video only, without the timestamp.

Is there a simple way to add the timestamp with (preferably free) Windows software? I don't need the timestamp to be extracted from metadata. I can compare the video on my phone app to the one on my PC, and get the timestamp 'close enough' if it will let me put the start time on it manually where I want.

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

Basic command is

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf "drawtext=fontfile=font.ttf:
                        fontsize=45:fontcolor=white:
                        box=1:boxcolor=black@0.4:
                        text='Time\: %{pts\:gmtime\:1466507118}'" output.mp4

(this should be in one line)

The value you need to change is 1466507118. This is the Unix epoch time representation of your intended date and time.


Creating stereoscopic video from two video files I've got two video files, each created with ffmpeg from a series of JPEG images, which I've obtained from rendering with a stereo camera in Maya.

I would like to somehow merge together these videos to form a single stereoscopic video file, but I can't find anything that would do it.

I've looked at as much of the documentation for ffmpeg as I could find, but haven't found anything. Is there some way of doing it with ffmpeg, or should I be looking for some other piece of software.

An alternative solution would be to turn the two sets of jpeg files into a single set of .mpo files (a 3d image format), and then merge them into a 3d video, but I haven't had much luck working out how to do that either.

Thanks!

This depends entirely on what kind of 3d video you want.  There are numerous formats for 3d video.  Some are as simple as placing the left and right images either side by side or one on top of the other (typically compressing them spatially to still take up the original space, for example 1080p video done like this ends up being wither 540 vertical pixels per eye or 960 horizontal ones.)  Others involve doubling the frame rate and interweaving the frames alternating between left and right.  Still other formats store the video files separately and stream them in parallel, possibly combined via timecode.  Some even use entirely separate files and just synchronize the players via the timecode (such as with 3d projection with dual projectors).

The split video is the easiest way to do it.  Most of the interwoven options involve special authoring (for things like 3D bluray) and I've only ever seen authoring options for 3D bluray on pretty high end (and expensive) authoring software.  The split option is easy to do and most 3D displays support it, the only downside is the resolution loss and the fact it typically has to be manually configured for playback.  It's by far the simplest and cheapest approach though.


Generating video thumbnails preview / contact sheet in batch, color issue I have a large collection of videos to sort out, and for that purpose I want to create a thumbnail preview for each one of them, as quickly and efficiently as possible. I have tested several tools which have that capacity, with a varying degree of satisfaction.

Media Player Classic : Does not allow command line interaction or batch directory processing. The presentation of timestamps and other informations is good enough as it is, but not customizable. The aspect of the screenshots, as I found out, depends upon the settings of the graphic driver : whether there are “enhancements” active or disabled, or whether the entry levels are set to full range or restricted range. With the default “restricted range”, the picture appears more vivid, with more contrast, but the blacks are crushed and the highlights are blown ; with entry levels set to “full range”, the picture is rather dull, with slightly faded / washed-out colors, similar to the representation of the other tools below.

{default graphic settings}

{“full range” in Intel graphic settings}

{all “enhancements” disabled in Intel graphic settings}

SMPlayer : Does not allow command line interaction or batch directory processing. The display of information is not customizable (does not allow to display the file size in bytes for instance). The colors on the screenshots appear shifted compared with the other tools, i.e. the greens are darker / less saturated while the reds are lighter / more saturated, which I know is related with the matrix used for YUV>RGB conversion (Bt.601 vs. Bt.709), but it's hard to determine which of these provide the most accurate representation.

Scorp Video Thumbnail Maker (GUI tool) : The display of information is fairly customizable, it allows to treat a whole directory recursively, but there's a huge logo / watermark covering one tile with the free license.

MTN / Movie Thumbnailer (CLI tool, also included in StaxRip) : The display of informations is fairly customizable, but the aspect of the screenshots is slightly blurry compared with the others (perhaps it creates JPEG-compressed temporary files ?). That tool, which apparently hasn't been updated since 2008, comes as an already compiled .exe file interacting with a bunch of DLL (based on libavcodec), so I don't know how to see which commands it uses internally.

VCSI (Python script) : The display of informations is fairly customizable, but some useful items are missing (video bitrate for instance). A small drawback is that it seems to be creating a temporary PNG file for each tile before generating the actual thumbnails file, it's still quick enough with 4 tiles but could make it slower for more complex presentations. Since it comes as a script interacting with ffmpeg, I could modify some parameters if necessary.

QUESTIONS :

My main issue is the color accuracy and sharpness of the screenshots. MTN would have been fine as it's simple and quick and provides all the relevant informations in the description, but the resulting files are definitely blurry : what are the likely causes of this ? When comparing the results, how can I determine which color representation is the most accurate, and is there a way to modify this behaviour, either by tweaking each tool's parameters or by adjusting global, system-wide parameters ?
Are there other similar tools which would be worth trying ?

So here is what I found out, if anyone's interested (however unlikely this might be, considering the poor popularity of that question ! :)) :
– Scorp Video Thumbnails Maker gets the colors right for Bt.709 footage with its “Engine 2” rendering module (not the other three with the current 11.0.0.3 version) and the CCCP codec pack. I created a thread about that issue on the support forum for that tool.
– I managed to tweak VCSI by adding "-vf", "zscale=matrixin=709:matrix=709,format=rgb24", to each ffmpeg call, so that it preserves Bt.709 colors; it's still slower and less convenient than Scorp VTM (and that modified script won't get accurate colors for Bt.601 footage so both versions would have to be installed and used accordingly), but it's free.
– Since I created this thread I found a few other tools which can perform this task : StaxRip (which has an internal thumbnails preview generation module, in addition to the older MTN), PotPlayer, BSPlayer, Auto Movie Thumbnailer. The latter is based on MPlayer, and is supposed to give control over the rendering engine, but I couldn't get it to use Bt.709. Otherwise it's a good free dedicated GUI alternative to Scorp Movie Thumbnails Maker, with many customization options.

I also created a thread on VideoHelp regarding that specific issue, and another about the color accuracy of screenshots in general.


Set variables on imported comp? Using After Effects CS6, I'd like to import one project (ProjA) into another project (ProjB). Let's say that ProjA has some text that I want to customize from ProjB. I'd like to be able to import ProjA into ProjB and then set some property "this is ProjB" on the imported project/comp and have the text in ProjA render that text dynamically. Is there a global properties/variables collection I can use to do this inside of a comp?

The way I see this working is I would add a variable called myText to the comp in ProjA. Then I would add a text layer and set its Source Text to an expression which would grab myText from the comp's properties/variables: thisComp.properties("myText")

This would allow me to import ProjA over and over into many videos and have unique text for each instance.

A normal 'pick-whipped' expression:

thisComp.layer("Solid 1").transform.position

An expression referencing another composition within your project:

comp("Second Comp Name").layer("Solid 1").transform.position

As long as the composition name in Project A is consistent, you could just reference it and include a fallback in case it hasn't been imported like this:

try { comp("PROJECT A COMP NAME").layer("YOUR LAYER NAME").text.sourceText; }
catch(err) { text.sourceText }

Reference:
 https://gist.github.com/animoplex/b426933ae6c896c79ea98a50855ff62e

I figured I'd give this a quick response since it's been a while and there haven't been any answers. Send me a comment if you have questions.

Hope this helps :)


FFMPEG output is blocky I'm attempting to extract the individual frames from a raw AVC video stream. I'm doing this via the following ffmpeg command: ffmpeg -q 1 -i video_test.avc -f image2 frames/frames_%04d.jpg

The problem I'm encountering is the first few frames look good. I'm including an example below.

The extracted frames then get progressively worse and by the time I get to the 17th frame, they're really blocky.

You get get the raw video from this link.

Is there an option I'm missing? I've noticed that FFMPEG on my Mac works as expected and generates nice frames, but FFMPEG on my production server that runs Ubuntu exhibits this problem.

Option placement matters

  Is there an option I'm missing?

No, but option placement matters. Options before the input apply to the input, and options before the output generally apply to the output. The exception are global options. See the FFmpeg synopsis and FFmpeg description for more details on option placement.

Therefore, you must move your -q (alias for -qscale) option:

ffmpeg -i video_test.avc -q:v 2 frames/frames_%04d.jpg

-f image2 is superfluous here since ffmpeg knows that your outputs are images.
A sane range for -q:v for the encoder mjpeg is 2-5; lower is higher quality.
It is recommended to be explicit as to which stream you want to apply -q to since ffmpeg can not know if it should be applied to video or audio, so in your case use -q:v. This is good practice, although it does not matter for your input since you have no audio.

A fake "ffmpeg"

  I've noticed that FFMPEG on my Mac works as expected and generates nice frames, but FFMPEG on my production server that runs Ubuntu exhibits this problem.

Ubuntu no longer uses FFmpeg:

Who can tell me the difference and relation between ffmpeg, libav, and avconv?
The FFmpeg/Libav situation

Since I do not use the fork my answer may not work for you.

Getting ffmpeg

FFmpeg development is very active and it is always a good idea to use a recent version. Two main ways of getting it are:

Follow a step-by-step guide to compile ffmpeg
Use an already compiled ffmpeg build (instructions)