Why more than 10 FPS is needed As we know that out brain can process at most 1/10th of a second then why we go beyond the 10 FPS as our brain should not be able to process more than the 10 FPS of a scene. whats is the logic behind ?

The brain can process an image displayed for as little as 13 ms if the surrounding content is blank.  10 to 12 images per second is only the number of images that appear distinct to the eye.  Beyond 10 to 12 images a second,  the brain starts to try to piece them together, but it is doing a lot of work to make that go and the motion isn't as smooth as it could be.

Using higher frame rates means that the brain has to do less filling in the gaps and motion can appear more accurate and smoother since the brain is actually fully capable of processing images faster than 10 times a second.

The 12fps animation threshold is only a minimum to get the appearance of motion, not the maximum amount of information our brain can take in.  We can process far more images per second to determine motion, but require at least 10 to 12.

You can test this for yourself if you want by taking a 30 fps video and inserting a black frame at random in the video.  You'll easily notice the distortion from the missed frame because it abruptly changes to something other than the expected image.

Basically your brain knows what it expects to see and can recognize that it didn't see what it expected, it just can't recall exactly what it is that it saw that it didn't expect since it was taking a shortcut to reduce the amount of processing needed.

The Wikipedia article on frame rate is a good source of additional information on the topic.


Is it still necessary to fill in gaps in sequence? I know that in the early versions of PremierePro it was necessary to fill all gaps in your sequence (places where there was no video) with black video.
If you left these gaps Premiere would give you trouble exporting or wouldn't export at all. Does anybody know if there is any need to still do that, or is that a thing of the past?

I don't think it has been an issue for some time.  I've been using Premiere since version 5 and don't seem to recall ever having a problem with exports though I don't recall my work area ever extending over a gap (though I certainly had many projects where there were gaps between work areas.)

I did verify that in CS6, it is no problem.


Applying identical keyframes to identical objects w/variation I have the following animation, in which a ball goes from the flashlight to the end of the frame. However, how do I create multiple iterations of this animation, except with the ball following the same path, except with some variation? I'm using Adobe After Effects V15.1.1.

I would use a particle engine of some kind to do this.

You set up the Emitter to start from the same position as your torch (in a layer behind it).

You set your particles to look like the ball.

You emit them at an appropriate rate, and use air or wind adjustments to "blow" them across the screen.

After Effects has a built in particle engine called Particle World

https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/simulation-effects.html

Or you could use Particular from Trapcode

Screen shots below showing roughly how you could do it in Particle World:


What is the best way to export a Motion movie to Youtube? I just finished a video that uses an audio interview to create a EQ bars animations.
I want to export this video (including the audio) for uploading to YouTube.
The problem is that my 30-min video exports to 3.5 GB size.
Isn't this file size too big for a simple animation and audio?
Can I export it at a smaller file size so the upload to YouTube won't take the whole day?

my 30-min video exports to

This sounds to me that you are not paying any attention to what settings you are using.
What program, what container, what codec, what settings?
On whatever program you are using If possible export to MP4, h.264, AAC.
As you already have rendered the file (assuming it took a long time to render, let's say if it was exported with special effects) another option is to recompress it.
If you are on Windows, you can try VirtualDub2 with the same settings.
You can also use FFmpeg. There are several users that know how to use it well. I'm not one of them :o)
The problem with this second option is that this will be recompressed more times. The initial, this recompression, and probably a third one by YouTube.


D7000 HD video format - can each frame contain metadata? In fact the question is the other way round:

I shoot a HD video with my Nikon-D7000, and along the way things happen, such as I change zoom, focal length, light levels change such that the D7000 adjusts its sensitivity during the recording...

Is all this data available for reading somewhere, and if yes how?

I could not find the information on regular websites (Nikon's, www.imaging-resource.com, general google search).

I tried exiftool, but it seems to only show general metadata that is true for the overall video recording.

So is this data recorded somewhere, and can I read it on my Linux system?

Any answer or hint appreciated.

No. Standard video formats do not work like that and the D7000 is no exception to this.  Conceivably it can be done but I am sure it is not on anyone's priority list. I worked for 9 years on video processing and rendering software and there are more important problems to solve. Indexing and managing that data would also become a problem. When working on functions that process video from a series of still images, it makes it vastly simpler to assume the metadata of the first frame applies to all subsequent ones.

Obviously I understand why it would be desirable but this is the same on all cameras. GPS is another perfect example. On cameras with built-in GPS, only the location of at the time video recording starts is recorded while you may be shooting from a moving vehicle and cover some ground while recording.


Equivalent to audio samples in video I wonder what's the smallest component of a video file.
I know, in graphics, it's the pixel, in sound,, it's the sample.
I also know video is made by frames + audio, so, is it pixels + samples?

It's a matter of semantics. Both audio and video are expressed as samples, where a continuous analog signal is encoded into discrete chunks. These chunks are expressed as numbers, and the numbers are composed of bytes, and the bytes are composed of bits. But saying that doesn't really give you any deeper understanding of the process.

Audio is encoded in samples where each sample has a magnitude, representing the sound pressure on the microphone at a particular time.

Video is also encoded as samples, where each sample is a representation of the amount of light that falls on a sensor in a certain period. Due to the fact that light is coloured, each sample is usually composed of three components, representing the three visible primaries, red, green and blue (often encoded as YUV, but that's beyond the scope here).

Unlike sound, more than one sample is recorded at a time; an array of them (a grid, aka a "raster") makes up a frame, which is the same as the picture a stills camera would record if it was fired at that particular time. By taking successive still pictures the camera is able to create the illusion of movement due to the persistence of vision. All of the pixels in each picture are recorded at (more or less, search for "rolling shutter" and "interlacing" if you want to dig deeper) the same time.


Do people fundraise to help someone buy a camera? I have been borrowing my library's camera the past few months and am getting sick of it. I want to buy my own camera, but the camera I want costs around $1600. I do not have that money but really want to get a camera to embark on a film project that would mean a lot to me and has an inspirational message. Can organizations, schools, and individuals provide funds or grants to help?

I remember when I was in high school I used to borrow their Canon 600D to use over the weekends. I loved it, but it was upsetting to have to return it every Monday. Like you, I couldn't afford to buy one at the time.

It wasn't until I got a casual retail job that was able to buy my first camera.

Now I'm a little older and have a steady(ish) income, I'm able to lease more expensive cameras and pay them off over time.

I'd argue that if you're after an individual/organisation to offer you a grant, you'd need a solid portfolio to convince them to do so. If no-one seems interested, then I'm afraid you'll need to wait and buy one yourself.

It doesn't need to be a $1600 camera right now, it can be an older second-hand one, because ultimately, if you have a good story, it doesn't matter what camera you use to tell it.


Merging mp4 video stream with subtitles for use in creating DVD Suppose I have two files called foo.mp4 and foo.srt. The mp4 file doesn't have subtitles, and I want to add subtitles from the foo.srt file.

The utility mencoder is frequently recommended in this context. I tried using, for example:

mencoder foo.mp4 -sub foo.srt -ovc lavc -oac copy -o foo.mpg

This worked for me before. However, here I get

Audio format 0x4134504d is incompatible with '-oac copy', please try '-oac pcm' instead or use '-fafmttag' to override it.

I don't know what this means. Running mediainfo on this file gives the following information for the audio stream.

Audio
ID                                       : 2
Format                                   : AAC
Format/Info                              : Advanced Audio Codec
Format profile                           : LC
Codec ID                                 : 40
Duration                                 : 1h 47mn
Bit rate mode                            : Variable
Bit rate                                 : 93.7 Kbps
Maximum bit rate                         : 110 Kbps
Channel(s)                               : 2 channels
Channel positions                        : Front: L R
Sampling rate                            : 48.0 KHz
Compression mode                         : Lossy
Stream size                              : 71.8 MiB (9%)
Language                                 : English
Encoded date                             : UTC 2014-11-19 03:58:38
Tagged date                              : UTC 2014-11-19 03:58:40

Trying

mencoder foo.mp4 -sub foo.srt -ovc lavc -oac pcm -o foo.mpg

works, but produces a video that is visibly worse with regard to quality.

I suppose ffmpeg could also be an option, but I've not figured out how to use it to do this.

I'm using Debian wheezy. The versions of mencoder and ffmpeg that ship with wheezy are:

2:1.0~rc4.dfsg1+svn34540-1+deb7u1 (mencoder)

6:0.8.16-1 (ffmpeg)

However, I managed to backport a newer version of ffmpeg from unstable,
namely: 7:2.5.1-1.

Use the subtitles filter to create hardsubs ("burnt-in" subtitles):

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf subtitles=subs.srt -target pal-dvd output.mpg

-target pal-dvd will make the output have a frame rate of 25 and a frame size of 720x576. If you want NTSC output instead for a frame rate of 30000/1001 and frame size of 720x480, then use -target ntsc-dvd. For a frame rate of 24000/1001 and 720x480 frame size use -target film-dvd.
The old, so-called "ffmpeg" version 0.8.16 in the repo is a counterfeit from a fork that lacks the subtitles filter. If you need the real thing you can simply download a static build.
I do not believe ffmpeg can convert the text-based SRT to the bitmap-based dvdsub/vobsub, but there are probably other tools that can do so. This will allow you to use standard DVD subtitles which can be turned on or off by the viewer.


capture card for thunderbolt 3.0 I'm a youtube gamer and I'm interested in making the transition from pc to mac. Unfortunately, I'm not too familiar with macs and any challenges their usb thunderbolts will pose. I want to get the 2017 macbook pro. It has four thunderbolt 3.0 ports. Will normal video capture cards like the eglato hd60 be able to connect to the thunderbolt port fine? My concern is that I also want to have an external hard drive connected as well due to the limited amount of space on the macbook. I edit and post ps4/xbox one gaming videos.

Thunderbolt is a much better connection than USB 3 for these purposes.  Thunderbolt, when fully implemented, is actually able to function as an external 4x PCI-E connector in addition to a bunch of other things.  You can use a cheap adapter that will allow a USB 3.1 connection (which is backward compatible to previous USB standards) or you can buy a new device that is Thunderbolt 3 compatible and will be able to make use of the added bandwidth that Thunderbolt 3 supports.


Black frame strobing during CC export I have a sub-3-minute sequence in Premiere CC, containing a single 4k DCI 23.98 AVC stream from a Sony FS7, with a couple static PNGs and 29.97 Quicktime Animation lower thirds.

I need to export to a quicktime wrapper around some sort of mpeg-4 codec; I've tried several configurations of H.264 and MPEG-4 with the same result.

My timeline plays and looks normal, but after export, I see the following result via Imgur videotogif:

http://imgur.com/I27CHk5

Because I know some of you will ask, here is a screenshot of my export settings:

Changing resolution, codec (within variants of Quicktime), with/without previews, max render quality - all has no effect on the strobing issue.

Anyone have any thoughts on what the problem might be here?

I'm having the same issue with a visually similar sequence in the same project for the same client, and had it once before as well (you guessed it, same client, same content specs). I've never experienced this ever before so I'm inclined to think there's some little gremlin in there somewhere - but I'm dashed to figure out what it is.

[edit]

I've also verified that the issue occurs when exporting to P2/MXF as well as ProRes.

Per @Mulvya's question about source properties, here's a screencap of the properties window on one of the clips. All the footage was shot in the same session, same camera, etc, and should be completely identical:

Are you using the "Mercury Playback Engine GPU Acceleration (CUDA)" as your renderer inside of media encoder? I've read about and had a few cases where software only rendering can cause similar issues.


How to add a "presenter's name" graphic to Camtasia that appears in from the right I want to have a graphic or animation that pops in on the lower right hand side of the screen that says the presenter's names, stays there for a few seconds then moves back off screen to the right. Like what you see on the news when they switch to a reporter in the field, their name appears below, then it disappears.

Can Camtasia do this with its own tools or do you have to use external programs?
In either event, how do you do this in Camtasia?

The term you're looking for is 'lower third'. Here's a tutorial from the software publisher on how to do that.


Video with inconsistent exposed / rendered image sizes I have an interlaced video with MTS file format, which was captured using a HD camera.
When I play it using VLC, it is displayed at resolution 1920x1080 and if I take a snapshot with VLC, the saved image also has a resolution of 1920x1080. I tried playing the video with the Windows Media Player, and the video is also rendered at a resolution of 1920x1080.

However, in VLC, when I select Tools > Codecs information I get the following :

Type: Video
Id original: 4113
Codec: H264 - MPEG-4 AVC (part10) (h264)
Resolution: 1440x1080
Framerate: 25
Decoded format: Planar 4:2:0 YUV

(there also are an audio stream and a subtitle stream, which I am not interested in).

So the exposed resolution seems to be 1440x1080 but when rendered the video is 1920x1080.

Anyway, my true problem comes from the fact that I need to extract the frames from the video to perform some Image Processing. I do that using ffmpeg, which extracts frames at the resolution of 1440x1080, but then the extracted images seem distorted (i.e. compressed horizontally), which causes errors for the Image Processing I am doing.

Any idea why VLC, Windows Media Player, Power DVD manages to render the video correctly, whereas ffmpeg fails to extract the frames at the correct resolution ? And why is the video rendered at 1920x1080 if the exposed codec resolution is 1440x1080 ?

HDV camera, right? It's not untypical for cameras to claim higher resolution than they actually scan. In such cases you have to look at the different aspect ratios involved: pixel, frame, display, sample. Here's a post that discusses this, or google "HDV aspect ratio". And here's a link to the spec from the HDV consortium.

It's essentially anamorphic. The ffmpeg or avconv docs should show how to extract and expand to 1920 in one step.


How can I automate creating a sequence from a set of clips? I have a large amount of DV footage, which I want to convert into a video per day.
I've tried doing this by scripting ffmpeg:
ffmpeg -safe 0 -f concat -i day1-files.txt -fflags +igndts -ac 2 -ar 32000 -vf scale=768x576,setsar=1:1,yadif sq08_output.mov

but results varied from perfect to garbled audio or video.
Then I tried this manually in Premiere Pro with the following steps:

Import footage of a single day
Automate to sequence
Export media

Results were perfect (for the same clips that ffmpeg couldn't decode).
As I have thousands of clips I don't want to repeat the Premiere Pro steps manually, so I looked into Premiere Pro scripting
I completed step 1 with app.project.importFiles:
app.project.importFiles(["day1-1.mov", "day1-2.mov", "day1-3.mov"], true, app.project.rootItem, false)

I tried to do step 2 with app.project.createNewSequenceFromClips:
app.project.createNewSequenceFromClips("sequenceName"
    , [app.project.rootItem.children[0]
    , app.project.rootItem.children[1]
    , app.project.rootItem.children[2]]
    , app.project.rootItem);

But got greeted with:
createNewSequenceFromClips is not a function

How can I automate creating a sequence from a set of clips?

Apparently createNewSequenceFromClips was not available in my version of Premiere Pro (v14.0.1). When I updated to v14.4 all worked as it should.
This example script using that function works as expected.


Plugins for Character Rigging Are there any plugins or scripts that make it easy to create Character Rigging?

I just watched a video that shows something I've never seen in AE.

Is this something I can incorporate into the software?

On this site there are some interesting scripts for you to use:

AEScripts


Open Broadcaster MOV to MP4 conversion I just used OBS to record an MOV file (4k screen recording). Now I'm having trouble opening it in Premiere. When I import it into Premiere, I get only the audio (no video). File opens fine in VLC, but when I use VLC to convert to MP4, one of two things happen:

I get an error
I get an empty file

Furthermore, I tried Adobe Media Encoder, and I get an entirely black-frame file - I can see the black frames in preview, even.

Can someone help me figure out what's going on? I have no idea what codec OBS uses - it doesn't show up in Properties for the file.

Are you using OBS Studio? If yes, you should try OBS built-in convertor to mp4. Use File->Convert Recording.


Audio monitoring w/ headphones through HDMI port I'm looking at a new camera that has a mic in and audio control, but no headphones out. Is there a way to get live audio out of a camera using the HDMI port and plugging into headphones? I want to be portable, so plugging into a monitor and then from the monitor to the headphones is not practical.

What you want is generally called an "HDMI audio extractor". There are several hardware products on the market that will extract the audio in the HDMI stream to an audio out connection and pass-through the video part.

A search on ebay gives you several results: http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=HDMI+audio+extractor

Though if you need very high quality audio you probably need a more professional product with a good built-in DAC (digital to analog converter). HDMI audio is digital so it needs to be converted to an analog signal and the hardware used in these products isn't meant for high fidelity audio production. Or buy a cheap one with an digital output and use an external DAC.


Put creatures moving around in your videos How the guy making the linked videos might have achieved those effects of creatures appearing behind him?

Here are the two videos I am refering to: see this, or this.

Looks like standard CGI stuff. It would be easiest to film the musician against a green screen, and then simply replace the background with computer generated scenery and creatures by using a chroma keyer.

He claims that some of the videos were filmed out doors. I don't know whether he's being cheeky or serious. But even if we take him at his word, you need to generate the creatures in the computer and then composite them into the scene.

In order to make this look good, you need to make sure that the lighting on everything looks correct. If you film the musician against a green screen, you can either put lights on the talent before filming and make sure they match the generated background, or add them in post to match the generated background. It's probably easier to do it during filming.


fps resampling dilema I want to mix some vacation clips into a single video. The sources I have are:

48 fps
25 fps

I don't care whether the end result will be at 24 or 25 fps but I do want to maintain the best viewing quality for the two different sources I got.

So the question in my case is, what is better between the following two?

resampling 25 to 24 (and perfect resampling 48 to 24)
resampling 48 to 25 (and leaving 25 as is)

48 to 25 should be better because you have more frame information to interpolate, though the contents of the clips could also matter.  If all the 48 fps clips are high speed motion while the 25 is relatively static shots, then it will probably interpolate better.

The key is that frames are going to have to be guessed at and the less time that passed from the last frame that can be used for the guess, the better off you will be.  Since 48 frames much closer to the correct timings it should generally get a better result.

Ultimately though, I'd suggest trying both interpolations and see which looks better to you.  While what I explained is a good general rule, sometimes the content of the clips makes weird things happen and there's no replacement for trying it out to see.


Timelapse - Exaggerated blinking I have a Timelapse question. We recorded about 22 minutes of a woman and boy lying on the ground around sunset to show the passing of time from day to night. We would like the shot in the film to be closer to 10-30 seconds.

I think the editor may have just changed the speed settings. Anyway, the problem is that the woman's blinking and the child's breathing both look very exaggerated now.

Is there any way to fix this in After Effects or Premiere?

Thanks in advance!

Import the footage into After Effects. Bring it into a comp and change the speed of the layer either with the speed control for the layer or with time remapping. Make sure the layer has Frame Blending turned on, and that it's on for your final render. Frame blending will blend all of the frames that make up a single frame, so if 20 minutes makes 10 seconds that's… er… 120 frames of original footage to make one frame of timelapse. This should mean that any quick motion in the original footage will blur away, and it should get rid of your blinks and breathing. If that's not enough you might want to try either the Time Warp at 100% speed with a long shutter time or even wide time effects to ad extra 'temporal blurring' to the footage.

Note that you'll have to render out the clips rather than using Dynamic Linking, because Premiere won't do the frame blends like AE does. Expect very slow renders.


2000 hours to render/encode 45 minute video, what machine should I build to make this manageable? I shot 45 minutes of stereo VR footage (6400x6400 frame size, 29.97 fps) and after adding color correction, rotation, adaptive de-noise and re-sharpen I got 2000 hours estimate to render and encode to H264. This is on maxed out MacBook Pro 2018.

I'm thinking it's time to build a video rendering machine, so I can edit, render and encode larger projects without keeping a laptop running for months. Any recommendations for what kind of hardware to get? Number of cores vs base clock vs memory speed and so on?

The render times break down like this:

2-pass VBR and all effects = 2000 hours, CPU at 100%, GPU at 5%
1-pass VBR and all effects = 800 hours, CPU at 100%, GPU at 5%
1-pass VBR and Lumetri Color + VR Re-Orient = 400 hours, CPU at 20%, GPU at 5%

It seems like I need to hit hard on CPU power and disk/memory speed, since that last estimate means I am I/O bound.

Before you go out and spend a lot more money on hardware, optimize your process.  Run tests on short pieces of your video, and see what you can adjust to get faster results.

For example, H.264 is pretty taxing to encode, especially at higher frame sizes.  Experiment with writing to intermediate codecs first, and then transcoding to your delivery format.  Often, that method is faster than writing directly to the delivery format.  See how long it takes your setup to churn out a five second clip directly to h.264, then time the same export to an intermediate codec + transcode.

Another thing you can optimize is your disk caching strategy.  If your disk cache is on your system drive, try moving it to something speedy and external.  Some NLE's give you the option to use the disk cache at render time.  Experiment with these settings.  Also maybe try changing your GPU driver settings if your system allows (OSX mojave deprecates OpenCl.  Depending on your NLE/OS, Metal may be your only option).

Another small piece of advice, get a good process monitoring utility and use it to help clue you in on where bottlenecks occur.  I use XRG for Mac.  It's free, and provides more information than Activity Moitor.  If you notice that your GPU's are pegged, then think about adding GPU horsepower.  If they're not pegged, your CPU isn't either, but you notice a lot of disk activity, then think about how you might improve that.


Frequency of Macbook fan sound My macbook spins off the fan like crazy which is audible when I'm recording a video when I show some stuff in Photoshop for instance. I'm thinking I could try to filter it out in Premiere Pro with high/low pass filters or an equalizer and I'm wondering what frequency might that sound of the fan have?

Anyone tried to remove the fan sound with this method or maybe there is a better solution?

Screen recording definitely taxes laptop graphics cards and makes the fans whir. There's no easy way to avoid that.  I would instead try to use a mic that gets as close to your lips as possible (without popping), and move the laptop as far from your mouth as possible (external monitor / keyboard / mouse). The results will be better than trying to use noise reduction to improve the audio afterwards.  Noise follows an inverse square law, so a small increase in distance from your lips will result in a big decrease in noise, if your mic is much closer to the desirable source than it is to the undesirable source.


How to detect if video had been sized up (Scaled up) in resolution? On Internet, I can see many videos/movies claim to have FHD (1920x1080) resolution, but on watching they seem to be shot in lower resolution and resized/scaled up using encoder or transcoding tool to 1080p resolution.
My question: is there any tool to detect such scaling up?
If possible, I prefer ffmpeg tool, or knowledge base of such detection.
Thanks,

May i rephrase your question as

How natural does an image look?

If so, you are finding Naturalness Image Quality Evaluator (NIQE). Plz take a look of Naturalness Image Quality Evaluator (NIQE) no-reference image quality score. Then you may find some information from Laboratory for Image & Video Engineering and then you will get some tools like

scikit-video
Video Quality Indicators

Good Luck!


Add waves in after effects How do I create waves that follows the users motion like this
Anything in this direction is appreciated except don't tell me to draw

You could track points on the arms to control the motion of a shape layer with a row of points or short strokes on it, then apply the echo effect. How well that would work would depend on the speed the arms move.

You could also apply the tracking to some nulls, and copy their motion paths onto a shape layer's path property, or the path property of a write-on effect.


Why is a screencast produced by Quicktime (.mov) is much smaller than the converted MP4 file? I recently recorded numerous screencasts using Quicktime.  The .mov files produced by Quicktime are 2876x1748.

To goal was to upload the files to YouTube and so I wanted to convert to the recommended format.  Since I had to merge 3 clips into one, I used a tool called iSkySoft iMedia Converter Deluxe to merge and convert.

The settings selected were optimised for YouTube (Settings were H.264 and resulting video was scaled down to 720P)

Interestingly, the MP4 files produced were significantly larger than the original .mov files!  The .mov files combined were ~ 1.5GB at a higher resolution and the merged & converted MP4 file was 2.2GB.

Is this to be expected?  Or could there be something wrong with the conversion tool being used?

I don't think it's the framerate. Maybe check with mediainfo to see more specific settings of each Codec. Apart from the bitrate, there are plenty of settings that can influence file size, even when using the same Codec.


Video playout software and hardware requirements for simple TV channel What would minimum hardware requirements be on Win10 desktop/server for streaming  SD channel ? Which is the simplest playout solution you can recommend ?

I have offers from 2.000,00 € for hardware and software up to 35.000,00 €, all basicly doing same thing. There are some new "cloud" services that offer it all but for enormous 80.000,00 € per year.

My requirements are very simple. Ingest - schedule - play. Graphics: only logo. And Desktop/server to handle it all.

I understand that big TV channels need load of things, graphics, multiple channels, safety etc. But what about those simple channels ? Any solutions out of the box for reasonable price ?

Cheapest solution: OBS for broadcasting, mplayer for video playback, someone who will programm simple schedule for $100. If you don't need exact schedule programming, you can just make playlists playback for free! Here no instruction how to setup it for your needs, but if you is advanced user, you can do everything youself.

If you need advert breaks, logo overlays and so on, it can be programmed with infrastructure of OBS, but you can reach limits very fast. You can try to hire freelancers who will maintain your infrastructure and wishes.

Main price for "out of box" solutions comes from any guarantees what will be provided to you. Cheap infrastructure guarantees nothing.


How to split a large mkv file into parts with the *.srt subtitle file separated accordingly? At UNIX command line, I use the mkvmerge command in MkvToolNix to split the large multi-GB *.mkv file into several parts:

mkvmerge -o out.mkv --split 1990M large.mkv

It generated out-001.mkv, out-002.mkv, out-003.mkv.

There is also a subtitle file large.srt.  Now I do I separate it into parts that will work properly with those smaller mkv files?

Another related question: how to incorporate large.srt into large.mkv first, and then split the resultant mkv file into smaller parts retaining the subtitles?

Add the subtitles to your large mkv file first. Then mkvmerge will split the file with the subtitles automatically.

To add the subtitles, the easiest is to use mkvmerge-GUI. It will also show you the command-line it uses. Or you can try something like this directly:

video="your_large_video.mkv"
st_en="english.srt"
st_fr="french.srt"
out="large_video-st_en_fr.mkv"

mkvmerge -o "$out" "$video" --language 0:eng "$st_en" --language 0:fre "$st_fr"

After that, splitting works fine and includes correct subtitles. I just tried it, and splitted by size and by duration. I'm not sure, but maybe the subtitle timing was preserved more exactly when splitting by duration (--split 1800s or similar instead of --split 500M).


ffmpeg: using vidstab{detect,transform} on parts of a video I'm using ffmpeg's vidstabdetect and vidstabtransform filter to stabilise videos. Currently I first cut out the scenes from the single input that I want to stabilise into individual files, which I then stabilise, transform, and join together. To avoid creating these intermediate files, is it possible to:

specify multiple time ranges to stabilise;
create the necessary *.trf file(s) in a first pass;
stabilise (transform) the time ranges from the input in a second pass and create a single output file containing just the stabilised scenes

without creating intermediate files beyond the *.trf file(s)? I am asking because I am not sure that the *.trf files can deal with non-continuous scenes.

What would be the right flag to specify the time ranges to stabilise and join?

Current workflow to extract and stabilise a scene from foo.mp4:

$ ffmpeg -v error -y -ss 00:00:00 -to 00:01:00 -i foo.mp4 -c copy foo-000000-000100.mp4

$ ffmpeg -y -v error -i foo-000000-000100.mp4 -vf vidstabdetect=stepsize=6:shakiness=6:accuracy=9:result=foo-000000-000100.trf -f null -

$ ffmpeg -v error -y -i foo-000000-000100.mp4 -vf vidstabtransform=input=foo-000000-000100.trf:zoom=1:maxangle=(1*PI/180):smoothing=30,rotate=(0.0*PI/180):ow=1920:oh=1080,scale=1440:-2,unsharp=5:5:0.8:3:3:0.4,drawtext=fontfile=din.ttf:fontcolor=0x55b575:fontsize=18:x=w-tw-10:y=h-th-10:timecode='00\:00\:00\:00':rate=60,drawtext=fontfile=din.ttf:fontcolor=0x55b575:fontsize=18:x=10:y=h-th-10:text='foo' -vcodec libx264 -preset slow -tune film -an -r 60 -crf 26 foo-000000-000100.stab.mp4

It is possible to use the select filter to select scenes for stabilisation and inclusion into the final result - see the example below. It seems that select is slow for skipping over unwanted material. This does not create any intermediate files except the *.trf file. In my example I am not using audio, which would have to be selected likewise.

#! /bin/bash

f="20191128_215245A.mp4"
x="select='between(t,5,10)+between(t,15,20)',setpts=N/FRAME_RATE/TB"
s="vidstabdetect=stepsize=6:shakiness=6:accuracy=9:result=foo.trf"
y="vidstabtransform=input=foo.trf:zoom=1:maxangle=(1*PI/180):smoothing=30"
z="scale=1440:-2,unsharp=5:5:0.8:3:3:0.4"
a="-an -tune film -r 60 -crf 26 -vcodec libx264 -preset slow"

ffmpeg -y -i $f -vf "$x,$s" -f null -
ffmpeg -y -i $f -vf "$x,$y,$z" $a foo.mp4


Intersecting Shapes in After Effects I've received an aep file and there's the following thing that drives me nuts:

There are obviously two overlapping shapes that where only the exclusion is filled:

Nothing special so far, but there are no masks included and also no Merge Paths:

So there are only two paths included (one for the circle and one for the rotated, overlapping rectangle), so which settings were used here to achieve the exclusion?
I personally would have used Merge Paths to achieve this result, but this is obviously not the case here.

It's likely due to fill-rule being set to "Even-Odd". Try changing it to "Non-Zero winding" instead:


Simple Editing of RGB Channels On Mac In older versions of iMovie you could edit the RGB channels of a clip independently. In the current iMovie 10 you can't. It doesn't seem to be a widespread feature, tried Shotcut and Video Pad so far as well as QuickTime Player and VLC.

Do you know of a free or low priced Mac app that can do this? Final Cut and After Effects are overkill for just this quite basic function.

Apple's Motion has a wide variety of useful effects for this sort of thing. It's not clear which iMovie filter you were using (a built-in one, or a 3rd party one?), but Motion offers a Channel Mixer filter, and includes a Levels filter which can work on individual channels. (You can see the docs for Color Correction Filters here.) In addition, Motion also supports 3rd party effects, and there are a ton of them that could do what you need. (It's hard to give exact details without more info from you about what you need, though.)


Convert .3GP to MP3? I recently recorded some audio on my cell phone that's a file type .3gp. Is there a way I can convert this to a more workable file type, such as MP3?

You can use ffmpeg, a free command-line tool. Basic command is

ffmpeg -i file.3gp file.mp3


Retrieve and decode V-Chip data from an aired digital TV stream I'm trying to retrieve and decode V-chip data from my TV streams (NTSC/ATSC digital streams). Apparently these data are embedded somewhere in the stream itself, but I have no clue how they are embedded inside, if they are inside visual frames, or a different hidden channel.

How are they embedded in the stream? And how can I retireve these data? Is there a software tool to get those signals? I need to do this programmatically in code.

V-Chip is encoded in the Extended Data Services (XDS) that is part EIA-608 captions. How it is actually transported in/with the video depends the signal type and medium.

Analog: Encoded with the captions on line 21 field 2.
SD SDI: Probably also on line 21 field 2.
HD SDI: On line 9 of the HANC encoded as per SMPTE ST 334.
ATSC over the air: In the DTVCC transport channel.
In a file: It depends on the wrapper.

It can be decoded in software. However, I don't know of any tools that aren't part of something larger, like transcoding, that can do it.


Breaking the 180 degree shutter rule when stabilising footage I usually record in 24 fps or 30fps using the 180 degree shutter rule for smooth motion blur.

On a recent trip I was recording hand-held footage of landscapes in high wind, which resulted in quite a lot of camera sway. I found that Resolve did a good job of stabilising the footage, but the resulting clips looked quite soft because of the motion blur left-over from the camera movement.

This left me thinking: if the main source of movement is likely to be camera shake (that will be stabilised in post) rather than motion of the subject, would results be dramatically improved with a faster shutter speed?

Are there accepted best practices on this?

I would invite you to experiment a bit and to answer your question yourself.

But yes, I can think in several cases where you should shot at higher framerate where this motion blur is actually a problem.

The first case is the one you describe. The camera shake will produce blur on directions we do not want.
Another case is time-lapse. You can have objects moving in different directions and different rates. Some programs process the images to produce different artificial blurs, so you could experiment on different shutter speeds-lapse ratios. If you want a cartoonish look you can simply shot at a fast velocity, for example, to give you a stop motion effect.
When you are shooting on a green screen to be composited later. A blur on a green screen is a pain to remove. Shooting at a higher speed will produce sharper edges on moving parts that will be easier to extract.

It is always easier to add blur than to remove it.

In my opinion, the best practices are the ones works for you.


Will multiple radiomic sets conflict with one another? I use a single radiomic (Sennheiser AVX) but now need a second one. Will the second conflict with the first one in terms of frequencies? Or would they automatically find different frequencies to operate on?

Update: now operating two Senn AVX sets, and they work together perfectly.

These wireless microphones specifically designed not to interfere with each other. They will automatically find their counterparts but can only send a signal to one receiver.
You should be OK.


Mouse drag and drop / drag to select animation in after effects I am currently trying to create some kind of drag and drop as well as a drag and select animation in after effects. The latter one is supposed to be looking something like this in the end:

(this animation is from adobe themselves, showing how to make stuff pixel-perfect in illustrator and can be found here: https://helpx.adobe.com/illustrator/how-to/pixel-perfect.html)

My problem is, that (1) I have have no idea how to make an object follow the animation of another object but only for a certain time. I mean, there is parenting, but I obviously just want the object to follow my cursor-object as long as it is in "clicked state" and not during the whole animation. I hope that makes sense ...

Also (2) I have no Idea how to let an anchor point of a rectangle follow another object.

My way of doing such an animation would be animating each object independently, but it always gets messy lining those animations up, especially when I for example change the speed of one of these animations in question, because I then will have to redo all the lining up again. There has to be an easier way!

Please let me know if you either know the answer yourself or a tutorial that can help me with this.

Kind regards,
Arvid

Expressions are you friend. Honestly I don't understand how anyone use AE without using expressions. To make the size of a rectangle shape follow a mouse you could do this.

Parent the mouse and rectangle to a null, with the top left corner of the rectangle aligned with the null. On the size property alt/option-click the stopwatch to open the expressions editor.

Delete what's there, and drag the pickwhip (the blue curly thing) to select the position of the cursor layer.

the size property will now look like:

thisComp.layer("cursor").transform.position

(if your cursor layer is called "cursor"). Now when you move the cursor the rectangle will scale to match the movement. But there's a problem, it scales from the middle, so you can add an offset to its position to make sure it lines up correctly. This time we use a bit of maths as well. On the position property of the rectangle path (not the position property of the layer) alt/option-click the stopwatch and drag the pickwhip to the size property of the rectangle, and then divide that value by 2. It will look like:

content("Rectangle 1").content("Rectangle Path 1").size/2

Now your rectangle should resize as if it's beign dragged by the cursor. You might have to manually drag the layer to line up perfectly. You can use more javascript to make the layer start and stop following the mouse.

Go learn expressions. As a bonus (or perhaps as a negative) you get to learn javascript, a ubiquitous computer language.


How do I batch replace video clips in Premiere to graded copies? (from Da Vinci Resolve) My color grader and I are working in parallel.  I'm editing in Adobe Premiere, and he is grading in Da Vinci Resolve (version CC 2015.2 and 12, respectively).  I gave him an early rough cut of the film to start grading.

A lot has changed in the cutting of the film since I exported him the rough cut XML of the project. The typical round-trip workflow I find online is to export XML projects back and forth between the NLE and Resolve, but that doesn't work for us because the Premiere project has changed so much and will continue to change.

Instead, we're trying to have Resolve render graded replacement video files for all of the source clips used, and tell Premiere to point to a different source clip.  The following technique seems to work, but has to be done clip by clip: "Project Pane > Right click > Replace Footage".

Is there an easier way to do this transition in Premiere and Da Vinci Resolve?  Or a better workflow in general for a colorist to work in parallel with an editor?

Method 1
First, with the Premiere project closed, move the original files that you're editing with to a new folder or other location. Open your project and it will warn you of missing files. Click the Relink others automatically checkbox and then hit Locate.

Navigate to the folder with the new graded footage, find the first clip and press Ok. It will then re-link all the other files to the matching files in new folder.

Note that this will only work if the files have the same name. Different extensions are ok, from my experience it's smart enough to deal with it if your original footage was an MXF and you're replacing it with an AVI for example.

Method 2
In your project window, or in your timeline, select all the files you want to replace, right-click and choose Make Offline. Generally you want to choose "leave the media files on disk" in the dialogue that opens, because it permanently deletes the file if you don't.

Once your clips are offline then you can re-link. With all the files still selected, right-click and choose "Link Media". This will open up the same dialogue as method 1, so as before you choose Relink others automatically and navigate to your graded footage.

Again, this only works if the graded clips are named the same as the originals.

Method 3
With the project closed, move the original clips from where they are on your hard drive, and replace them with the graded clips. When you open the project it will link to the new clips, again, provided that they are named the same. You will need to re-render any rendered clips in your timeline.

Another note is that if your footage contained audio you need the graded footage to contain audio, even if you're not using it. Premiere won't accept them otherwise. So in Resolve, make sure you check the "Render Audio" box.

I use this workflow when I'm working with BlackMagic Cinema Camera footage. DaVinci Resolve gives me much better results than the Adobe grading tools, either in Premiere or Speedgrade. The only thing that does nearly as good a job is using Adobe Camera Raw by opening the footage in After Effects and rendering out intermediates, but that is extremely tedious and dog-slow.


How to animate the size (width and height) of a rectangle animation in after effects? I want to change the height of a rectangle bottom - top from 0 to 1080px starting from position -1080 to 0. How do I do that? By default the transform does not have a size. It does have a scale but it's blurring out the edges when I'm trying to do the same with it.

Why not just start with a full screen square and simply position it off the bottom of the frame.  You can then simply animate it moving up.  Even if you have something on the square, it will generally look better to slide in than stretch in.  If there isn't anything on the square, it will look the same either sliding or stretching in if I understand your scenario correctly.


Which ND filter should I use? I have a Tiffen variable ND filter. I was wondering if the quality is good enough for video, since I'm pretty new to this. I've heard people using other filters but they are way too expensive for me right know, so I was wondering if, quality-wise, the Tiffen is a decent filter for DSLR videomaking.

If a filter is good enough for photo, it is good enough for video.  Video is much MUCH lower quality than photography.  Ultimately, it really depends on your standards though and we can't tell you if it is good enough for your particular tastes and needs.  The reason that there are more expensive cinema lenses is because of how focus works while zooming.


Why video call has no latency, but no matter what options of ffmpeg I tried to transmit video, the lowest I can get is ~0.2s latency? Why video call has no (even if there is, it is lower than human perception can discern) latency,  but no matter what options of ffmpeg I tried to transmit video to a remote server, the lowest I can get is ~0.2s latency (estimated, not sure how to profile)?

What is the technology behind video call that allows it to be much faster than ffmpeg?

I tried sending to the server and make the server send back the stream using the following commands:

CLIENT:

termimal 1-

ffmpeg -pixel_format mjpeg -s hd720 -r 30 -i /dev/video1 -c libx264 -preset ultrafast -tune zerolatency -crf 18 -b 5M -f matroska -vf hflip tcp://X:5000

termimal 2-

mplayer -benchmark ffmpeg://tcp://Y:5000?listen

SERVER:

ffmpeg -i tcp://X:5000 -c copy -f matroska tcp://Y:5000

However, the video I got back has a slight delay of about 0.5s (estimated, not sure how to profile). Is sending to and fro different that causes it to have longer delay?

Try using UDP. It should be faster than TCP but with possibility of losing paackets.


How to concatenate 2 MP4 videos to output of certain bitrate? I've already read the other articles about concatenating but couldn't find any that discuss specifying the output bitrate.

I have 2 MP4 videos.

What I want to do is speed up the first video to 110% speed (without changing audio pitch) and then concatenate it with the second video (which will remain at normal speed), and I want the resulting video to have a bitrate of 2.5 Mbps (since that's what Wistia told me should be the minimum for my upload).

Currently, my first attempt results in a video where the 2nd part is all mangled and shows bright green, etc. My second attempt (of Step 4) results in a video that has a total bitrate of only 1645kbps.

Step 1:

In Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2017, I've exported 2 videos, each using these settings:

Frame Rate: 30
Field Order: Progressive
Aspect: Square Pixels (1.0)
Profile: Main
Bitrate Encoding: CBR
Target Bitrate [Mbps]: 2.5
Audio Format: AAC
Audio Codec: AAC
Sample Rate: 48000 Hz
Bitrate [kbps]: 320

Step 2.

ffmpeg -i video1.mp4 -filter_complex "setpts=PTS/1.1;atempo=1.1" -c:v libx264 -x264-params "nal-hrd=cbr" -b:v 2.5M -minrate 2.5M -maxrate 2.5M -bufsize 5M video1_faster.mp4

Step 3.
Create a text file of this content:

file 'video1_faster.mp4'
file 'video2.mp4'

Step 4 (first attempt).

ffmpeg -f concat -safe 0 -i ffmpeg_concat_list.txt -c copy final.mp4

Step 4 (second attempt) (with re-encoding).

ffmpeg -i video1_faster.mp4 -i video2.mp4 -filter_complex "[0:v] [0:a] [1:v] [1:a] concat=n=2:v=1:a=1 [v] [a]" -map "[v]" -map "[a]" -b:v 2.5M -minrate 2.5M -maxrate 2.5M -bufsize 5M final.mp4

What am I doing wrong? Thanks.

Step 4 (first attempt) will work if you re-encode the 2nd video like the first (without the filters).

What's happening is that besides the timescale difference between CC's output and ffmpeg's (which will only result in timing errors), x264 is producing a High profile stream with a different parameter set than CC's encoder. Re-encode the 2nd video with ffmpeg and your files should be matching. Alternatively, you can speed up in CC and export the 1st video.


Which Blackmagic codec to choose? I purchased recently a new BMPCC 4K and I'm facing a big problem with file sizes...

The files are tremendously huge, so I have to make a choice about the codec to choose.

I'm shooting basically nature documentary so I need to color-adjust my files in editing, but I do not do any green screen or heavy special effects.

BlackMagic provides several codecs and I do not want to compromise quality, but without going into crazy unnoticeable quality...

I'm thinking of choosing Blackmagic Raw 8:1. Does any one know the technical differences between those codecs (beside the file size which varies quite a lots) ? Blackmagic Raw 3:1, 5:1, 8:1, 12:1, ProRes 422HQ, ProRes 422, ProRes 422 LT, ProRes 422 Proxy

Thanks

I would suggest using Braw Constant Quality Q5.

With 21-58MB/s it is on the lower end of data consumption while still giving you RAW capability.

BRAW gives you the RAW capabilities like Blackmagic Highlight recovery, changing the ISO, lossless color temperature changing. And 12bit colors.

ProRes gives you higher compatibility (Braw is currently only supported by Resolve) and "only" has 10bit Color.


Animating arcs waves With I could create an animation using arcs in After Effects as the example of the link below.

Animation

I'm trying to animate only the region where the arcs are opening.

In After Effects I can not create arcs. My attempts were only with circles.

I think you can achieve this effect using the built in Radio Waves effect.

https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/generate-effects.html

I think you can restrict the arc size.  If you can't, you could always mask the areas of the circle you don't want to see.


Why would you deliver a video in 1920x964? Quite simply; I've never come across this aspect ratio in video before and I just wanted to know if there is a standard in video (that I'm unaware of) that routinely uses this aspect ratio.

For a little extra background: an outsourced company in the States produced a video for us (we're based in the UK) and they delivered the video in 1920x964 and I really don't want to go back to them and ask 'why?' in case I seem like an idiot, so I'm checking with you gals and guys first :D

I know I've never heard of that ratio but I didn't know if it were more standard either in the US or in a different branch of film-making that I'm not party to.

I cannot think of a good reason why 1920x964.  It is not uncommon to see 2:1 aspect ratios, which would be 1920x960.  The extra 4 pixels are a mystery, especially because 960 divides by 8 and 16, which make it very JPG friendly.  964 does not divide evenly by 8, either.


How do I record decent sound during an interview? I’d like to get a decent sound while recording a video interview (two people). What I have:

Panasonic GH3 camera
Tascam DR-40 Mk II sound recorder

What I’d like:

Get as close as possible and keep the noise down.
Keep the number of devices down.
Battery-operated is a plus.

It looks like two lapel microphones are the way to go. But the recorder I have can’t record from two sources at once, should I get a mixer? Also, I’d love the microphones to be connected wirelessly, but a bundle of a wireless lapel mic and the receiving station looks quite expensive. What are my options?

You should definitely get a mixer!

The "complete" setup for audio would include:

a field mixer (like the PSC ProMix just for example) - needs XLR in/out
lavolier microphones
shotgun mic (or other very directional mic) with boom or pistol grip - this way you aren't stuck with the lavoliers all the time!
cables connecting the microphones to the mixer
your recording device
cables connecting the recording device to the mixer
headphones to monitor the sound coming in, and going out, of the mixer

Note I say your recording device, because theoretically you could record to the camera (not recommended).

The monitoring part is pretty crucial, because you don't want to be surprised in postproduction.

I prefer more directional microphones, because lavoliers can pick up some kinds of ambient noise.  Note however: a shotgun requires skill and endurance to use correctly!  Not to mention, an extra person on your crew.

I would also avoid wireless if you can.  It seems cool, but there's always some unexpected source of interference, and it can potentially add a lot of time to your set-up.

I hope this helps!


How do I change output file format in ffmpeg batch, when using drag and drop? I've been searching around for this for some time but can't find a working solution.
I found this question, which is close, but not exactly what I need.

I'm windows and ffmpeg to convert movs to mp4.
What I would like to have is a cmd file on my desktop on which I can drop my mov from any folder and the cmd file will create an mp4 with the same name in the same folder as the original mov, except the extension should be mp4.

My cmd file looks like this:

@echo off
ffmpeg -i %1 -s 1920x1080 -c:v libx264 -preset slow -bf 2 -crf 18 -pix_fmt yuv420p -movflags faststart -r 25 -profile:v baseline -level 3.0 -c:a aac -b:a 192k %1.mp4
pause

This creates the file Test.mov.mp4.
I tried
-f mp4 "%1~nf.mp4"
instead of %1.mp4 but this outputs Test.mov~nf.mp4.

With Gyan's help I was able to get it to work.
%~n1.mp4 will get the filename and substitute the file extension with mp4.
To get the correct path as well, I added %~p1.
So all in all I now use %~p1%~n1.mp4 and it works exactly as intended.


ffmpeg : how to reduce bit rate of transport stream I'm aiming to reduce the bit rate of a video contained in a transport stream.
The command (ffmpe.exe) is as follows :

ffmpeg -i "udp://127.0.0.1:40101" -map 0:v -c:v libx264 -b:v 256k -maxrate 256k -bufsize 256k -map 0:d -c copy -f mpegts "udp://127.0.0.1:10101"

The result is a tranport stream with the same bit rate.
What I'm doing wrong?
Thank you.
sb

Place the -c copy before -c:v libx264. See https://superuser.com/a/1219824


FFMPEG add image at beginning of MP4 as first frame I need to add an image (1 frame maybe) for one millisecond at the start of the mp4 video.

The final video should contain audio in the AAC system.

I expect no delay in the audio while the video plays. I would like to have silence at first for one millisecond to avoid lagging video.

  OS: Linux/Debian

Edit:

I converted the first image to an mp4 video with ffmpeg -i <static_picture.jpg> -c:v libx264 -s 256x144 -r 30 -t 0.03 -pix_fmt yuv420p image.mp4

I merged the two videos by concat demuxer but the video submitted has no sound.

The result of ffprobe -hide_banner -i Video.mp4 is:

Input #0, mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2, from 'Video.mp4':
  Metadata:
    major_brand     : isom
    minor_version   : 512
    compatible_brands: isomiso2avc1mp41
    encoder         : Lavf58.20.100
  Duration: 00:03:52.40, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 96 kb/s
    Stream #0:0(und): Video: h264 (High) (avc1 / 0x31637661), yuv420p, 256x144 [SAR 1:1 DAR 16:9], 94 kb/s, 25 fps, 25 tbr, 12800 tbn, 50 tbc (default)
    Metadata:
      handler_name    : VideoHandler

I am not sure I understand your question correctly but you can extract the video and audio stream, format them the way you want and then re-multiplex them all with ffmpeg.

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c:v copy -an video_only.mp4

The -an option is disabling the audio -c:v copy is copying your video stream to video_only.mp4.

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c:a copy -vn audio_only.mp4

Here you do the same but for the audio.

Please note that 1 frame is different than 1 millisecond. The duration of your frame depends on the frame rate but usually is between 16,(6)ms for 60fps (1/60) content and 41,(6)ms for 24fps (1/24) You can have 1ms frame only if your video is 1000fps which I really doubt it is. The audio, on the other hand, has a normally 44100Hz or 48000Hz sampling rate, which means that the minimum sample duration with 48KHz is 2.08(3)E-5 seconds.

When you are done you can multiplex the new video and new audio together by:

ffmpeg -i new_video.mp4 -i new_audio.mp4 -c copy audio_and_video.mp4

In order for this to work you need to have the same duration of both input streams though.

You can also concatenate a static picture to the video file. You can create your image.mp4 file with:

ffmpeg -i <static_picture.jpg> -c:v libx264 -s 1920x1080 -r 50 -t 0.02 -pix_fmt yuv420p image.mp4

This will create an image.mp4 video with a duration of 20 ms (1-frame) with a frame rate of 50, encoded with libx264 and resolution 1920x1080 using pixel format YUV420p which you most likely need.

Then you can concatenate both files by:

ffmpeg -i "concat:image.mp4|original_video.mp4" -c copy output.mp4

Make sure that the frame rate, resolution and pixel format of the image.mp4 and original_video.mp4 match otherwise it won't work.

[EDIT 17.11.2019] Apparently in your case you need to use the concat filter which also will require re-encoding of the audio and video. So the commands are the following:

ffmpeg -i <static_picture.jpg> -f lavfi -i anullsrc -c:v libx264 -s 256x144 -r 25 -t 0.04 -pix_fmt yuv420p -c:a aac -ac 2 -ar 44100 -shortest <image.mp4>

This command will create one frame long video with an empty audio stream, presuming that the second video is having 25fps. Please note that in your question the ffmpeg output of your input file is 25fps (tbr) and not 30fps, as you have presumed. I am also setting the number of channels to two: -ac 2 and the sample rate to 44.1KHz. The number of channels and the sample rate should match between both videos. More information about the anullsrc can be found here: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Null
Then you can concatenate and encode the video with the following command:

ffmpeg -i <image.mp4> -i <second_video.mp4> -filter_complex "[0:v:0][0:a:0][1:v:0][1:a:0]concat=2:v=1:a=1[v][a]" -c:v libx264 -b:v 100k -map "[v]" -map "[a]" <output.mp4>

Here I am taking both the video and audio streams from both video files and I am merging them to the output file and setting the video encoding bitrate to 100Kbps, the bitrate of your original video is 96Kbps and I have let ffmpeg decide how to encode the audio. You can change that if you want by defining codec, number of channels, sample rate. More information about the concat filter could be found here: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Concatenate


Video editing software for easy freeze frame voiceover I'm currently using Movie Studio Platinum 16. When I need to make a voiceover (e.g. for a product presentation), I like to do it without a carefully planned script, just talking over the video and pausing the video when necessary to manually sync the video with the narrative. However, in Movie Studio Platinum 16 it's not possible, so I end up either rushing my voiceover or having to manually edit freeze frames afterwards.
Which video editing software allows doing voiceover to a video and "live" pause the video but continue recording audio in sync with the paused video?

I believe you can do this in both Adobe Premier and Final Cut Pro. Here's some links:
https://helpx.adobe.com/premiere-pro/using/recording-audio.html
https://support.apple.com/guide/final-cut-pro/record-voiceovers-verc1faa9c5/mac


Minimal working frame rate for H264 codec When making a video from single image files whereas each image file should be visible for about one second, it does make sense to encode a video with an extremely low frame rate such as 1 frame per second. For this type of application, every frame rate greater than this would be a waste of resources.

I am wondering if the H264 codec (or any specific implementation, such as x264) itself has any lower limit for the frame rate below which it comes to technical problems or some kind of instabilities. In case there is no problem with encoding, can we expect video players to properly deal with such an unusual low frame rate?

Thanks for sharing your experience!

I'm not sure how it will behave at very low frame rates, but it is worth pointing out this would also limit your options on how and when you could change frames since they would have to follow on the clock cycles.  What is more likely to work in this case is a long keyframe interval.  The majority of frames in a compression like H.264 only store the changes from the previous frame.  In the case of a still image, the compression ratios will be huge because very little (no) change occurs between frames.  I'm not sure that you would really pick up enough of a savings from dropping the frame rate to be worth the loss of control over when you can make a change to the frame.

The best bet would be to try it with your media and see the results.  Compression is a highly content dependent thing and the best quality and compression for any particular clip is going to depend a lot on the nature of that clip, so trial is still the best way to test it out.


After Effects Crashes When Exporting To Media Encoder When I try to add my work to media encoder queue it used to give me an error about missing plugin.  I found a video online that said to make a symlink from default location to where I have it installed so I did this:

mklink /J "C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Media Encoder CC 2015" "D:\Program Files\Adobe Media Encoder CC 2015"

Now when I go to add to media encoder queue, the media encoder splash screen appears and then it instantly crashes.

Does anyone know what I can do to get it working?

Media encoder takes a real long time to open, I think this is the problem.  If I open media encoder first then after effects second it will export properly.  Just got to wait 5 mins for media encoder to open fully first.


How to make a set of a space capsule? I am going to make a short film for the 2019 Cinespace contest created by NASA.
The short is going to take place inside a space capsule. It has to look something like this:

How do you guys suggest I do it? Do I build a set from scratch? If so... how do I construct it?
Thanks!

This really depends on your budget.

Low Budget:
Find a room which allready looks futuristic with a lot of tech or stuff that looks like buttons and displays. Like in your image, you could make a little bole eye windows with some salad dish, put a screen behind which plays space stuff.

High budget:
Build a little wood cage, also add a little window which shows space and adds natural light.
Then go to home depo and just buy a lot of diffrent knobs and buttons.


How to create a video that can be uploaded to Twitter in Mac? I'm using Mac to make videos.
I have iMovie and Final Cut Pro.
It seems that the videos that can be uploaded to Twitter have a specific formats.
Does anyone know what's the easiest way to make such a video in Mac?

From Twitter's support page:

We currently support MP4 and MOV video formats on mobile apps.
On the web, we support the MP4 video format with H264 format with AAC
audio. You can upload videos up to 512MB, however you will be prompted
to edit videos to 2 minutes and 20 seconds or less in length.

You can export an h264 format video directly from Final Cut.


How can I color correct a footage from a 7D using the CineStyle Picture Style I want to use the CineStyle color style for my 7D to get the most out of the dynamic range.  Saw some tutorials on how to use a LUT file to color correct in Final Cut Pro or Premiere, but only on the Mac version with the help of a plugin.  How can I do this on the PC?

Technicolor Cinestyle provide a .mga file to color correct the picture.  But I can't seem to find how to use that.

The CineStyle picture style provides you with a flat, desaturated image: providing the best dynamic range of any of the picture styles for Canon DSLRs. Technicolor provide you with a file that you can apparently import into your editing software to help you grade your footage. However, I never figured out how to use it and frankly, I don't think one needs to. I think your time would be better spent learning how to color grade rather than learning how to import an .mga file. You don't need the file to grade your footage. I think it is more of a preset kind of thing – used to return the flat, desaturated image into a contrasty, attractive one albeit with more detail in the shadows and highlights than if you'd used any of the inbuilt Canon picture styles. However, this is something you can do yourself, and if done right, you will achieve better results than any preset can give you.

Most editing programs will have a color correction filter. Some programs have better than others but most should satisfy your needs. However, I will recommend a good piece of free software called DaVinci Resolve Lite. Like I said, it's free, and it's awesome.

Sorry I couldn't give you any help with the .mga file.


How to batch covert a folder of mp4 files to avi? I'm trying to batch convert a folder of MP4 files to AVI using this script:

for f in *.mp4; do ffmpeg -i "$f" -q:v 6 "encoded/${f%.*}.avi”; done

(This is based an earlier question that was helpfully answered for me by @Mulvya here: What's the best way to convert mp4 to avi?)
I'm receiving the error message:

Unable to find a suitable output format for 'encoded/test file.avi”; done
for f in *.mp4; do ffmpeg -i test'
encoded/test file.avi”; done
for f in *.mp4; do ffmpeg -i test: Invalid argument

Can anyone suggest where i may have made a mistake?

Change the ” to a ".

Avoid using TextEdit or other "smart" editors to edit your scripts and shell commands. They will mangle it with fancy quotes and other oddball characters and ruin your commands.


ffmpeg: concat without temp files? Is it possible to concat without temp files using ffmpeg?
eg;
# nice ffmpeg -v error -f concat \
  -ss "52.519" -copyts -to "53.153" -i in.mkv \
  -ss "53.186" -copyts -to "390.690" -i in.mkv \
  -ss "464.264" -copyts -to "2831.331" -i in.mkv \
  -c copy out.mkv < /dev/null
Invalid duration specification for ss: "52.519"

if so, what is ffmpeg version 4.2.4 complaining about?
the "duration specification" is valid when using temp files followed by concat.
mkvtoolnix is able to do this btw.

If I understand the question correctly: yes! You can create a file that is a concatenation of different parts of the input video.
The script you're looking for is something like:
ffmpeg \
-i "$INPUT_FILE" \
-filter_complex \
"[0:v]trim=start=5:duration=10,setpts=PTS-STARTPTS[v0]; \
 [0:a]atrim=start=5:duration=10,asetpts=PTS-STARTPTS[a0]; \
 [0:v]trim=start=20:duration=10,setpts=PTS-STARTPTS[v1];
 [0:a]atrim=start=20:duration=10,asetpts=PTS-STARTPTS[a1]; \
 [v0][a0][v1][a1]concat=n=2:v=1:a=1[final]" \
-map "[final]" concat-video.mp4

You can read a little bit more about this on this blog post
(Disclaimer: I'm one of the co-founder of https://mediamachine.io)
Hope this helps!


I'm having trouble scaling strokes in After Effects I am new to after effects and I am having trouble understanding scaling shapes. I have an initial shape ( image 1 ) that I wish to expand and animate to a wider shape ( image 2 ). But as you can see, the grey stoke also widens when I expand it when I want it to remain the same stroke width as the previous image and just have the shape widen. Basically I want image 1 to animate to a wider shape and look just like image 3 without the stoke becoming thicker. Hope that makes sense.

Any help will be most appreciated.

If you created the shape with the rounded rectangle tool, then you won't initially have the same control over the transform as you would if you'd made the shape with the pen tool.  But there's a simple fix.  Just right-click on "Rectangle Path X" and convert to bezier path.  Now you'll be able to use the selection tool to draw a marquis around the individual corner points and animate them however you like (just tick the stopwatch next to "path" to create keyframes).

Just to be clear, don't animate the "Scale" transform property x value.  This will distort the lines, even after they're converted to a bezier curve.  Instead, animate the actual corners of the path.


Software for detecting Photosensitive Epilepsy content As part of various broadcasters requests media provided for broadcasting environment must be PSE (Photosensitive Epilepsy) free. There should be not frames sequences that could trigger that symptoms.

I would like to know if there exists some free software for quality check media in mov, mp4 and mxf with dnxhd, h264 and prores codecs and if ffmpeg can do it showing the possible harmful patterns and passages.

Thanks!

Some Broadcasters require a Harding Test which is patented and proprietary, it creates a Certificate; thus getting someone to accept liability isn't going to be free.
You can find a number of places online that will test a video file (or Game, Poster, Art, etc.) but those aren't free, the Harding website has authenticated tests and support.
Free software claiming to perform the same checks (so when you submit your work, it won't be rejected) is available from the University of Maryland in the form of PEAT, their Photosensitive Epilepsy Analysis Tool.

Note: Restrictions on use
The Photosensitive Epilepsy Analysis Tool (PEAT) was developed to provide a free resource for Web designers and computer software developers. Use of PEAT to assess material commercially produced for television broadcast, film, home entertainment, or gaming industries is prohibited. For broadcast, film, home entertainment, and gaming applications, the Harding FPA software should be employed.

To get the real thing, a Certificate, you'll need to pay. To get software that claims to do the same thing without accepting liability or providing the authentic Certificate is possible, I found that source with less than 10 min. of searching.


What software is used to add animated characters to live TV? Specifically, I am wondering how Cartoon Donald Trump was added, voiced, and puppet-ed in clips such as

It seems like they added this in post with a program like after effects(but this is simple enough that they could have even used a video editor). The cartoon was made in a program like after effects, blender, or any other animation program.


Best low cost software for lightsaber effect on a macintosh? I'm interested in creating lightsaber effects with a Macintosh on home videos with my children.

What is the best low cost software for recreating this effect today? I don't have Adobe CC, and have no desire to subscribe to it, nor do I have Final Cut Pro X.

Does iMovie support this effect? Are there any good free or cheap rotoscoping or canned effect programs to accomplish this?

Edited to add: "Would the free (non-commercial) edition of Nuke for Macintosh" be a good solution? (I discovered it after asking.)

Thank you.

You could try the HitFilm Express 4, they have the sci-fi pack (25usd) which contains the VFX you want and specific tutorials for lightsaber (https://hitfilm.com/express/the-force) and it works on mac :)
Link: https://hitfilm.com/store/hitfilm-4-express


ffmpeg output file includes two video sequences but input file only one I want to copy from the source mkv-file the video stream (only once) and the German audio stream and all subtitles if available.
The Problem is that sometimes is the video stream copied twice in the output-mkv-file. I have following:

ffmpeg -y -i input.mkv -map 0:v:0 -map 0:m:language:ger -map 0:s? -c copy output.mkv

What must I change?

Use

ffmpeg -y -i input.mkv -map 0:v:0 -map 0:a:m:language:ger -map 0:s? -c copy output.mkv

You'll need ffmpeg 4.2 or newer.


How To add blank part in video for 1 hour I have a video of 2 mins length.Now I want to add extra 1 hour to the video.I have done this be changing video duration in composition settings.But video is rendering for about 4 gb.Whereas original video is only 5 mb.

How to render this video in mp4 format with around 10mb size.

I don't know if the AE encoder can signal duplicate frames (which would keep the size down). You may be better off using ffmpeg, a command-line tool.

Suppose your source video is 1280x720 at 24 fps, then you would run

ffmpeg -i source.mp4 -f lavfi -i "color=black:s=1280x720:r=24:d=3600" -filter_complex "[0][1]concat=n=2:v=1:a=0[v]" -map [v] -c:v libx264 output.mp4

To combine with text overlay,

ffmpeg -i universal.mp4 -f lavfi -i "color=black:s=1280x720:r=24000/1001:d=20" -filter_complex "[0][1]concat=n=2:v=1:a=0[v];[v]drawtext=fontfile=FreeSerifBold.ttf:text=\'Hello World\':fontcolor=white@1.0:fontsize=16:x=w-tw-10:y=10:box=1:boxcolor=black@0.5[vout]" -map [vout] -map 0:a -c:v libx264 -profile:v main -movflags +faststart output.mp4 2>&1


What software can I use to make "stop motion" video from existing video material I want to make video like this:

While I know they used different technique (stop motion from photos), I would want to make mine from existing video of person walking. So my question is: what software would automatically remove every frame except the ones I mark as important for walk animation (ie.: frames in which left or right leg is in specific position so the walk impression is preserved).

Even better, the video I currently have has pretty systematic walk so I guess it would be nice if I could specify the important frames as x+n and y+n (where x and y are numbers of first important frame for left and for right leg and n is some constant offset) and just adjust the n if and when necessery.

Even better if the software cold actually detect which frames may be important.

So, can this be done and if yes then what software do I need?

You can use any non-linear video editor to make this, but you are in for a lot of manual work.

Time posterizing (or video strobe) is mentioned which can give you that "stop" effect, but it will not take care of the walk-cycle. For that you need to manually go in and choose each frame.

My suggestion would be to take the video sequences you need, go through frame by frame in the preview monitor and grab the frame you need according to where in the cycle by making the in and out point the same, then drag the cut (a single frame) onto the timeline. Repeat.

Now the only thing you need to do is to scale the timeline so that each image has a duration longer than 1 frame (probably around 10 frames or so). With this technique you can also fine-adjust a single "take" if needed.

The other approach is to convert video (or using photo still) as single images. Here you loose the advantage of fine-adjusting though (in relation to the walk-cycle).

Automatically detecting where in a walk-cycle a person is is highly specific task and AFAIK there exist no such software available to the public (some law enforcement agencies have access to software for behavioral analysis including walk patterns, but that becomes quite a different table- - so yes, it's possible, but not available).


help to animate an lower thirds that's positioned by expressions I'm new to using expressions in after effects and I've also hardly touched Java before.  However using some online tutorials and common sense, I managed to create a lower thirds title graphic yesterday, the java is used to change it's position based on how much text is written inside.  The title graphic bleeds off to the left of the screen, so when text is written on it, it moves left or right to match the length of text.  I've included the code below.

s =thisComp.layer("Header title");
x = s.sourceRectAtTime(time-s.inPoint,true).width;

subl =thisComp.layer("Sub title");
subt = subl.sourceRectAtTime(time-subl.inPoint,true).width;

text = Math.max(subt, x) -100;

max = 659.4;
m = Math.min(max, text);

[m, 871]

So with a little bit of text:

With more text:

Where I'm struggling is I want to make this into an animated motion graphic, where the graphic just slides in and out at the right time.  However, if there's less text, it's position is further out the frame and it takes longer to slide in - which means that it's out of sync with other parts of the animation.  I'm not worried about consistent speed, I just want it to appear in at the same time as it has to match other animations.  The only way I can see this happening accurately is by further encoding, where it gets a little beyond me!

I tried animating using if expressions dependant on the time function, but this didn't create a transition, the graphic jumped instantly from point to point.  I can't find anything on creating keyframes in java either so not sure the best way to do this.

Really appreciate any help to put me on the right track.

There are some built-in functions just for this purpose. You'll find them in the interpolation folder in the expression drop-down. The simplest is the linear() function:

linear(t, value1, value2)

This function interpolates in a linear fashion between value1 and value2 based on the value of t, where 0 ≤ t ≤ 1. So if t=0 the function returns value1 and if t=1 it returns value2. It can also take five parameters, in the form

linear(t, tMin, tMax, value1, value2)

in this form, instead of using the range 0-1 for t it uses the range tMin to tMax.

Along with linear() there are also ease(), easeIn() and easeOut(). These interpolate with easing - meaning the animation slows down at the beginning or end, or both.

So in your example you could add this before the last line:

startTime = inPoint; //if you want the animation to start at the start of the layer
m = ease(time-startTime, 0, animationLength, 0, m)

this will smoothly animate from the layer's in-point for animationLength seconds to the calculated position.

Oh, BTW it's Javascript not Java. They are completely different languages. As they say, Java and Javascript are similar in the same way that "car" and "carpet" are similar.


Editing 1440p @ 47 FPS in Premiere Pro CS6 I am attempting to edit the videos I've recorded with a GoPro Hero 3 in Premiere Pro CS6. However, the preview window jumps, is slow and not smooth at all. As this pretty much makes video editing impossible, I was looking for a solution.

Are there any settings in Premiere Pro CS6 which would fix this or are you guys able to recommend me another program for Windows 7 which has a comparable features?

My computer specs:

OS: Windows 7 Professional 64-Bit
RAM: 32 GB
Processor: Intel i7-3820 @ 3.60Ghz (8 CPUS)
Graphic Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670

This sounds like a hardware problem.  The playback engine in Premiere has been very, very fast since CS5, so it is unlikely to be a software problem.  The data rate for 1440p video at 47fps is going to be astonishingly high (170MB/sec once decoded, for comparison, 1080p 24fps is just under 50MB/sec) and extremely demanding on your system.  Based on your system specs, it probably isn't a processing or memory problem, particularly if you have CUDA enabled, however you may be running in to a bandwidth problem loading off your hard-disk or loading in to memory (depending on your memory speed).

It also may be an issue with the format of the video you are using.  Not all video formats are designed for random access.  Even with a very powerful computer, if the file format you are working with requires rendering out multiple frames from the latest key frame every time that you move your preview, you will hammer your computer far harder.  (In the worst case, you end up having to load over a dozen frames of video to get one frame.)

It also wouldn't hurt to double check if anything is bottle necking by looking at Task Manager when you are previewing video.  Does memory utilization or CPU get high?  I expect it will be hard disk access (which won't peak the CPU or memory utilization) but it doesn't hurt to double check.


set scale in pixels in After Effects using Expressions You can right click on a scale, hit Edit, and then enter scale in Pixels, inches , % of Comp, of source....

I would like to set the scale in pixels. How can set the units using expressions?

I tried returning ["200px","200px"], but that is an error.

The size in pixels is easily computed as the source's original dimensions multiplied by the scale. Or in other words

p = d × s

where p=pixel dimensions required, d=source dimensions, s=scale.

So to set the scale so that it takes a given source and makes it conform to a desired dimensions:

s = p / d

In an expression on the scale property you'd use

var p = [123, 456]; / desired output dimension
[ p[0] / width, p[1] / height ] * 100; // the *100 is because scale is a percentage

To be really fancy you could repurpose the scale value input so that it controlled the pixel dimensions. This means if you want the layer's dimension to be [123,456] you'd just dial it in in the scale control:

var d = value; //returns the pre-expression value of the property
[ p[0] / width, p[1] / height ] * 100


Separating and Mapping Audio Channels in Premiere CC Multi-Camera Sequence I'm having a lot of trouble getting my audio to work properly in multi-camera sequences.

I have just two sources, both video with a single synced stereo track. The stereo tracks for each source have been split into two mono channels (each channel is a different mono microphone.)

After creating the multi-camera sequence "Dr Chen pt.1 Multi-Cam", everything seems fine. Everything is synchronized and each of the 4 audio tracks holds a different microphone recording.

But when I create a new target sequence from the multi-camera sequence (for editing) it seems that the first two audio tracks are identical and the last two are missing. Furthermore, the first two sound like the sum of all clips from the multi-camera sequence. But I've made sure each track in both sequences is mono and mapped to a different audio channel.

The audio channel mapping is confusing to me, but I don't know what I'm doing wrong. Any ideas?

Here are screenshots of the audio channel mapping for the multi-cam sequence and the target sequence.

Premiere Pro is definitely not a digital audio workstation.  Its treatment of audio is primitive at best.  I believe its paradigm (which I think is screwy, but that's my opinion) is that a multicam clip conveys one of two types of audio: the preview channel track (which you have selected as Channel 1) or audio-follows-video, which means each cut you make, the audio switches to the one channel allocated for that clip.

I know you don't want either, but I don't think there's a third way.

So, use Channel 1 as your reference clip, copy and align the audio tracks you want to deal with to the sequence containing the multicam clip, and do all your audio edit processing there, separately from your camera changes.  Good luck!


Renaming source files without breaking link in Premiere? So, I messed up and rushed into a project for work. Instead of giving my files good naming conventions, I worked off a generic file naming convention off the camera. Now I have many edits on premiere but if I want to rename my source files outside of premiere, I find I have to go one at a time.

Otherwise, if I batch rename them all at once I will have no idea what to relink to what in my project. I've searched and haven't found a solution other than renaming the files inside premiere and consolidating the project to copy to new location and selecting to rename media files to match clip names.

I don't like this solution because it means I'll have to use the new premiere files. Much appreciated.

I figured it out! It was super easy.

I used Adobe Bridge to batch rename. Very importantly, I left the preserve current filename in XMP metadata option checked.

BUT before clicking rename, I first clicked preview and exported the CSV file and saved it somewhere safe. This file will help you remember the original file name. In this instance I will know that file 001.png was renamed to 120.png. This is very important.

Now in Premiere, all your renamed files will go offline. If all your files in one location on your drive, this next step is very easy. Just link one file and if you can't remember what you renamed it to, the beauty is that you can quickly search your CSV file in many ways like excel. Then just relink your file to the renamed file that way. Premiere will recognize all your other renamed files because you preserved the XMP meta data. And that's it!


Adding hard and soft subtitles to a video I have several movies and shows, such as Breaking Bad, into which I want to add both soft (optional) subtitles for English, but hard (always on) subtitles for the non-English languages. Is this possible?

All of these files are in mp4 format, and I can find the subtitle files online, or learn to edit them, but have downloaded none yet.

You can do this via ffmpeg.exe.

For a guide to installing ffmpeg check the first part of this video here:

For hardsubbing you can check this video here:

Assuming the above is now known:
In your specific case you are going to want to make copies of the video stream and then hardsub the copies with the subfile desired.
To learn about mapping streams you can read here:
https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Map

All the information is above in those 3 links to get you going with ffmpeg for the purposes needed. If you need help formatting the command for your specific situation please provide a thumbnail of the streams in ur video you want to modify and I can help you with the specifics. Pay close attention to the specific tidbits mentioned in the content above, as there are many traps you can fall into along the way. I'll help you with those though if needed.


Using gopro hero 3 white/black with 3d- anything to watch out for? I am looking at buying a pair of black edition go pros and a 3d kit (mount with sync cable)

I read elsewhere online about some issues with earlier models with the firmware etc.

Does anyone know if these issues have been addressed?

I'd like to hear if you have used the new hero 3 black edition models and any issues you may have had shooting 3d

Ensure that you purchase the 3D kit for the current generation of GoPro Black Edition.  There was a 3D kit for the older GoPro HD (and they have a terrible set of similar names for all their products).  I take it you are thinking of the Hero3 Black, Hero3 Silver or Hero3 White and not the Hero3+ Black or Silver?  These are different products and it looks like the (more recent) Dual Hero System is designed for the Hero3+ products and not the Hero3 ones.  You should be careful not to purchase the older 3D Hero System, which works with the HD HERO2 & the Original HD HERO, but not the newer cameras.

I have only read reviews on using the older 3D system.  They mostly concluded that the 3D software was good and produced reasonable results in a reliable way.  It was observed that the cameras seem to start with a small offset (1 frame I think) and the reviewer summarised that the software might be designed to deal with this difference.  If you choose not to use the bundled software, you might want to check the timing of the two video sources carefully as you might need to take steps to synch them.


YouTube 3gp encoding settings I'm building a new media site and I'm taking cues from YouTube for which video file formats I should offer for widespread usability among mobile and desktop clients.  I'm doing all transcoding using ffmpeg.  My trouble is that YouTube's .3gp files have a Codec ID of "3gp6", a Video Format of "MPEG-4 Visual", and a Video Format Profile of "Simple@L1" (using mediainfo to interrogate the files.) I can't figure out which ffmpeg settings I can use to reproduce this.

If I use -vcodec libx264 -profile:v baseline -level 1 in my ffmpeg command, then the file comes out with the right Codec ID, but the Video Format is "AVC" and the Profile is "Baseline@L1.0".

Alternately, if I use -vcodec mpeg4 -profile 0 -level 1, then the Video Format and Profile are correct, but the Codec ID is "3gp4" instead of "3gp6".

So my question is, how can I use ffmpeg to arrive at a Codec ID of 3gp6 along with a format of MPEG-4 Visual and a profile of Simple@L1?  I've been unsuccessfully Googling and experimenting on this for hours.

Why would you want your videos in the .3gp container to begin with? Its a very irrelevant format nowadays, there is practically no device that supports the 3gp container but not MP4 at the same time. Its nothing but a close derivative of MP4, they are very similar container formats holding the same codec. If you want to support a lot of devices using h264 in the mp4 container opens your website up to the majority of mobile an desktop devices, in addition vp8/webm offers compatibility to open source software that can't afford h264 license or doesn't want to use h264. With these two formats you are covering every relevant market.

http://caniuse.com/#feat=mpeg4

http://caniuse.com/#feat=webm

3gp is a depricated format for legacy phones, long before the Android and iOS era when YouTube was new and started to add a bit of mobile support and its nearly identical with MP4, some manufactures even name their 3gp files with the .mp4 extension (wiki)

Also note that having your files have the same meta information as those from YouTube is not an indicator if they are compatible or not, YouTube uses a different encoder than you and the encoder will write different information than x264 in ffmpeg. If your file meets the specs of a certain format than its compatible, easy as that.
If you want to go sure you don't use any fancy format features just use a low profile (e.g. baseline in the case of h264) to ensure compatibility with virtually any device, the lower the profile the less features are allowed.

If you REALLY need to use 3gp you can specify the container with the option -f 3gp. Using the BaseLine 1 profile is absolutely suffice.
Using a ffmpeg commandline like the following will get you what need:

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf scale=320:240 -vcodec mpeg4 -acodec aac -strict -2 -f
3gp output.3gp

Note the usage of mpeg4 instead of libx264. The mpeg4 encoder is the Mpeg4 Part 2 codec also known as h263. Again, extremely few devices nowadays do not support h264 and I can only advice to support h263 in the 3gp container when you are in dire need to do so or have an extremely large user base that ranks in the tens of millions of users.

Having 3gp6 instead of 3gp4 is irrelevant, you are targeting old devices so using the newest version of the standard doesn't make much sense. FFmpeg will use the 3gp6 container only when using the also newer codec h264 which release 6 is also meant for.

Here and excerpt from the 3gpp v6 standard:

Specific MBMS Rel-6 application codecs are introduced, like for example audio codecs Extended AMR-WB (AMR-WB+), Enhanced aacPlus and video codec H.264/AVC.

So unless you use h264, there is no need for using Release 6 and you can stick with Release 4 without running into any issues.
The opposite is actually the case, the older the version the more old devices you will support.


Weird scrolling lines in video while using Akaso EK7000 in low light I got the Akaso EK7000 action cam in the mail today. The camera works almost perfectly other than one issue I noticed. The issue I noticed is a scrolling line that appears in the video at 4k 25fps. I then took about the same clip in the same conditions at 1080p 60fps and I didn't notice the issue. Here are the clips I took.

4k 25fps:

Video on Vimeo (password: video)

1080p 60fps:

Video in Vimeo (password: video)

Also, the lines on the walls in both clip aren't caused by the camera, they are just shadows from a railing behind me.

I've heard about something called rolling shutter, could this be caused by that at all?

that's the frame rate and electricity frequency

Ill bet if you filmed at 1080 25fps you would get the same result. Im going to assume you are based in the US which uses the standard 30fps which is why your 1080 footage does not show it as 60fps is a multiple of 30fps but 25fps is not which is why you are getting the banding.

Hope that helps

FYI there is nothing you can do in camera unless the 4k offers a 30fps (or multiple of) to avoid the banding when filming with standard household lighting


Canon video recording stopped automatically problem but new question not like the other ones! On my Canon EOS 550D, I am getting this error. I know the problem is about speed of sd card. Well my sd card is not fast but I am also using adapter. I mean I originally have micro sd card but I am using adapter to make it big to put it in my camera. So the question is if I get fast micro sd card and use the same adapter will the problem be solved? My logic is if adapter effects the speed then even if I use fastest micro sd card it won't work well. I am using micro sd card to see my photos on my phone by easily putting it in. So what is your recommendation for me?

Typically the problem likely isn't the SD card speed. Depending on the camera it's likely limited because of file size or import taxation.

Most cameras use FAT32 as the file system on the SD card, which caps you out at 4GiB, so when you record enough footage to slam into that ceiling the camera will stop. Based on the Canon 6D we have in the office you can do ~10-15 minutes (depending on motion) at 1080p24 IPB mode, or 3-5 minutes
in All-I mode.

Some cameras work around this by using AVCHD, which allows for longer clips to be spanned across multiple files (DVDs and the GoPro use a similar trick) but because AVCHD is an established system and specification it does constrain the formats and bitrates that can be recorded at (e.g. Canon's All-I mode can hit 70+MbPS but AVCHD tops out at about 28MbPS), and it uses MPEG-TS to store video which is a bit less intuitive than classic MP4/MOV files.

Other cameras work around this by using exFAT for the SD card file system, which allows for files greater than 4GiB, and can be read and written by both Windows and OS X. However Linux support is a bit spottier.

Now the ultimate question: why don't all cameras use one or both of these systems? The answer: money. exFAT needs to be licensed from Microsoft, and AVCHD from the AVCHD consortium (Panasonic and Sony; hence why those cameras most frequently feature AVCHD modes).

Then there's import taxation. Some countries classify any device that can record for 20 minutes or longer a "video camera," and thus are taxed differently on import. So some camera manufacturers will just stick with FAT32 to save money on both licensing and import tax, as it naturally restricts record time at higher resolutions, with recording limits imposed in software at lower resolutions.


How to losslessly encode a jpg image sequence to a video in ffmpeg? I have a large set of jpgs that I want to convert to a video losslessly (or, at the very least, very close to losslessly as long as the encoding time isn't much higher than otherwise).

Naively, I would think that there should be some codec that can store each individual jpg frames as-is (without recompression), and perhaps achieve some nice compression by replacing some of the frames by just the information on the delta from the previous frame. In my case there are many sequences of frames which are identical to each other, or that have a tiny difference between them.

Is there some codec and suitable settings for ffmpeg that can achieve this?

Just mux the images

You can simply mux the JPG images to make a video:

ffmpeg -framerate 30 -i input%03d.jpg -codec copy output.mkv

Note that if you omit -framerate then a default of -framerate 25 will be applied to the input.

Lossless optimization

You can use jpegtran to perform lossless optimization on each frame which may provide significant file size savings:

mkdir outputdir
for f in *.jpg; do jpegtran -optimize -copy none -perfect -v "$f" > "outputdir/$f"; done

Now mux with ffmpeg as shown above.

Checking that it is actually lossless

The framehash muxer can be used to compare the unique hash of each frame to ensure that the result is truly lossless:

$ ffmpeg -i input%03d.jpg -f framehash -
stream_index, packet_dts, packet_pts, packet_duration, packet_size, hash
0,          0,          0,        1,   460800, 29bcc2db3726c7dfec1826c5740f603f
0,          1,          1,        1,   460800, b5fdc23d93cbd043dc2b9290dc8378f0
0,          2,          2,        1,   460800, ee0709942f24b458fd2380d134dcb59d
...

$ ffmpeg -i output.mkv -map 0:v -f framehash -
stream_index, packet_dts, packet_pts, packet_duration, packet_size, hash
0,          0,          0,        1,   460800, 29bcc2db3726c7dfec1826c5740f603f
0,          1,          1,        1,   460800, b5fdc23d93cbd043dc2b9290dc8378f0
0,          2,          2,        1,   460800, ee0709942f24b458fd2380d134dcb59d
...

In the above examples each associated frame for the input and output share the same hash ensuring that the frames are identical and that the output is lossless.

Also see

FFmpeg image file demuxer documentation
FFmpeg Wiki: How do I encode single pictures into movies?