Converting a Video from 1600*1200 to 1920*1080 How can I convert a video from 1600*1200 to 1920*1080 ?
I know that the aspect will be not correct, but I just like to do.

With Handbrake I can't do it, because it will not allow me to go beyond the 1600 pixels in the width.

Thanks for helping.

Using ffmpeg,

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf "scale=1920:1080:flags=lanczos,setsar=1" output.mp4

This will stretch the video to 1920x1080.

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf "scale=-1:1080:flags=lanczos,setsar=1,pad=1920:1080:(ow-iw)/2:(oh-ih)/2" output.mp4

This will keep the aspect ratio but place black bars on the left and right.

The flag in the scale filter determines the scaling algorithm to use. lanczos is the best available, in general, for video.

The setsar sets the pixel aspect ratio. Advisable to keep this square (1) unless you know what you're doing.

In the 2nd command, the -1 tells ffmpeg to preserve original proportion when scaling height to 1080. The pad fills out the canvas to 1920x1080 and centers the scaled video within it.


Fujifilm X-T3 or BMPCC4k for musicvideos and feature film I'm currently looking which camera that I should buy.
I narrowed it down to the BMPCC4k or the Fujifilm X-T3, but not sure which one I should pick...

I mainly make music and event videos, but next year I will film a feature length film.

The RAW and color of BMPCC4k is really nice, but it doesn't really have a low bitrate codec for smaller music videos... So the storage can get quite expansive.

Also I'm not a huge fan of MFT, but with a Speedbooster this is not so important. Allthough a Speedbooster is quite costly.

What would you say is better for this type of shooting?

As long as you can do the job right, there is no contest here.  BMPCC4k all the way.  The X-T3 is a nice mid-range photo camera, but it's a still camera first and a video camera second with all the limitations that entails.  The BMPCC4K is a very solid entry level digital cinema camera.  It lacks the more full featured functionality of it's bigger brothers like the BMPC or Ursa Mini, but it inherits from their roots.

Yes, the file sizes are large and you shouldn't underestimate the cost of data storage.  If you are planning on shooting a feature length film in 4K RAW, expect to be using around 10-17TB of footage (I am working through post on a six episode TV series shot in 4K on a mix of Ursa Mini and BMPC4k currently.)  What you get for that extra data is well worth the cost though, especially on a large project.  You get a degree of flexibility in your color that is unmatched in the DSLR/Mirrorless camera video shooting world, which will greatly assist in your color grade efforts in post.  Also make sure you get your hands on a color target to simplify fine tuning your color as you go and save yourself lots of time in post.

Do make sure you have sufficient lighting and know what you are doing when it comes to exposure though.  While the Black Magic line of digital cinema cameras is a great line, it does not hold your hand.  It expects you know what you are doing and doesn't do a great job of covering for your mistakes, even up in to the Ursa end of their product line.  They can produce amazing images if you use them right, but used incorrectly, you'll have far better results out of the DSLR/Mirrorless world.

I have experience shooting video professionally with both a Canon 5D Mark iii (with Magic Lantern installed) and most of the Black Magic line of digital cinema cameras.  There is no comparison between them when used properly.  There are a few special cases I'd choose my 5D over my Ursa Mini, but they are few and far between (mostly low light shooting where it actually has to look like low light.)

The one thing that might be a gotcha for you would be that if you do weddings, the Black Magic line is really not well suited for weddings compared to the X-T3, but for music videos and feature film production where you can control the light to fit your needs vs the other way around, Black Magic wins hands down by a significant margin.


in Premiere CC, how do you create a TALL rectangular mask? I can create a rectangular mask in Premiere CC, and I can resize it. But how do I change just one dimension (make it more narrow) while keeping the corners at right angles? Dragging a corner point manually probably won't maintain a 90-degree corner.

Finally figured it out (with some help). You can drag a whole side at a time! Here's how:

Click one of the 2 corners to (subtly) select it.
Shift-click-and-drag the other corner.

That will select the whole side between the two corners. It will also limit your "dragging path" to paths that are at 45 degrees or 90 degrees relative to the corner's original position. That enables you to keep your rectangle rectangular.


Camera shake produces ripple-like effect I'm using a Kodak Zi8 at the moment, but I've noticed this effect on other cameras. When a camera is moving it occasionally produces fun house mirror-style effects. It makes things appear to stretch and shrink. Is this a software issue or a problem with cheap components? Are there any cameras that don't produce this effect?

See example video:
 Kodak Zi8 shake issue from Reed Law on Vimeo.

This "effect" is called Rolling Shutter. It is common in most CMOS camera sensors because they don't capture an instantaneous image, instead they do it progressively over a period of time. CCD sensors do not have this problem as they do have instantaneous capture.


How to throw fire from a Saxophone (in live)? In this video of Post Modern Jukebox (Burn - Ellie Goulding), you can see fire thrown from the saxophone at 2:10. I can't see how exactly they are doing this.

So, how to throw fire from a Saxophone live? What is the technique they used in the video?

A tube is clipped to the side of the sax. At one end of the tube is the little flame. At the other end, off frame, a technician holds a small canister of gas equipped with a valve. The valve helps the technician control the amount of gas that gets in the tube.
When s/he gets the signal, s/he opens the valve and lets more gas in the tube, which makes the flame go up. It's a very simple and a very common technique.

That's how it's done.
The question is, should it be done?

Good luck.


H.264 encoder with CLEAR options for specifying minimum & maximum video bitrate? I almost never get stuck with things like this and kinda figure things out myself... but I'm at a complete loss here.

I've used Handbrake, X-Media Recode, and lots of other encoders and they're great.. but they just don't have clearly defined options for maximum and minimum bitrate control in VBR. That, or I just can't find the options. Is there a GUI I could use for this? Or is it only possible through command-line in x264 core? I've only been able to work with constant bitrate so far and I REALLY need to use variable bitrate.

I found these extra options and I think they might be for variable bitrate.. but experimenting and encoding with that still produces a result with constant bitrate:

VBV buffer size, VBV maximum bitrate, VBV initial buffer and Bitrate variance.

Any help would be appreciated.

From http://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg.html , you can do this in CLI.. not sure about GUI.

  ‘-maxrate bitrate’

  Set max video bitrate (in bit/s). Requires -bufsize to be set.

  ‘-minrate bitrate’

  Set min video bitrate (in bit/s). Most useful in setting up a CBR encode

    Eg: "ffmpeg -i myfile.avi -b:v 4000k -minrate 4000k -maxrate 4000k -bufsize 1835k out.m2v"


A text animation tool or plugin pack that has very elaborate text animations? I dont want to do the animations by hand myself. The idea is that I use something that already exists and just slap my text inside. Manually doing all these elaborate animations is not an option for me.
It doesn't need to be exactly like in the photo e.g. text gets written out, then erased afterwards. But some plugins or packs or whatever will do just fine. Thing is, I googled for a long time now, never saw something similar.
Am I googling for the wrong tool (adobe premiere pro)?
here an example how the text pops out:

then another example where it goes away again:

the idea is that the text animations are interesting. They do not need to be exactly one way or another.

If you don't want to do your own animations, you might want to search for Essential graphics presets. Essential graphics allows you to load AE compositions inside PP ready to edit like the ones you have seen. There are a bunch of places where you can get them, for free and paid, like Envato Elements, Premiumbeat, Mixkit, even Youtube itself.
If you want to know more about it, here's a link to Adobe's wiki for "Essential Graphics": https://helpx.adobe.com/es/premiere-pro/how-to/essential-graphics-panel.html


Interpreting 60fps to 24fps in Premiere Pro I shot some footage on a Sony a7s at 59.94 fps so that I could slow it down in post to achieve a smoother camera movement. But when I interpret it to 23.976 fps in Premiere, it looks like it's dropping frames. It looks super glichy and terrible. When I scrub through the interpreted clip frame by frame, it looks like it has duplicated every frame. Each frame is held for the length of two frames. What can I do to slow the footage down so that it looks smooth?

I am especially confused because I've used this technique in the past with footage shot on a Canon Mark III and footage recorded through a Shogun. When I interpret that footage to 23.976, it looks perfectly smooth.

Things I have tried with the Sony footage, none of which worked:

Interpreting to 23.976
Dragging 59.94 clip to 23.976 sequence and slowing it down to 50%
Frame blending
Opening the clip in After Effects and interpreting to 23.976
Selecting "Pixel Motion Blur" on the interpreted AE clip

I am using Premiere Pro CC 2015. Any help would be much appreciated.

I figured out the problem. My shutter speed was set too low. Turns out it needs to be double the frame rate in order to achieve a smooth motion when interpreted to 24 fps. Should have thought of that before I shot. Oh well. Lesson learned.


Beginner looking to try a short CG film, any suggestions for software? Sorry if I'm using the wrong terminology or anything, I've never done anything like this before.
I'd like to try my hand at making a short 2-3 min film in CG. What I'm kinda envisioning is something like the clone wars series on disney+, but I think that's probably a bit advanced. I checked around the site a it, and found these two(1 2) questions that were kinda helpful for transitions and storyboarding, but I still don't really know where I should be making the actual video. This question had some suggestions, but I'm still just a beginner and don't really know what I'm doing. Are these good suggestions, or do I need something else?
Since I've never done anything like this before and will probably be bad at it, I'm preferably looking for a free software, or a short subscription or cheap app. That way if I suck, its not that big of a loss. Any suggestions?

Months ago, I'd done some researches on this topic; even i had CG background, i don't have much time on modeling. My suggestion for you is to do How to Create 2D Animations - Beginner Blender Tutorial firstly, then https://conceptartempire.com/blender-animation-tutorials/


Invalid DICT array size (83::2) in After Effects What does the error "After Effects error: invalid DICT array size (83::2)" mean?
Is this a serious problem?
How can I fix it?

This in essence is a font system error.

If your system was working fine and then after installing some fonts you are getting this error, I would uninstall the fonts in question.

Fonts that have special characters in their internal font names (not the fontfile name) like accents, umlauts or trademark signs will cause this issue and need to be removed.

The update to After Effects CC 12.1 should fix this error. http://blogs.adobe.com/aftereffects/2013/09/after-effects-cc-12-1-whats-new-and-changed.html


Converting container or transcode movies to iPhone from command line (os x) Over the years I collected many movies in different container formats (avi, mp4, mkv) and encoded with different codecs too.

Now want convert containers (or transcode them if absolutely necessary) to "iPhone compatible" movies.

After spending long time on google, still didn't know exact answers to the next questions - so, please confirm them or please give the right answers

iPhone can play only mp4 container format - so the mp4 is the only usable container for iPhone movies
In what codecs can be the streams? (video/audio and subtitles)
Is possible embedd "SOFT" subtitles to mp4 container? (what i read - yes, but here is some pitfalls) - mean soft subtitles, so not "burned them into the video stream".
What is the right logic to convert/transcode movies from different formats to wanted iPhone compatible format? My idea is roughly:

fetch information from the current movie - e.g. from avi container
if the used codecs and the used video resolution is compatible with iPhone (like h264), only change the container format, otherwise
transcode the movie, with:
if the current movie has smaller resolution, don't change - only transcode
if the current movie has higher resolution, change it's resolution proportionally to match the iPhone needs

All above want do from command line on Mac OS X - so, with ffmpeg or mencoder and like. (please, don't suggest me batch conversions with not-command line app)

The questions are mainly about the whole workflow, what are the most common pitfalls, recommendations and etc.

Would be happy with some external links to some good articles about the above.

This is my 1st question here, and I hope it is OK with right-question-type on this site:

post-production techniques
asset management, media, and file formats
installation, configuration, and operation of hardware or software
related to these topics

You can use ffprobe (which comes with ffmpeg) to give you info about your movie files from the command line.

You may require some shell-fu to convert the output of ffprobe into something you can use though. I've done this in the past; basically I pipe the output of ffprobe to sed or awk to grab the bits of info I need, then use this to drive the parameters of ffmpeg.


How to easily insert frames at the end of a video? I need to insert a still image for several seconds at the end of my 1080p video. I can't find how to do that with Virtual Dub. Tried with Microsoft Movie Maker but it messes the resolution, changes the format, etc. Any quick solution I haven't thought about ?

A quick Google search for the terms add photo with virtual dub shows this result. Quoting:

  save the titlescreen in bitmap (same size of video, obviously)
  import image in VirtualDub (with Open command)
  select the single frame you get after opening and copy it
  open your video
  paste the frame you copied in the desired position (every ctrl-v is a single frame, if your movie is 25fps, just paste 25 times to create
  1-second title sequence)

For your case you don't have a titlescreen but just a regular image.

You can select frames in VirtualDub as following:

Click on the timeline on the location where your frame that you want to select. In the image below I clicked on frame 30.
Click on the button where the arrow points to. This sets your beginning of the selection.

If you want to select one frame, click on the 31st frame (as in the image below) and click the button that is indicated by the arrow. This sets your endpoint of the selection.

You can also select a series of frames this way.


Can Premiere edit AV01 files? I downloaded my own video from YouTube, it is 4k and is an av01 file type. Quicktime can't play it, VLC does.
When I try to import the file into Premiere it gives me this error.

Any solutions or do I just need to convert it using Handbrake or something? I don't want to lose quality etc.

Whenever you get such an error it does indeed mean the file is not supported and you cannot edit it without transcoding it to another format first using another tool.
Choose a compatible format and make sure the bitrate is set high enough to avoid noticeable compression artefacts. If possible, set the tool to copy the audio track because it probably doesn't need transcoding.


Selectively blur many but not all of the faces in a video Shooting videos of Ninjutsu events. Top man insists that there are privacy issues as some of the participants don't want their faces to appear in the resulting video. Would really love to be able to solve this problem because I'm sitting on tons of video that I want to distribute!

Blurring all the faces in the video is not a good solution because first there are the instructors in the the video and second some of the participants would LOVE to see their faces in the video.

So what I was thinking was to blur the faces of those participants who request that their faces be hidden (i.e. opt-out). This means I'd have to be able to tell the software that "this is the face of Dick, Joe and Harry" and have the software identify and blur all occurrences of those faces in the multiple clips of the event.

A less desirable alternative would be to somehow pixelate/blurr/remove everyone EXCEPT for the instructors (i.e. opt-in)

So, my question is:
Do you know a solution to preserve the privacy of some of the participants in a video?

This is a hobby, so preferably the solution would be inexpensive or even free ;)

I'm totally pessimistic - can you surprise me? :)

Update: I ran a test. I figured Google would have the best technology, because of Google Street View. So I uploaded a sample to YouTube and selected to blur all faces. This is a much easier problem than my problem description but the results were very disappointing. First, it was very disconcerting to see the blurred faces but even worse, the blurring was very "temperamental" - sometimes faces were blurred, sometimes they weren't.

So, I figure that if Google can't do it, then  it isn't doable.

However, and here's the moral of the story: Returned to "Top Man" and mailed him that it can't be done. Return mail was a very surprised "who told you this was an issue"!?! So, the moral of the story is: "Always recheck again and again with the client and re-verify the requirements".

As if we didn't know :)

I'm leaving this question open for a few more days, to solicit answers, and then I'll award the "solution" to the best answer. Thanks for helping!

While its technically possible to have a program detect specific faces and apply a blur on that face. That would require a lot of programming work on your side, there is no free tool or low cost tool that does this automatically for you. This is possible with OpenCV but I highly doubt that this is a viable solution for you in any way, it's a quite complicated task and the result will not be 100% reliable.

The general workflow of blurring out faces would be to semi automatically track the motion of the faces with a 2D tracker in each clip an apply a blur mask to them.
The usual go to software for that is Adobe After Effects or other Motion Graphics video applications like Apple Motion.

Both are no free applications and I never heared of free software that implents 2D tracking together with a video editor. Though there are some really cheap amateur video editing suites out there that even implent face recognition but they all work pretty bad and unreliable without giving you much or no control over whats happening.

For example: http://www.wondershare.com/video-editing-tips/change-face.html
I highly discourage using such software for any work that goes beyond your average random youtube video.

While Adobe After Effects was always unaffordable for hobbyists, Adobe now switched to a subscription based model which makes it very affordable for small projects. You can use the program for free for 30 days (no commercial use) or a monthly subscription for ~30$ depending on the country you live in.

I recommend After Effects because there are ton of beginner tutorials out there for exactly what you want to do and the tracking workflow is quite straight forward. There is also Apple Motion like already mentioned and Nuke and quite a few other applications though After Effects is available for both Windows and Mac and is the easiest to grasp in my opinion.

Edit: I just found out that there is also an automatic face tracker in Adobe Premiere since CS6, this might not yield perfect results but should ease the workflow quite a bit.


How to technically tell if a video has been sped up or not? If given a youtube video, where one part of the video is normal, and the other part is sped up so slightly that it's hard to notice... is there a technical way of proving that it is sped up or not?

There is unfortunally (or maybe fortunally) no way to see if it is slowed down or sped up if done properly. What you have to look for is their movements. I'm not a guitar player, so I can't tell if it is real, but I think it sounded and looked real.

If you study the people there you can see that they move pretty natural. You can see on several occations that they blink in normal speed, but you also see that the main guitar player looks from place to place pretty rapidly. But from
 my experience with the piano you do everything a little bit faster when you play fast. Because you need to look at what you do, and when you are working hard with your brain and "slowing" everything down to keep up the pace you do things fast. The left hand finger movement also looked pretty natural. If it was sped down it would probably have been unnaturally fast and awquard movements.

Everything looked like it goes in normal speed, even their foots. Normally you have a constant speed on your foot when you tramp the beat. Depending on how slow you play you just increase the time you have your foot flat on the ground. Their foots didn't look like they went up and down too fast. If they had sped it up they would probably have had a small brake holding their foots flat on the ground before tramping the beat again really fast.

Secondly I don't see why a spanish TV programme would slow down their footage or why a good guitarist wouldn't be able to play that.


Progressive vs Upper Recently been working on a TV Commercial and they asked for it as upper field first rather than progressive can any one explain the difference between the two and why upper field first is requested for TV?

Upper field first is a form of interlacing. Interlacing divides each frame of video into two fields, with each field containing half of the scan lines of the frame. One field contains the first, third, fifth, and so on lines while the other frame contains the second, fourth, sixth, etc. lines. That alternation of lines is what makes it interlaced.

Different coding methodologies define whether the field that contains the first line of video is described first or second. Upper field first means that the field that contains the first line of video is sent first in a frame. Lower field first sends the field with the first line of video second in the frame.

Progressive video does not divide a frame into fields. Every line of video is described every time a frame changes.

The region and the specifications of the individual broadcaster will determine whether they want a progressive, top-first interlaced, or bottom-first interlaced vide. In general, HD video is always upper field first. SD video is usually lower field first, but it depends on the exact standard being used. These settings are true whether you are delivering to an over the air broadcaster, a cable service provider, or just playing your video on a TV.


About film making techniques I have developed a big interest in film making recently (I hope it isn't a fad). I am interested more in the technical side like cinematography, editing, lighting etc than acting, direction etc.

I am in look out for sites that do a "review" of sorts (more) of the film making techniques than the story, acting etc. I didn't get much help googling. Could you good people on this board lead me to some sites online that discuss these aspects of movies?

Directing actors is a technical part of film making. It's not easy, and if your actors don't give good performances, chances are you won't have a good film. People can usually forgive bland cinematography and clunky editing – but if they don't believe the characters then you're going to have no chance in engaging the audience.

I go to a film school myself and so I haven't really done a lot of research online. I suspect that you wouldn't be able to find everything you need to know just by looking online.
If you're serious about filmmaking then I'd suggest you take some courses. If you just want to take it up as a hobby then the best way to learn is to practice.
Buy a camera (a good DSLR if you can afford it), get editing software on your computer (would recommend Final Cut Pro 7 if you own a Mac or Adobe Premiere Pro if you've got a PC) and shoot  outdoors in natural lighting (cheaper and looks better if you can't light well).
Also, best way to study films is to watch films. Watch a lot of different kinds of cinema. If you like a certain director try and watch all their films, especially their early shorts if they have any.

Just did a quick google search and found a couple of sites:
for cinematography: http://filmmakeriq.com/2008/07/345-cinematography-techniques/
filmmaking in general: http://digital-filmmaking.blogspot.com/

Not sure if they're any good though, sorry mate.

If you're keen on getting a DSLR, this stackexchange site is perfect for information. https://photo.stackexchange.com/


Comments in script files Is it possible to write comments into files specified by -filter_script and -filter_complex_script?

-filter_script and -filter_complex_script simply read a filtergraph from a file, and there is no support for comments within filtergraphs.


Why can't I change the aspect ratio of my project in Final Cut Pro X? I am trying to create a Final Cut project that has a 4:3 aspect ratio. So I went to the project settings and set it to 1440x1080. But the preview window and exported video is still widescreen, does anyone know why?

Does that squiggly line have anything to do with it?

Just so you can see, my project is set to the right resolution, but the preview window is clearly playing a widescreen video:

Am I missing something obvious or is this a bug?

When you import clips the default spatial conform is fit. Change it to fill and clips will be cropped. You can reframe as you like.

This article has more details Square video with FCPX


optimizing / compressing video for web with Quicktime I have a ~70mb (3 minutes long) m4v video that I need to get to a much more reasonable file size for playing on a site that will primarily be accessed via iPad.

I don't know if it matters, but the video will need to play automatically upon page load.

I've read through a few tutorials for doing this with Quicktime, however I think I'm missing something..

From the Export pop-up menu, there should seemingly be an option to choose "Movie to QuickTime Movie." I have only 480p and iPod/iPhone/iPad options(which I believe would result in a viewing frame that is too small).

How can I proceed with web-optimizing this file in Quicktime? (Or is there a better solution? I tried Sorenson Squeeze, but that had a large watermark..)

To add on to AJ's answer, Vimeo has a dedicated page on their preferred compression settings; Youtube has the same.

Check these out for some more specific information on which bitrate/codec to choose!


FFmpeg, encode video for 720p @ 4mbps playback I've been fighting with this dilemma for about a week or two now and I've tried my best to understand it from whatever I can find through google.

What I need (or at least I think I need) to do is calculate the bitrate to determine the mbps, if it's over my requirement (720p @ 4mbps) then I want to optimise the video, if it's below my requirement then it's just a matter of copying the file to an mp4 container.

Now I have my own code for FFmpeg, which I will attach below, and I found that there are alternative applications that will provide me with kbps calculated from the file, but I want to do as much of this as possible with only one application if I can.

I'm not asking anyone to code anything here, but more so to tell me how I can calculate this myself using the information I get from FFmpeg or even FFprobe, and what parameters I'd need to set within FFmpeg to make sure that the video file is encoded to stream at 4mbps.

ffmpeg -i "input.file" -map 0:0 -map 0:1 -map 0:1 -r 30 -profile:v Main -level:v 4.0 -crf 19 -c:a:0 copy -b:a:0 448k -metadata:s:a:0 language="english" -metadata:s:a:0 title="AC3 5.1" -c:a:1 libfdk_aac -ac:a:1 2 -b:a:1 160k -metadata:s:a:1 language="english" -metadata:s:a:1 title="AAC Stereo" -movflags +faststart "output.file"

Thanks in advance.

Update to my original code

This new code includes the bitrate buffsize and maxrate (if needed), in my script, if the fps is over 30 it will be set to 30, otherwise it was left alone, but if the fps is uncertain, example 23.970542342, this can produce an error in FFmpeg, I thought "-r 23.97" would fix this but apparently not, so I had to change "-r" to "-filter:v fps=" and set the fps for my files by calculating the "r_frame_rate", which is easy enough.

My new code

ffmpeg -i "input.file" -map 0:0 -map 0:1 -map 0:1 -filter:v fps=30 -profile:v Main -level:v 4.0 -crf 18 -b:v 4000k -bufsize 4000k -maxrate:v 4000k -metadata title="" -metadata year="" -c:a:0 copy -metadata:s:a:0 language="english" -metadata:s:a:0 title="AC3 5.1" -c:a:1 libfdk_aac -ac:a:1 2 -b:a:1 160k -metadata:s:a:1 language="english" -metadata:s:a:1 title="AAC Stereo" -movflags +faststart "output.file"

In the script that I'm building, it's going to generate the appropriate parameters for FFmpeg, so if the codec is not x264, if profile:v is not main, if level:v is not 4.0, if bit_rate is more than 4000k, then all the needed parameters will be set, otherwise it gets copied.

FFprobe Code from Mulvya, slightly modified so I can get everything I need from it.

ffprobe -v error -select_streams v -show_entries stream="bit_rate,codec_name,profile,level,r_frame_rate" -of compact=p=0:nk=1 "input.file"

Goal at the end of this is to have my own automation script to encode my videos from a folder, I know about sickbeard mp4 automator, but I don't need all those features, and there are things I want that it doesn't have.

The ffprobe command below will spit out the bitrate:

ffprobe in.mp4 -select_streams v -show_entries stream=bit_rate -of compact=p=0:nk=1

e.g.

4118620

If the result is greater than 4000000 then you can add -b:v 4000k -bufsize 4000k -maxrate:v 4000k. Or you can add it anyway. Set -c:v to copy if the stream is under 4000000 else to libx264. The three values will be ignored just like -b:a:0 448k in your command is.


Audio and video track doesn't match in Premier pro I use Movavi for screen recording and after recording it's about 7 min video of the tutorial. I played in VLC media player it's fine perfectly matched audio and video. (Audio and the video track is same and has not been manipulated — captured from Movavi Software).

And for editing, I create a new project in Adobe Premiere Pro, and when I import my clip to timeline I can see that the starting point and ending point of that video and audio clip are the same. But when I play that clip Video is delayed why is that? And when I play at last around 5-sec track it's fine.

Can you guys assist me what's the problem? I tried many creating many new projects to start from default but no progress. I guess I must have messed something up, Couldn't figure out what is that.

This might be a performance issue.

You could change playback resolution, quality, use proxy videos, render preview videos and some more. Tutorials for these steps should be easy to find.


Using a Flash to Light Video I have a Nikon D3100. It has a built in flash.  Can I use it as a light when filming videos?

Generally speaking, it is not possible to use a camera flash as a light for video.  A true flash is a high intensity discharge bulb which produces a very short (1/100 second or shorter), very bright burst of light.  It is not designed to be used for constant light output and has insufficient power, durability or cooling to be able to operate as a continuous light source.

Some devices, most often smartphones, use LED light sources as a "flash" but actually are not flashes, simply constant output lamps that can be used for video or as a low brightness "flash" for still images.  This is very rare to see with a point and shoot or DSLR.  When it is included with DSLR flashes, it is typically as a separate, distinct light on the same unit, such as the video light built in the Canon's 320EX flash.


How to Achieve Slow Motion Effect in After Effects as seen in Kygo's Firestone Video This effect should be simple to achieve, however I'm having difficulty with time-remapping (should I be using this function at all?)

The effect happens right after 1:45

It is called the "Time Warp" effect. You should check out this video from "Fenchel & Janisch" for a tutorial on how to apply this effect.


Best transcoding path using Sorenson Squeeze for AVCHD video? We have some AVCHD files (MPEG 4, 1280x720 H.264, AAC) that we have had a world of trouble editing with Premiere Elements. The main problem is that the audio and video get out of sync. Reviewing this question on the Adobe forums, the likely issue seems to be that Premiere Elements doesn't import some MPEG 4 formats correctly and Adobe recommends transcoding.

We have Sorenson Squeeze 7 in-house (we're using simple iMacs), so my first thought is to simply transcode. The question is what format is best from an editing (and preservation) standpoint. I am currently trying the AVI "NTSC DV" format, since I =think= that's what we get off mini-DV tapes, but I would hate to be throwing away resolution or image/sound quality if there is a more recent, non-lossy format that we should be using. I'm also quite open to upgrading to Sorenson Squeeze 8, purchasing/installing a different transcoder, and/or going to a professional video editing platform--although the latter seems to be a waste. We pretty much exclusively generate flash and MP4 clips from our source files--simplest editing, rarely use any sort of effects (and nobody here knows video editing more sophisticated than what can be done with iMovie--ie., home movie production).

So, my primary goal is to generate reasonably good clips today, and to be saving master files in the best, stable, long-term "archival" format that is accessible without specialized equipment.

With NTSC DV format (854x480), you are throwing away resolution. I'd suggest I-frames only MPEG2 with a good bitrate (about 5MB/s). I don't know Squeeze, so I don't know what parameters are available. If you post a screenshot of the export/convert dialog, I may be of help.


Text Anagram Animation in After Effects I need to create Text Anagram Animation using After Effects, Is there any script, expression or plugin available to do this job. If not how to animate it manually, The animation needs to be like in the movie "Harry Potter 2" animation of  "TOM MARVOVLO RIDDLE / I AM LORD VOLDEMORT" anagram.

It's difficult to give advice on how to achieve this effect without knowing what knowledge you have in animation and motion graphics. In on itself, this is a very easy animation which will take up to 5 to 6 hours of work.

Create the letters individually in a compositing program like After Effects or Nuke
(optional) make the letters emit particles to make it look like actual embers, using something like trapcode particular and setting the emitter type to layer, then selecting the text layer.
Use glow, turbulent displacement, displace and fractal noise to your liking until you're happy with the result.
Turn the layers into 3D-Layers so you can rotate and move them on each axis.
Animate them using keyframes so they move according to your needs.

The hardest part in getting these things right is the lighting on the set. If you're filming in a dark area, these letters would emit a lot of light, which you would see on other actors and the environment. Try lighting the set accordingly while shooting, otherwise you would have to resort to lighting up the footage in post, which will not look as good as doing it for real.


Camera setup for quick preview/editing I'm setting up an educational lab which is going to have a number of cameras positioned around the room. Ideally, there would be one button somewhere which we could press to automatically start all the cameras, and when we pressed the stop button, all the cameras would send their video to a computer in the room. What would be the best setup for this? I don't want to have to walk around and press record on five cameras, then walk around and press stop, then attach 5 USB cables, then remove 5 USB cables, etc.

If your cameras have a LANC port, you can build yourself a LANC controller using arduinos:

http://controlyourcamera.blogspot.de/2011/02/arduino-controlled-video-recording-over.html?m=1

Or alternatively get a cheap lanc controller.

http://pages.ebay.com/link/?nav=item.view&id=281983277383&alt=web

Depending on the camera you are going to use, like the other replies mentioned, there might be options to control your cameras as well through a regular remote control or control over USB.


Smallest Possible Video File in H.264 Format I am writing some unit-tests for a software that does some work with videos.  To do so, I need a programmatically generated video file that is both small and legitimate in that it is actually a sensible video from the point of view of a codec.

An idea that came to mind was to produce a video of a single frame of a solid color. I have tried that in Apple Motion. However, the file still ended up being about 8KBs. That is not so big, but I am wondering if one can do better.

Do you have any advice on how? I would be happy with MP4 container.

To give you an example of what I may be after, here is a list of HEX codes that produces a small but valid .PNG image:

png_hex = ['\x89', 'P', 'N', 'G', '\r', '\n', '\x1a', '\n', '\x00',
           '\x00', '\x00', '\r', 'I', 'H', 'D', 'R', '\x00',
           '\x00', '\x00', '\x01', '\x00', '\x00', '\x00', '\x01',
           '\x08', '\x02', '\x00', '\x00', '\x00', '\x90',
           'w', 'S', '\xde', '\x00', '\x00', '\x00', '\x06', 'b', 'K',
           'G', 'D', '\x00', '\x00', '\x00', '\x00',
           '\x00', '\x00', '\xf9', 'C', '\xbb', '\x7f', '\x00', '\x00',
           '\x00', '\t', 'p', 'H', 'Y', 's', '\x00',
           '\x00', '\x0e', '\xc3', '\x00', '\x00', '\x0e', '\xc3',
           '\x01', '\xc7', 'o', '\xa8', 'd', '\x00', '\x00',
           '\x00', '\x07', 't', 'I', 'M', 'E', '\x07', '\xe0', '\x05',
           '\r', '\x08', '%', '/', '\xad', '+', 'Z',
           '\x89', '\x00', '\x00', '\x00', '\x0c', 'I', 'D', 'A', 'T',
           '\x08', '\xd7', 'c', '\xf8', '\xff', '\xff',
           '?', '\x00', '\x05', '\xfe', '\x02', '\xfe', '\xdc', '\xcc',
           'Y', '\xe7', '\x00', '\x00', '\x00', '\x00',
           'I', 'E', 'N', 'D', '\xae', 'B', '`', '\x82']

A one frame H264 stream would have to consist of an intra-coded frame, so there is a size floor in effect.

This ffmpeg command produces a 1.7 kiB file

ffmpeg -f lavfi -i color=blue:s=1280x720 -vframes 1 out.mp4

You can save ~200 bytes by lowering the resolution.


Cheapest way to convert from toslink to 4 channel analog audio? I have a mac-mini and an old analog 4.1 set of speakers and I want to use all 4 channels instead of only two.

I do not have a receiver and I am looking for the least expensive way of achieving 4 channels audio working.

I should also mention that the mac mini does have an HDMI out, so this could contain some audio out but I'm not sure how many channel it does have and I do know that my TV is not able to convert the signal to analog (and it's speakers are far worse than the 4.1 old system).

I use a Behringer ADA8000 for this - it converts toslink to 8 channels of analogue, and vice versa.  It works well, and is relatively inexpensive.


Record on laptop from streaming camera via RCA cable I have a video camera that only 'streams' the images and has no way of recording them. Currently I'm plugging the RCA into a TV and then recording from that, but I need to be mobile and so need to record onto a laptop.

Will something like this (http://www.amazon.co.uk/tag/av%20to%20usb%20converter/products) work?

Any other ideas?

EasyCap 2.0 DC60+ is what I use, and they work great. Make sure you get the DC60+ version, you don't want the older versions.

There are a lot of knock-offs floating around--I'd stick with the official one.

There's also a good compilation of capture cards on this thread on the Wirecast Forum.


Trying to do a "clipping mask" a video to an image in After Effects I'm trying to do a clipping mask a video to an image in After Effects. Basically, I'm putting this video on top of an iPhone but track matte settings doesn't seem to be working for this. I saw Luma Inverted Matte setting works for what I'm trying to achieve but it leaves my video with like a white overlay on top (see screenshot).

I've already searched the ends of Google for this but can't seem to solve the problem. All I'm really trying to achieve is post my XD prototype on Dribbble but to do so, I had to record my screen, import it to After Effects and now deal with the iPhone background. Please help!

Track mattes work by applying the alpha (transparency) or luma (≈ brightness) of one layer to the transparency of another layer. So in the case of an alpha matte, if the upper layer is transparent in an area (or opaque for alpha inverted), the lower layer will be too. In the case of luma mattes if the upper layer is black (or white for inverted*) then the lower layer will be transparent. The amount of transparency is controlled by the Luma of the matte layer.

In your example To get fully transparent / opaque mattes use curves or levels or brightness and contrast effects to adjust the contrast of the upper layer. Or use whatever you used to create the image and output one with a transparent / black background.

 *could be the other way around, I always forget


What hardware/software to get fastest possible access time in AVC/h264 files? Sometimes I watch a video that I don't want to see from beginning to the end, but only some parts. Sometimes I need to quickly find some scene/spot in a video. The less keyframes there are, the longer it takes to seek random place in a video.

What hardware/software configuration I need to make seeking time as fast as possible?

I mean if I to build a new PC, what hardware is there to get fast access time by fast decoding?

If its just about playback, I can highly recommend Media Player Classic HC for Windows. I think I haven't seen a faster player so far. It utilizes DirectX 9 for most image rendering which results in a lot faster playback on many machines. Most players only uitilize the CPU for drawing.
Even uncompressed avi's had a lag free playback and fast seeking times from a USB 2.0 hard drive. The player is very good at caching aswell which should give you a benfit with files that have keyframes that are far apart from each other. It also has the option to always skip to the next keyframe when seeking (Options/Tweaks/Fast Seek). It also has a setting for the jump distance when seeking very long videos.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/mpc-hc/

Generally for all plattforms recommendable is mplayer with a fitting GUI (there are quite a few of them out there for Windows/Mac/Linux). A little "geeky" but very powerfull.
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/dload.html

You dont need RAID storage to seek through h.264 files fast. That only applies to really huge "raw" video files that are meant for editing. A video card that has MPEG-4 decoding supported would be good to have but normally any video card from the last 4-5 years supports that. Apart from that you dont need any special hardware, your problem is mainly a software issue.


Text according to Excel document A friend and I recently launched a model rocket. We had installed an altitudemeter that exports all it's data for each quarter second into an Excel document. I want to take the data of the time and height of this document (about 1000 time steps) and use it to have a live altimeter in the top of the screen on the video using Vegas Pro 13. I basically want it to count the height live with the video. Does anyone know if this is possible in Sony Vegas?
The best thing for me would be that it follows a graph so that the text doesn't change every quarter second, but every frame. If this can be done, it would be easier, because then I don't have to use every single step of time from Excel, but every 10 steps or so. It will still be accurate and smooth, though less of an annoying job.

I think you want this to be done automatically. But f course you could create 1000 text overlays, each one showing a particular altitude, and place the correct overlay at the correct point in the timeline for the correct duration (1/4 second). That would be a terribly tedious job!


Adobe After Effects how can you create a distorted line moving along a video / picture? Example given in desc Saw this on youtube and i would really appreciate if if anyone could explain to me how to do it- The youtube video is below and the distorted libne is in the intro:

Thanks,
I've tried looking around for help but cant seem to find any.

You can duplicate your footage and add a displacement map as your revealer with a black line with gradient


What equipment should I get for starting out making professional quality films? I want to start two short film projects but I don't know what equipment I need to get a good professional quality result. I've been saving some money so I hope budget is not a problem. Also, what's most commonly used to record audio in this kind of project? I want to get the sound from two people talking with the camera placed far away from them. I'm trying to make an independent production company so I'm seeing this as an investment. The cheaper the better though.

For videography, the best bang for your buck is, hands down, going to be an entry level DSLR and a decent lens.  For audio, if your budget can allow for it, I suggest getting a stand alone multi-track recorder.  The Zoom H4n is a particularly popular model with videographers for its low price and decent (though not superb) audio quality.  (Update: The H5 and H6 are now available offering significant upgrades over the H4n, but also at a slightly higher price point.)

There are far better options and values as you get more skill in the field, however for starting out, you probably don't want to invest too much until you get some experience under your belt.  It's easy to spend upwards of $10 to $15 grand on a nice videography setup as you get more and more professional, but a $1500-$1700 setup with something like a Canon T4i or Lumix G2 with a moderate level lens and an H4n or similar for recording audio (with some basic shotgun or lavaliere mics) is a decent start.

Also, be sure not to skimp on a tripod.  You'll want a solid, sturdy tripod (probably aluminum) with a good fluid tripod head to make sure you can get steady shots.  Just a solid tripod alone can run you in to the $350 to $500 range.

If you'll be shooting indoors, you may also need a light kit.  A cheap 3 point lighting kit can be had for a couple hundred dollars, though depending on what you intend to shoot, you may be able to get by without this initially.

So overall breakdown I'd recommend starting out is around $500 to $600 on an entry level DSLR, $150 to $300 on a lens (if your DSLR body supports video auto focus, such as the Canon T4i, a stepper motor lens is needed), about $280 for an audio recorder, about $100 to $200 on mics, about $400 on a tripod and optionally about $150-$250 on lights.  Altogether, that's about $1600 or $1850 and you should be able to make some pretty solid professional looking stuff.

It does add up quickly, but the good news is that you can improve on the gear incrementally over time once you have the basics.  If you do have more than 2 grand to start out with, I'd spend a little bit extra on the lens or the camera body to get better low light performance and better background blur.  Better mics or mic boom arms also couldn't hurt and if you do go with lights, light modifiers or more powerful lights is also never a bad investment, though the best place to spend any extra money is going to depend on the kind of shooting you are planning on doing.


IMovie 11 to FCP 10.1 Is it possible to import a IMovie 11 project into FCP 10.1? I tried to Export the XML in IMovie, but when I try to import it in FCP the file is grayed out.

For some reason apple keeps changing how this works from version to version and I'm wondering if its even possible anymore.

You should be able to send it directly to FCPX using the "Send To Final Cut Pro" menu item. Per the documentation, they say:

  Do one of the following:

  Select the project in the browser, or double-click the project to open it.

  With the project open, click anywhere in the timeline.

  Note:  If you can’t find the project you’re looking for, verify that the correct library is selected.

  Choose File > Send Movie To Final Cut Pro.

  Final Cut Pro X opens. A new library appears in Final Cut Pro X with the name of your iMovie library, and a new event within that library contains the movie project you sent.


Davinci Resolve does not shows fusion nodes after re-open the project After working with fusion I have saved my project. When I try to re-open that project I can't see any nodes in Fusion tab. There is only MediaIn1 and MediaOut1 nodes. Below yo can see the screenshot. How I can see my nodes again? OS: MacOSX Big Sur, Davinci Resolve Version 17 Public Beta.

It depends on how you created the Fusion compositions in the first place.
If your Fusion clip exists on your edit timeline, then when you're in the Fusion tab, you'll see it listed if you activate the "Clips" panel (at the top of the screen, or under Workspace->Show Panel in Workspace->Clips)
If your Fusion clip doesn't exist on your edit timeline (there are a few ways to do this), then to find it within the Fusion page, you'll need to navigate to it through Fusion's "Media Pool" tab.  Resolve's Media Pool contains all of the elements you've imported or created within the context of the currently open project.  If you don't see your Fusion Clip there at first, don't panic.  To see absolutely everything in your project, first you need to expose the sidebar of the media pool, then select the "Master" bin and all children of it by shift-clicking the last item in the list of bins.  With all of the bins selected, Resolve shows all of the available content in your project.  Your Fusion composition should be listed there.
The reason you're not seeing the nodes you expect to see in the screenshot above is that whenever you switch to the Fusion Page from the Edit page, Resolve turns whichever clip that currently intersects the Edit timeline playhead into a Fusion clip, and populates the node tree with a MediaIn and MediaOut node.  If you don't make any alterations before returning to the Edit page, Resolve will turn the Fusion clip back into a normal clip (at least, in recent versions of Resolve).
To put it another way, the moment in time you're viewing on the Edit page will be the same one you're viewing when you switch to the Fusion page, complete with any Fusion nodes you've set up previously (if any), or set up for a new composition if you haven't created any yet; the Edit timeline playhead and Fusion timeline playhead are linked.
In Fusion, the "Clips" tab lets you skip from one clip to the next down your edit timeline, and the playbar only scrubs through the length of one clip.  But since all of your Fusion compositions don't necessarily need to be on your Edit timeline, the Media Pool holds all available source material.


DaVinci Resolve: Track with points outside of a window I am completely new both to video editing and DaVinci Resolve 14.

I would like to apply stabilization to a clip which has a constantly moving and changing object in the middle. Therefore I only want to track points which are outside of a certain region in the middle of the screen.  Is it possible to mark the middle region by drawing a power window and then track everything that is outside of it?

So far I have been trying to manually draw an "inverse window" which selects mostly everything except the middle.  Is this the right way to go about it?

The tracker is designed to track whatever you put inside the tracker's window.  It doesn't matter whether you want to track something in the middle of your frame or on the edge.  All that matters to the tracker is that it can "see" enough detail of whatever it's being told to track that it can lock on it in the various dimensions it can track: pan, tilt, rotate, zoom, and 3d perspective.

Your background looks really tricky to track because it's very low contrast (relatively speaking).  You could dramatically boost the contrast of your background, for the purpose of building a good track, then use that tracker data on the non-contrast-enhanced image.  Just use a square or a circle over a small but distinct area you want to track and it should be good.

BTW, now you know why people who need to do VFX use Tracking Markers


Small Indie Production and Insurance I'm supporting some friends for a small web series and we're trying to figure out a budget. As I research, I'm reading a lot about permits and insurance and so forth. We are not even a real production company and are mostly hiring friends and such. To what extent do we need get workers comp and other forms of insurance to make this small budget short?

We live in Los Angeles.
We will need permits for public locations.
We do plan on hiring friends for cast and crew.
We were also thinking about hiring kids but I'm starting to think that is not possible with our budget.

I've struggled with a similar question, although everything that I have done has been so small that I've usually been able to dance around it. I'll say this, from a liability standpoint the greater the size of your cast & crew and the greater your production, the more that you want to at least look into "General Liability". If you're working with animals, pyro, a lot of moving traffic, swimming/diving, aerial cinematography, things like that. You really have to look at the scale of what you're doing. Once you move away from a one-person or small-group hobbyist into hiring cast & crew, it's time to at least talk to insurance brokers. If for no other reason than to protect yourself, your employees, and your overall production.

You want to make sure that you go through a broker who is primarily an Entertainment Insurance Broker. I could go on for hours however my knowledge here is limited. I found an article last year that really helped me with the bullet points on all of this. I used this to educate myself on what I need going forward. Check out this link...
https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/the-producers-guide-to-film-production-insurance/


Does Sony PMW-EX1R HDMI output contain audio? I'm trying to get a Sony PMW-EX1R XDCAM to output HDMI for live streaming (using Teradek Vidiu). The picture looks fine, but it seems to lack audio. Is there a setting that I'm missing, or is it impossible to use HDMI in this way?

HDMI does support audio, but it is possible that either the PMW-EX1R doesn't output audio over HDMI (which would seem odd to me, but is possible).  It is also possible that the settings are wrong on the Vidiu.  The Vidiu appears to support audio input from either the HDMI port itself or a line input.  If it is expecting signal on the line input, it might ignore the HDMI audio.

I'd check the documentation for the Vidiu to see if you can find anything about that since I don't see anything in the PMW-EX1R documentation to answer it.  You could also try plugging the PMW-EX1R in to another HDMI device to see if you get audio.  If not, you can also try running the audio output of the camera in to the line input of the Vidiu and monitor off of the headphone jack of the Vidiu.


Remove light reflection from eyes I have a video with a man speaking (very stable, motion tracking on his eyes works perfectly)

The problem is each eye has reflections of 4 light sources, so each eye looks like it has 4 white pupils inside the iris. The black pupil suffers from these reflections too. I hope you can understand what i mean. See the following photo.

What effect i need to apply to remove these light reflections and make his iris look natural brown (his original color)? Tried lowering brightness, but his eyes became like big black eyes of a shark.

What to do? Do i need some sort of effect and an artificial black pupil on top?

I'm asking this question hoping this is a somewhat common problem so maybe there is a solution already for that.

Here is what it looks like

I solved my problem using 1) motion tracking and 2) a good picture of an eye.

With adobe after effects i managed to track the motion of the problematic iris. The result was a very precise motion path of the iris for the whole video. Great.
Then i used a good picture of brown eyes (google images) from which i cropped a circular selection which had "some" iris and the pupil. I made that circular selection a little transparent around the edges and finally had this result:

Using that image (2) on the motion path (1), the result was excellent. I had to play a bit with the colors to make the new iris blend with the original iris which "embraced" the new one.

(Fortunately, person wasn't blinking.)

p.s. More answers are welcome!


Darwin Streaming Server 6.0.3 won't send Closed Caption track I can get the captions if I stream the Quicktime file through a link on my webserver, but if I try to stream the file via Darwin Streaming Server, the audio and video come through, but no captions.  The QT browser plugin has no option to enable captions so the caption track just has to come from the server. Or is it the plugin's fault? Any thoughts?  Let me know if more info is needed.

I have no direct experience with DSS, but it appears, from what I could find online, that DSS does not support streaming a text track.  Rather, you seem to need to reference a non-streamed version that has text data.  I unfortunately couldn't find much more on what the one place I found mentioning that intended, so I'm sorry that it isn't very clear, but it was the best I could find.

Hopefully someone else has actual experience with DSS and can provide better guidance than I.


How do I replace one layer with another and take all its specifications How do I replace one layer with another and take all its specifications(size, scale, position, effects....) in after effects?.

Select the layer you want to replace in the timeline or comp window
Alt/opt-drag the new source from the project window into the comp or timeline window.


Digitized super 8 mm film - got wrong aspect ratio? I had some old super 8mm film digitized, and the result looks almost right.  I did a little poking around and I'm wondering if they squished the film into a standard (but wrong) aspect ratio.

The resulting video files claim to be 720x480 which would be a ratio of 1.5, but according to Wikipedia, the image portion of a super 8mm frame is 5.79 x 4.01 mm which is a ratio of 1.44.  If they did force it into a ratio of 1.5, that would be off by about 5% which would be noticeable.

The video files are of course too large to upload, but I used "Photos" (comes free with Windows) to snip out a 4-second chunk.  I've got other video editing software, but thought Photos had the best chance of not doing anything to the video except extracting the desired scene.  It's shared on my Google Drive here.

Just for fun, I laid the super 8mm film across my negative scanner and got an image, since the scan was at 2400 dpi I did the math and the images are about 5.58 x 4.27 mm which is approximately what you expect for super 8mm.

Am I overthinking this?  Or should I take the time to drop each video file in my editor and squish it into the right shape?

EDIT

After posting I had a thought - what if they digitized it at the right aspect ratio by trimming?  So I found the image in the video that matched the frame I had scanned on the original film:

At first it looked like I had the answer, as they had clearly trimmed my mother's hair in the digitized video.  However, by zooming in on the encyclopedias on the shelf:

In the scanned film, they are 99x69 = ratio of 1.434; in the digitized video they are 156x94 = ratio of 1.660.  So yes, the aspect ratio was in fact altered during the digitization process, and by about the amount expected from my original calculations.

Yes, digitization screws up the aspect ratio.  See the reasons for my conclusion after "EDIT" in the question.


What free video editing software is capable of moving/rotating a sprite atop video? Can anyone please advise: I'm looking for a recommendation on free video editing software that can:

Overlay a sprite (static image with transparency, e.g. .gif) atop a video,
Move and rotate the overlaid sprite over some specifiable portion of the video,
Mask the sprite, (i.e. create a movable/changeable shape that covers the sprite but is invisible in the video).

Sorry if my terminology is primitive - it's been years since I last dabbled with video editing software; I'm not sure how terminology has evolved since then.

I'd be grateful if the recommended software also had a tutorial -- either built-in or easily findable online -- on how to do the above.

A great tool for this is Davinci Resolve: https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve. It is very capable, has an excellent free version and can easily accomplish the desired tasks.

A quick intro to Animating a Spite/Image over Video is shown here:

             -- Davinci Resolve - How to Move Images (Animate Movement)

A quick intro to Masking can be seen here:

             -- Masks in DaVinci Resolve 16


What's a good alternative term for "live action"? According to a dictionary, "live action" means:

  (in filmmaking) action involving real people or animals, as contrasted with animation or computer-generated effects.

It does not mean "live". Live action can be prerecorded as well as live.

Is there a better term for live action? I would like one that doesn't lead to the confusion with the definition of "live".

You don't need another term. Live Action is the accepted term for differentiation between, well, live action film and other kinds of movies, such as animation/3D films. It's also used consistently for this purpose, e.g. the Oscars use it in their category names:

  Short Film (Animated)
  Short Film (Live Action)

Conversely, I have never seen this term used to indicate a live stream, so nobody will get confused.

There are other terms for feature-length such as feature film or motion picture, however those are rather used to differentiate between feature lenght movies and short films and can also be used for animated films.

If you have a feature-length film, you could amalgamate the terms to something like live action feature film or live action motion picture, but I really wouldn't recommend that.


Why I can't check the bit rate on some videos? I've downloaded a video from YouTube, well I've downloaded the video stream and the audio stream of a YouTube video separately. Then with this ffmpeg command ffmpeg -protocol_whitelist "file,http,https,tcp,tls" -i video.mp4 -i audio.webm -acodec copy -vcodec copy output.mkv I merged the two streams together.

Using the ffprobe -i audio.webm -show_streams -hide_banner command it gives me the bitrate of the audio file but not of the stream (in this case it's not crucial since the file is only one stream) :

Duration: 01:35:26.06, start: -0.007000, bitrate: 119 kb/s
  Stream #0:0(eng): Audio: opus, 48000 Hz, stereo, fltp (default)

But in the detailed stream informations I get after thanks to the parameter -show-streams it doesn't give me the bit rate of the stream : bit_rate=N/A

Same command with the video file :

Duration: 01:35:26.04, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 213 kb/s
   Stream #0:0(und): Video: av1 (Main) (av01 / 0x31307661), yuv420p(tv), 640x284, 0 kb/s, 24 fps, 24 tbr, 12288 tbn, 12288 tbc (default)

And again in the detailed stream informations it doesn't give me 213 for the bitrate of the stream but 21 (I don't know why) : bit_rate=21.

However when I try the same command with the mkv file that contains the audio and video streams I get that :

Duration: 01:35:26.06, start: -0.007000, bitrate: 331 kb/s
  Stream #0:0: Video: av1 (Main), yuv420p(tv), 640x284, 24 fps, 24 tbr, 1k tbn, 1k tbc (default)
  Stream #0:1(eng): Audio: opus, 48000 Hz, stereo, fltp (default)

So I get an overall bit rate but not the bitrate of each stream which is more annoying. In the detailed stream informations for both streams I have : bit_rate=N/A.

Using other tools, mediainfo for example.
On the audio file (mediainfo --fullscan Ofitsery.webm) I have an overall bitrate for the file : Overall bit rate : 120 kb/s but no bitrate indicated for the audio stream.
For the video file (mediainfo --fullscan Ofitsery.mp4) I have an overall bitrate : Overall bit rate : 213 kb/s and a bitrate for the video stream which is not exactly the same (on a file with only one stream) : Bit rate : 211 kb/s.
But on my mkv file that contains the audio and the video stream I have an overall bitrate : Overall bit rate : 332 kb/s but no bitrate neither for the video stream nor the audio stream.

It annoys me because I'd like to check if I have bitrate loss during the file merging and I can't check the bit rate of the streams separately.
Beside why are there 1 or 2 kb/s differences sometimes ?

For mkv files, you can use mkvpropedit —add-track-statistics-tags to add stream level data.


2 h264/mp4 files does not merging in right way by mp4box I have a problem when merging two h264/mp4 files with the same parameters except length. I'm using the command

mp4box -cat ....

After that the video player's behaviour is strange: if I drag the time slider closer to the end of file it restarts the video; Sometimes the player shows an incorrect video file length; Also there is a problem with audio sync.

Input file sample parameters:

Movie Info * Timescale 90000 - Duration 00:15:00.214
Fragmented File no - 2 track(s)
File suitable for progressive download (moov before mdat)
File Brand mp42 - version 0 Created: GMT Thu Jun 7 23:31:52 2012
File has root IOD (9 bytes) Scene PL 0xff - Graphics PL 0xff - OD PL 0xff
Visual PL: ISO Reserved Profile (0x7f)
Audio PL: High Quality Audio Profile @ Level 2 (0x0f)
No streams included in root OD

iTunes Info: Encoder Software: HandBrake 0.9.6 2012022800

Track # 1 Info - TrackID 1 - TimeScale 90000 - Duration 00:14:59.858
Media Info: Language "Undetermined" - Type "vide:avc1" - 21576 samples
Visual Track layout: x=0 y=0 width=853 height=480 MPEG-4
Config: Visual Stream - ObjectTypeIndication 0x21 AVC/H264
Video - Visual Size 864 x 480 AVC Info: 1 SPS - 1 P
PS - Profile Main @ Level 3 NAL Unit length bits: 32
Pixel Aspect Ratio 80:81 - Indicated track size 853 x 480 Self-synchronized

Track # 2 Info - TrackID 2 - TimeScale 44100 - Duration 00:15:00.214
Media Info: Language "English" - Type "soun:mp4a" - 38769 samples MPEG-4
Config: Audio Stream - ObjectTypeIndication 0x40 MPEG-4
Audio MPEG-4 Audio AAC LC - 2 Channel(s) - SampleRate 44100 Synchronized on stream 1

Output:

Movie Info * Timescale 90000 - Duration 00:29:24.136
Fragmented File no - 3 track(s)
File suitable for progressive download (moov before mdat)
File Brand isom - version 1 Created: GMT Thu Jun 28 19:40:39 2012
File has root IOD (9 bytes) Scene PL 0xff - Graphics PL 0xff - OD PL 0xff
Visual PL: AVC/H264 Profile (0x15)
Audio PL: AAC Profile @ Level 2 (0x29)
No streams included in root OD

Track # 1 Info - TrackID 1 - TimeScale 90000 - Duration 00:19:36.968
Media Info: Language "Undetermined" - Type "vide:avc1" - 28219 samples
Visual Track layout: x=0 y=0 width=1024 height=576 MPEG-4
Config: Visual Stream - ObjectTypeIndication 0x21 AVC/H264
Video - Visual Size 1024 x 576 AVC Info: 1 SPS - 1
PPS - Profile Main @ Level 3.1 NAL Unit length bits: 32
Pixel Aspect Ratio 1:1 - Indicated track size 1024 x 576 Self-synchronized

Track # 2 Info - TrackID 2 - TimeScale 44100 - Duration 00:29:24.136
Media Info: Language "English" - Type "soun:mp4a" - 75975 samples MPEG-4
Config: Audio Stream - ObjectTypeIndication 0x40 MPEG-4
Audio MPEG-4 Audio AAC LC - 2 Channel(s) - SampleRate 44100 Synchronized on stream 1

Track # 3 Info - TrackID 3 - TimeScale 90000 - Duration 00:09:46.503
Media Info: Language "Undetermined" - Type "vide:avc1" - 14062 samples
Visual Track layout: x=0 y=0 width=1280 height=720 MPEG-4
Config: Visual Stream - ObjectTypeIndication 0x21 AVC/H264
Video - Visual Size 1280 x 720 AVC Info: 1 SPS - 1
PPS - Profile Main @ Level 3.1 NAL Unit length bits: 32
Pixel Aspect Ratio 1:1 - Indicated track size 1280 x 720 Synchronized on stream 1

And I do not understand, why in output file I have 2 video tracks?

I believe this statement:

  I've a problem while merging 2 h264/mp4 files width the same parameters except length

is incorrect. In addition to length your video files have different picture dimensions, and that prevents the merge.

Your "input sample" shows a track size of 853x480. The output, however, shows that track #1 is 1024x576 and track #3 if 1280x720.

So clearly, the input file that you are showing in your example is not one of the files you merged in the output. There are at least three different files at play here, and each has a different picture size.

To be able to merge two files they must have the same picture size. As a test, you may want to try merging the same file twice.


After Effects: Strange motion tracking problem I've tested this on numerous videos: whenever I try to track motion in a video, the track point just flys straight up.. no matter how many different ways I've tried it, it also does this. I've linked a gif of what I'm talking about.

I hadn't touched AE for a few months, and motion tracking worked fine before, the only difference between now and then is 1-2 windows updates.

Please help, I need this for a production due Friday (if this is the wrong place to ask this question please let me know)

gif of problem - http://giphy.com/gifs/l2SpXUaPwPEoz4LzW

some possibilities:

You are trying to track a very general area. Try to track a smaller
area with well differentiated colors (maybe another footage).
You are using CC 2014. There are bugs that have been solved since
then. Why don't you try to update your After Effects version to
2015.3.


Imovie 10.1.9 clips turn solid black in Final Cut Pro X 10.3.4 after "Send Movie To Final Cut Pro" Better describe "steps to reproduce", than wrote bunch of text.

What has been made:

Clips has been captured by iPhone 8 Plus with 4K and 60fps.
Clips has been added to iMovie project from Photos.app library.
Clips has been trimmed and rearranged in iMovie.
Sound has been added as a separated track from .mp3 file.

Menu button "File/Send Movie To Final Cut Pro" has been pressed.
Imovie project has been successfully transferred without warnings.
All clips video, graphic parts turn to solid black.
Sound plays with no problems screen shows solid black rectangle.

What has been tried to solve problem:

Preferences restoration to default for iMovie.
Preferences restoration to default for Final Cut Pro X.
Library has been trashed and new one was created for iMovie.
Library has been trashed and new one was created for Final Cut Pro X.
Videofiles from another source (YouTube) has been tried.
Another projects has been created.

Suffering through with no luck. Looking for help.

Sorry for panic. Answer has been found.

Problem: Final Cut Pro X was unable to see 4k 60fps videos captured by iOS devices.

Reason: Unknown.

Solution: Need to update Final Cut Pro X to 10.4.1 version.

Source: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208131


How can I export RGB + Alpha in Adobe After Effects with Adobe Media Encoder (2020) I have built out a few little animations in After Effects. I'm trying to export them — and pull them into ScreenFlow.

When I export > add-to-media-queue I get a .mov that won't open in QuickTime — and that is “messed up” (for lack of understanding) when I try to use it in ScreenFlow.

It's supposed to look like this:

but it looks like this:

I've been able to export it with Adobe Media Encoder — but it has a black background and I can't find how to ensure it comes out with alpha.

Media encoder is being really buggy - and I'm curious is there are problems with the latest releases?

How can a regular ol guy, who's trying to get a basic RGB + Alpha animation, get the job done — the simplest way? I don't even want to know what a codec is... if possible. I plan on staying in the hobbies zone.

Click the output mode in the render queue, by default it says lossless:

use these settings, format: quicktime, video output channels: RGB + Alpha:

click format options and choose Apple ProRes 4444. The 4th 4 is the indicator that the codec has an alpha channel (this only applies to the Apple ProRes codec naming scheme).

That should fix your problem.

Edit: This was also fixable without changing the codec to Apple ProRes 4444, and could have been accomplished with opening one less window by just switching the color channel to Straight (Unmatted), however...

...knowing whether to choose Straight (no baked-in black) or Premultiplied (baked-in black) is somewhat abstract, and importing video with the default animation codec + aplha into other programs is just weird sometimes.

I've found that ProRes 4444 hits the "it just works" goal more often, and remembering that 4444 corresponds with RGBA(lpha) is easier to recall than the difference between matted vs. unmatted.


Premiere Pro plays media video stream at half the speed as audio In Premiere Pro 2020 (14.7), some media files have video playing at half the speed as the source, either in the source monitor or the timeline. Here is one example in Premiere with a still apparently at minute 6:

Here is the source file playing in VLC showing a near still at minute 3:

The same problem appears in this thread. The solution there was to re-open the project, which didn't work for me, and neither did restarting Premiere.
I have this issue whether I set ingest to create proxies or not.
How can I fix this issue?
Update: This is an issue with Adobe After Effects 2020 as well, so most likely an issue with some basic code in the 2020 version. I used a clip in Premiere 2019 and in After Effects 2020 from about 0:30 (shown in the first picture as marked in and out). After Effects rendered the video at half the speed and showing frames that are at 0:14 in the original footage. Lucky for me, I didn't need the audio for that clip in After Effects 2020.

I spent 5 hours with Adobe support and an engineer, where we tried cleaning the media cache, removing preference files, removing "Application Support" files, rendering in to out, and downgrading from 14.7 to 14.3. The issue still persisted. Adobe said it was my fault because I have the minimum 8 GB of RAM instead of the recommended 16 GB. It sounds like a bug to me.
I tried the oldest version of Premiere, 13.1.5 without creating proxies when ingesting, and it did not have that problem.


Avid import wmv file, just audio no video I've got a few wmv files, when I import them into avid it seems that the video channel is not being imported. There's just audio.

Am I missing something in the import stage? Or in the handling of the sequence?

This is likely due to the video codec that you are using. First, an explanation of terms is required: WMV is a container format. These can contain one or more video or audio streams - with video this is normally one video & one audio stream; and these are encoded with various codecs (coder/decoder). I'm not very familiar with the WMV format - for editing I use proper intermediate codecs (Apple ProRes in my case; more in this in a moment), and I prefer MP4 as a delivery codec.

There are broadly three 'types' of video codec: capture codecs, that a video camera will use to record the video; intermediate codecs, that are more suited to post-production editing (they trade larger files for requiring less processing power & the ability to easily cut on any frame); and delivery codecs, that are more compressed (so they can be streamed over the internet, or so you can fit a decent length on a physical medium like a DVD, or for broadcast). There is some overlap between these (many DSLRs use h.264, which is designed to be a delivery codec, to capture video).

This stuff also applies to audio - though there you should use uncompressed PCM audio. However, since audio decompression requires far less processing power, some NLEs will allow you to get away with compressed audio.

I have never heard of the WMV format containing any intermediate formats, as far as I know it's a purely delivery format. That's probably the cause of your problem. I've never used Avid, so I don't know  exactly which intermediate codec you should use. Since it's designed by Avid, the DNxHD codec is a good bet for video (you should convert your audio to PCM audio while you're at it).

Your video editing software probably came with a media conversion tool. You could also use the command-line-based ffmpeg (wiki) to encode to DNxHD. For the following command, you would need to adjust the bit rate - here it is 36 megabits/second - see here for some information on what you should use. Note that the ffmpeg syntax used in that guide is somehat out of date; you should use -c:v instead of -vcodec and -b:v instead of -b. This following command will also convert the audio to uncompressed 16-bit PCM, for maximum compatibility:

ffmpeg -i input.wmv -c:v dnxhd -b:v 36M -c:a pcm_s16le output.mov


Video effect - slowmotion to fastmotion? How do you edit a video using Premiere Pro CC 2017 so that it goes from slow motion to normal speed or fast motion, like in this video. Some parts are in slow motion and then it suddenly speeds up?

The term your looking for is called a speed ramp. There are lots of tutorials if you search for that.

Here are basic instructions for one way of doing that.

Right click on the clip in your timeline
Click 'Show Clip Keyframes' then 'Time Remapping' then 'Speed'
You can then add Keyframes and drag the line on your clip to alter the speed


How to critique promotional videos? I want to start producing short promotional videos for products, services, events, etc.

I figure the first thing to do is:

Know how to find examples of 3-5 minute promotional videos,
Learn how to critique the how the video expresses it's message, and
Access the cost required to produce the video.

Any suggested resources for learning to do this?

A quick google and the 3rd result is this article on how to write a product review...

Finding examples is easy, just do a youtube search or google "Canon 550d Video Review" or any other product event or service. Just add "video review" to the end.

I dont think you will find any specific tutorials or resources on how to produce review videos. Making good review videos comes from experience. Either because the producer has been educated in writing & marketing or because they have done it many times before and have worked out what 'works' and what doesnt. Just look at the reviews that are already out there  and model yourself off those.

Cost is simple: What equipment do you need?

Camera
Lights
Microphone
Editing Software (eg Final Cut)
Editing Hardware (eg Laptop)


Premiere Pro CC: Loop vertical frame edge on 16mm film scan I am working with a 16mm film transfer that was done onto videotape in the late 90s. The film print itself is no longer available, and this digitized video copy is the best version that is known to exist.

As you may know if you've worked with film projection systems, projectors often had a knob that would allow the operator to adjust the position of the film frame within the projected image. If this knob was badly adjusted, a black line would appear near the top or bottom of the image, and part of the adjacent frame of film (either the top or bottom) would appear either above or below this line.

In the case of the film transfer that I'm working with, this framing setting was improperly set during the film's transfer to video, and a portion of the bottom of the adjacent frame appears above a black line near the top of the video. I've been using Premiere Pro CC provided by my institution to do basic editing on a large volume of digitized film and video recordings, but fixing this framing issue is beyond the scope of my knowledge of Premiere, and all I haven't been able to find any information on the issue online.

Is there a way to digitally “scroll” the top portion of the video frame back to the bottom where it belongs? I recognize that given the way film works, this portion at the top is one film frame offset from the rest of the picture, but this will be far less noticeable than having part of the bottom of the image incorrectly placed at the top.

Here is a screenshot from the film in question. Note the black line near the top. The picture information above this line should appear at the bottom of the picture.

Here is a screenshot from the film in question. Note the black line near the top. The picture information above this line should appear at the bottom of the picture.

1) Select the clip in your timeline and in the effects controls panel just adjust the 'y' position value until the line at the top is out of frame.

2) Duplicate the clip on your timeline into the second video track, and make the same adjustment but in the opposite direction so that only the content above the line is visible at the bottom of the program monitor.

3) Move the clip on video track 2 forward or back one frame to match.

Obviously my test doesn't match quite right because I only had the frame you provided, but your results should look better. It looks like there might still be some extra stuff to cut off at the bottom, so you can then select both clips, right click and nest them, then either scale that footage up in the effects control panel to fit, or apply a crop effect to remove the extra bits for cleanup.


Audio randomly cuts out for remainder of clip - Adobe Premier Elements 11 I have a Sony Handycam HDR-XR260, and haven't had any trouble before the last two weeks.

While editing, occasionally a clip's audio will suddenly disappear a few minutes in, and not return until the next clip. Could be a 10 minute clip, could be a 20 minute clip.

The microphone is built in, so it isn't a matter of disconnected mic equipment. I'm not doing anything different from one clip to another, during filming or during uploading.

Super frustrating - any thoughts on the cause?

EDIT

I checked the original files on my computer, and the audio is still there. So for whatever reason, the clip isn't importing into Premiere with the audio, even when I try again.

I'm not that familiar with Premiere Elements, however in Premiere Pro, there is a conforming process during which a special preview video is made that can be used for more efficient editing.  I wonder if perhaps either the conforming has not finished yet or if perhaps you are having a problem with the conforming.

Does it stop at roughly the same time on all clips?  Is the spot that it stops consistent?  How high is CPU usage and memory usage during the drop outs?

If the spot that it stops isn't consistent within a particular clip, then it is highly likely that it is an artifact of the conforming progressing.  If it is roughly the same spot across multiple clips, there may be some other kind of software or buffering issue going on that causes it to error or crash.  Also, if CPU or memory usage is high, it may support being a buffering issue where your system simply can't keep up with the playback.

This is also probably something that will be hard to troubleshoot over the Internet, so it might be worth contacting Adobe to see if they have any ideas as well.  It certainly doesn't sound like typical behavior.


How do I darken a video smoothly halfway through? I have a 10 second video clip. At about the 5 second mark, I'm showing a text overlay. I want the video to keep on playing, but I'd like it to be darker when the text is showing.

I don't want an abrupt transition of:

0:00: normal video (100% bright), no text
0:05: darkened video (50% bright) w/ text overlay

I want a more smooth transition such as:

0:00: normal video (100% bright), no text
0:04: begin darkening the video
0:05: darkened video (50% bright) w/ text overlay

How do I do this in iMovie?

First of all the transition that you are willing to do is according to my knowledge an abrupt transition and according to me dimming 50% of brightness in just 1 second will look less smooth and more immediate than the dimming/reduction of brightness in 5 seconds.

Preferably, I would like you to use Adobe Premiere Pro and/or Adobe After Effects, if you like such transitions, in which "keyframes" do a nice job.

But, in iMovie, you don't have a good keyframe feature. So, what you can do here is answered by AppleMan1958 (quoting it in his own words below):-

  Mar 9, 2012, 5:07 AM AppleMan1958 in response to Penfold941

  iMovie does not contain keyframes like FCP, but you can simulate it quite a bit. Just drag your mouse from your first "keyframe" to the end "keyframe" within a clip so that you have selected a range of clips. Then right-click within the range and select "Split Clip". Now you can apply a Ken Burns zoom to this section. This works for many effects.

  What you cannot do is keyframe the location of a motion graphic to simulate movement, for example.

You may read the full thread here

So, you might have got your answer, if there remains any other confusion, you may ask in the comment section below. But, try this solution out before asking or assuming any confusion. Hopefully, you might get rid of your problem yourself.


Standard way for handling different resolutions when concatenating videos I am building a small tool to take the short videos I record from different devices (e.g. iPhone, camcorder, etc), and concatenate them together chronologically. Everything is working up to the point of resizing/padding the videos before concatenation. My solution right now is to just take the max width and max height and then center and pad all the videos accordingly. This doesn't look great though.
For example, I have a 1280x720 stream from my camcorder and a 1920x1080 vertical (i.e. rotated) video from my iPhone. My current solution leads to a lot of padding and a square image.
When I use Shotcut the output looks quite visually appealing: the camcorder video is full screen, and the iPhone video is rotated and then padded. However, it seems as though it must scale the 1280x720 stream to 1920x1080 as the final mp4 file is 1920x1080. I'm not sure I want scaling as the default behavior though. For example, if I had a 4k video and a 1280x720, I imagine the scaling would look terrible.
I know that I can always add selectors to choose what resolution I want, but I found that the production software I looked at (Shotcut, Premiere, etc.) seem to abstract these decisions away.
Is there a optimal way to make this decision? What the standard way of handling these differing resolutions when combining videos in software like Shotcut or Premiere?

I have written various approaches how to fix this below and you can automated the ones from the first two blocks with a clever rule set. But the content-dependent options should be done manually. So if you want to use this, maybe you find a way to tag those videos first by hand, for example by using metedata and your tool can then read the metadata and apply the correct solution. Anyway, there is no real standard way and it's not really common for professional productions to deal with clips in different frame sizes. If so, it is well planned and those scenes are usually filmed in a way that parts of the frame can easily be cropped away afterwards.
Videos with the same aspect ratio
You can downscale to the lowest common resolution if all the videos share the same aspect ratio. As you correctly assume, upscaling would not always look good. Downscaling will not be noticable to the general viewer.
Videos with different aspect ratio
If the videos don't have the same aspect ratio you have to add black bars horizontally or vertically. My recommendation is to use only black bars for 2 different frame sizes, not more. This means some videos will be full screen and all the rest will have the same sized bars. Either keep all bars horizontally or vertically. Anything else might confuse the audience too much. In case you have 3 or more different frame sizes, I recommend to manually crop them before starting your automated solution.
Options depending on content
If it works for your story, you can render mutliple source clips in the same frame, for example take 4 lower resolution clips, put each into a different quarter of the frame, maybe with seperating bars in between. It then resembles like a wall of screens. Generally this works well if you want to show things happening in parallel. One example is filming various instrument players individually while they perform a musical piece. This is also a good solution, when you have vertical videos shot with a smartphone: you could combine 2 or 3 in the same frame, just put them next to each other.
Another option is picture in picture, which is often used for all kinds of presentations, where you have either slides or a shot of the main stage filling the screen and a smaller overlay with the video of the speaker(s) near one of the corners.


HTML tags in SRT files produced by ffmpeg What I do:
$ ffmpeg -i a.mkv -c:s srt b.srt

The resulting file contains HTML tags, is there a way to avoid that?
On a side note, where can I find the list of... what do they call it... encoders? I simply tried srt for the name and it worked.

Instead of srt try to use text:
$ ffmpeg -i a.mkv -c:s text b.srt

(source)
For a list of all codecs use:
ffmpeg -encoders

You can check the documentation for more options.


For a given bitrate, what video resolution is perceived as the highest quality? I'd like to achieve certain approximate bitrate for video encoding. If I use higher resolution like 720p, I'll get more fine-grained image, but more encoding artifacts. If I use smaller resolution like 480p, I'll get less detail and more coarse image, but higher image quality. Naturally, if the resolution is too high or too low, the result will be bad. Is there any research or information based on experience, what's the optimum resolution, given a desired bitrate and codec (in my case libx264)?

In case of H.264 codec, you can use YouTube recommendations.

Here's Vimeo video compression guidelines


GoPro Dual HERO 3D stereo system only compatible with HERO3+ Black Edition units? I need to shoot stereo video in perfect sync. I realized that GoPro offers Dual HERO System but they only list compatibility for HERO3+ Black Edition units. So I assume the currently selling cheaper HERO3 White Edition and HERO3+ Silver Edition models are not able to do frame synchronization for 3D even though they might have the same HW sync connector/socket as Black Edition on their bodies?

I do not need the waterproof dual enclosure, I can connect bare camera units just with cable (because I need wider lens baseline). My main goal is to get stereo video in perfect synchronization only.

I probably could have done a quick google search before asking. HERO3+ Black Edition may be the only currently selling supported unit, but I found that following historical products are compatible with a "3D HERO System" (which may be different from "Dual HERO System"):

HD HERO Original camera
HD HERO2 camera

Dont know whether "3D HERO System" has different sync cable than current DUAL System. Also, a guy called "linuxluver" said on this page that he is using his "Hero3 Silver cams for 3D content". I am not sure if he uses the sync cable or not.

Still, they list the HERO3+ BE as the only compatible with "Dual HERO System".


Key out everything but one color? Ok I know this might be very basic for many of you, but I couldn't quite figure out how to do this ...

So, in case I want something like a reverse color keying where everything except one particular color is keyed out, what would be the easiest or, even better, most customizable way to do this in Premiere Pro?

I want to be able to manually set the tolerance level for similar colors as well as soft edges.

Thanks in advance!

No answers starting with "This is much easier with After Effects ..." please!

This is quite simple.  Use any keyer of your choice that can give you a good mask for the layer, then place an "Alpha Adjust" layer below it in the Effects control and click the "Invert Alpha" checkbox.  This will invert the alpha channel produced by the keyer and reverse the effect the way you are looking for.


How do I render each time increment on Premiere Pro CS5/6? I want to write a script that automates rendering in a way that each, say, 30 seconds of a longer video becomes a separate video file. How do I approach this without having to manually highlight and render each time increment?

I would honestly suggest outputting the whole thing to a lossless format and then using another tool to split the file.  Depending on if you have audio, it could be particularly easy to do by exporting as an image sequence and simply moving and renaming the images for each 30 second clip and then encoding each.  If they have audio, then you'd want to actually use something like FFMpeg for splitting the file though.


How to add location text character by character like in action movies? For a video I want to add text character by character, including the beep-beep-beep alike sound, like common action movies do this when switching to a new location. Obviously, I don't know how this is called and if it is military related, so I hope you know what I mean.
I already figured out how to generally add text, but I found no option or animation to introduce it character by character. Alternatively I would have to manually insert character by character; but this would be difficult to align properly (not vertically, but horizontally (proper character spacing)).
I though of using the subtitle feature for this. But if there is a more elegant solution, I would prefer to not using subtitles.

The software is Kdenlive 19.12.3 on Ubuntu 20.04.
I do video editing occasionally only; I am sorry for any misconceptions, wrong wording, etc in my description, therefore.

Edit:

Unfortunately I am unable to find an example on youtube currently
Maybe there is an effect that is able to fade the text in from the left to the right as an alternative?

I found a way:

Add title text to video
Add the Rotoscope effect to the title
At timeline start of text: draw the rotoscope shape around the text (see below)
At timeline end of text: add keyframe and move the shape behind the text (see below)
Set the effect mode to Luma
Add the Cairo Blend composition to the title
Set the gradient mode to Add

Now the title text should appear from left to right. It does not appear character by character, but this is ok.
The rotoscope effect is quite mighty - this video teached me how to use it:

Additionally I found this cool sound, which is quite exactly I was looking for:
https://freesound.org/people/Sky_Motion/sounds/416777/


After Effects - Audio Spectrum with Circles I have a music video I'd like to make with 4 quarter-circles at each of the four corners of the screen. I would like them all to to "pop out" together (in sync) along with the music, without any audio waves. How would I do that in After Effects?

Import your audio and use the Convert audio to keyframes option on the layer (right-click->Keyframe Assistent).
Then create an expression for the value that you want to modify based on the audio spectrum. In that case you probably want the radius or scale to be affected.
The simplest way to do this is to use the "expression pick whip". Just alt click the stop-watch icon to get the expression control menu.

Then click on the pick whip icon (marked above) and drag onto the left, right or center channel slider of your earlier generated "Audio Amplitude" layer. Now the values of the keyframes are 1:1 mapped to the chosen property of your circle object. Now you can do some math to the keyframes to amplify the animation or to reverse the direction.
F.e. you can do things like shown below, be aware that I chose to use the 2D size value as shown in the picture above, hence I have [temp, temp] at the end. If your property only has one value it will have only [temp] or with 3 values [temp,temp,temp]. You can also of course have separate values for each dimension.

Amplyify times 10:

temp = thisComp.layer("Audio Amplitude").effect("Left Channel")("Slider")*10;
[temp, temp]

Amplyify non uniform:

temp = thisComp.layer("Audio Amplitude").effect("Left Channel")("Slider");
[temp*5, temp*10]

Reverse direction:

temp = thisComp.layer("Audio Amplitude").effect("Left Channel")("Slider")*-1;
[temp, temp]

Easy In:

temp = easeIn(time, thisComp.layer("Audio Amplitude").effect("Left Channel")("Slider"), thisComp.layer("Audio Amplitude").effect("Left Channel")("Slider"));
[temp,temp]

The little "play" icon next to the whip offers you a lot of math expression functions to use here.


What is the proper notation for a frame rate that is less than 1FPS? For example should 1 frame per minute be 1FPM or should it be expressed as FPS using a decimal.

Frame per minute is totally fine. Frame per hour, frame per day. But I am not sure you can keep going using an acronym indefinitely.

But when talking about timelapse, you normally do not talk about FP(add letter here) but intervals. So the term is actually different than FPS.

The Interval is 1 second, 30 s or whatever.

When reproducing a "video" with this frame rate, I would not think of it as actual video, but more like a slideshow, so again the concept is a bit different.

20 slides per minute, or a slide every 3 seconds.

This is a nice question actually.