Where can I find good free quality VFX effects stock library?

I've just found this nice Video & Filmmaker Magazine list of free stuff.
Some of them:

Chroma Key Backgrounds
Cute Stock Footage
LightLeakLove


How do you organise your timeline clips in Premier Pro

In this scenario, I start out with a single long sequence.
I make cuts wherever the good stuff is, and move it up one layer to identify it.
I duplicate the sequence, then label the old sequence as unedited, and the new sequence as "edits".
I delete all the unnecessary stuff on the lower layer, then duplicate again, and make a sequence with all the good stuff in a single sequence with all the gaps removed.
If I need to split things up thematically, I would duplicate and rename sequences down to whatever granularity makes sense.
Then I would start labelling, colouring and adding markers as appropriate.
Would be interested to hear how others do it.


It may be caused by a not supported QuickTime Version.
If QT is installed, try downgrading it. For eg with Haali Media Splitter & ffdshow.

This  ug was found 2015. But it may still be the problem.


Crop video in ffmpeg without re-encoding

A videofilter in ffmpeg always has to modify pixel information hence the reason why you need to re-encode.
It seems logical at first that you wouldn't have to do this when cropping but the way lossy video codecs work makes this pretty impossible without re-encoding everything.
They usually don't see an array of pixel information but a much more complex representation of pixel blobs that are described in a way that takes up less space than the original pixel blob, you can't really "crop" that encoding, to do a crop you would first need to decode the information to know what you are dealing with but then you need to re-encode to have it compressed again. Thats the main stepping stone.
Then they also use things like motion estimation that depends on information before and after certain frames, if that information changes all of the sudden the whole thing is screwed up and you end up with tons of artifacts when decoding the video during playback.

tldr; no its not possible to crop without re-encoding in any tool.

Unless you deal with some very specific lossless non-consumer intermediate codecs that would enable it but in that case transcoding wouldn't be an issue.


Video from image with same image as background


Your best bet is to save them on two disks, that is two back up copies. A RAID sounds nice, but have you ever had to replace a RAID system with a faulty controller? It can be a nightmare. Forget RAID as a back up unless you are talking about an instant snapshot retrieval system that is online 24/7. If you are talking about a long term back up as in a real archive then get two USB disks with enough capacity and make two copies, one on each disk.

Tapes will require hardware that may not be around when you want to retrieve the data.

As a systems administrator for many years please allow me to demonstrate this issue.

In the 1980s we used 1/2 inch tape transports to back up our servers, this was replaced by 8mm tapes by 1995, 8mm tapes were replaced by DLT transports, DLT was then replaced by super DLT, which then was replaced by LTO. This never ends. If you wanted to read those old 1/2 inch tapes you would have to go to a museum, and this will eventually be true for every tape transport system that was ever developed.

Yes disk interfaces change, but getting a conversion interface say EIDE to USB, or ATA 100 to USB, or SATA to USB is easy. Other serial interface conversions will be easy too vs. trying to locate a 'vintage' tape system that still works.

I only shoot on digital memory, so backing up my data is simple and painless. I make two back ups on two different disks. The disks are then removed from service and stored where they will not get toasted, or frozen. I only use these disks when I need to update the backup. Eventually when they are full I store the disk in what I call a dormant back up.

Because I only power up the disks when I either need the data or I need to do a back up increases their reliability. Most disks have a 5 year warranty, if these are on 24/7 or turn them on every time I use my computer I would be needlessly heating them up, and after 50,000 hours they may not work. Using the back up disks only when you need them will extend their life way beyond 5 years.

Currently I have two 2 TB disks as my active back up. I have two 1TB disks in the dormant state too.

Like a volcano, information has 3 states: Active, Dormant, and Extinct.
Active data should be accessibly 24/7, dormant should be available, and extinct goes to the shredder.


60 fps vs 50 fps in 24 fps timeline slow motion difference

The difference is noticable but the question is if it is worth it.
Many low-end cameras compress High Framerate videos more than "normal" framerate videos, thus you loose quality.

So best thing in this case is just to try it out, if you think that the quality loss if worth the slight slower speed


ffmpeg stretch edge pixels to cover black bars

FFmpeg has a fillborders filter that can be used here.
Assuming a 1440x1080 content area inside a 1920x1080 frame, use
ffmpeg -i in -vf fillborders=left=241:right=241:mode=smear -c:a copy out


Are there only a maximum of 1 re-encodes per stream in an ffmpeg command?

Yes, each output stream undergoes, at most, one encoding. If you map an input stream to multiple output files or multiples times in one output file, those count as distinct output streams.

copy must be set as the codec value for an output stream in order to avoid re-encoding it.


Export EDL from Movie Maker WLMP (Windows Live Media Project)

A WLMP file can be opened as an xml.  Save a copy of the project changing the extension to XML.

Convert XML to CSV using one of various free converters available online.  Open the CSV file as a spreadsheet (Excel, Calc, etc).  Now you can access the filenames and durations of each edit.

You must reformat your spreadsheet to match an EDL format supported by your NLE.  Once you have the correct format, export spreadsheet (sometimes you must convert to CSV, open in notepad and save again with the desired extension).

This is an example of the cuts once converted to csv / spreadsheet format:

_id,_filePath,_arWidth,_arHeight,_duration,_songTitle,_songArtist,_songAlbum,_songCopyrightUrl,_songArtistUrl,_songAudioFileUrl,_stabilizationMode,_mediaItemType
159,F:\video\img(7).jpg,2448,3264,0,,,,,,,0,2
106,F:\video\img(8).jpg,2448,3264,0,,,,,,,0,2
160,F:\video\img(50).jpg,960,960,0,,,,,,,0,2
107,F:\video\img(51).jpg,667,667,0,,,,,,,0,2
161,F:\video\clip (32).mp4,1280,720,26.026,,,,,,,0,1
108,F:\video\clip(20).MTS,1920,1080,12.69,,,,,,,0,1


Best way of presenting both 720p and 1080p screencasts

Generally speaking shooting in 1080p and scaling it down to 720p is not a problem with cameras as I do this all the time and it looks just fine. When I do this I may also be mixing 1080p and 720p raw images, and I always scale to the lowest resolution. When I render a 1080p I will generally render a 720p version as an answer print to view before committing the final cut to a 1080p render. I say this with caution because I have not worked with screencasts or using screen motion capture software.

However, shooting in 720p and trying to make it into 1080p is a losing battle because then you are asking software to make up for pixels that do not exist. You can try it, but I don't think you will like it unless someone makes a software product something like Twixtor that adds frames needed for extra slow motion shots.


Help achieving a specifc effect in DaVinci Resolve - glowing floating head fades in and then out

I found this helpful tutorial on basic compositing:

With this I was able to easily do additive compositing with a mask and I can easily adjust the position, opacity, etc.

I wanted a white glow, and as luck would have it the video was filmed in front of a white brick wall. It works great now.


While I can't recommend any particular products and generally stack exchange communities are hesitant about product recommendations, what I can recommend is that at a minimum you should use two light sources offset to the left and right of the camera and if budget allows, put an additional light behind them facing up.  Ideally, one of the lights behind the camera should be slightly less intense and/or further away than the other.

This is the concept of three point lighting.  The lights in front are called the key and fill light.  The purpose is that with only a key light, you will get unacceptably dark shadows where the camera may have a hard time getting a good image.  The fill light fills in the shadows without making them completely washed out so that the shot still looks natural.

The light behind and below them is called the backlight and will illuminate their edges to make them stand out from the backdrop a bit more, but it isn't strictly necessary if you can't afford three good lights.  The image will just seem flatter.

My recommendation for finding suitable lights is to visit the site for a popular online A/V retailer and look at the reviews of specific lighting products.  I personally use B&H for a lot of my needs and I know lots of people also like Adorama.

It is also worth noting that in a jamb, you could use just about any lights that have the same color temperature (the tint of the light) but in general, the made for the purpose lights you would get from an A/V store will be the most durable, easiest to set up, and likely give a better result if you aren't experienced with lighting for video.


Selectively blur many but not all of the faces in a video

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.


What's the difference between open Subtitles and open captions in Premiere Pro CC 2018?

ok, I found out that the difference is in the export options of this type of caption, aside from in editing the subtitles. You can export open subtitles as a sidecar file with the same formats you get in teletext, while you can only burn open captions into video.


It was apparently made with a thermal imaging camera.


What do you call the video effect where water looks like it's standing still when filmed

This is called stroboscopic effect.  It refers to when the sample rate is synchronized or very slightly out of sync resulting in a much slower representation of the motion that results from taking a picture that is at the same point or slightly advanced point in a subsequent cycle of a higher frequency cyclic motion.

You can actually do the same exact thing in real life for your own eyes by using a strobe light, which is the more common demonstration, though frame rate can be used too if you can adjust it closely enough.


Best medium for mixed content - High quality pictures and SD video

It depends on your goal:

If you must deliver to viewers with only a classic DVD player then make it a DVD.
If they only have a Blu-Ray player then make it a Blu-Ray.

For content preservation I would recommend to basically write all original content onto a disk with highest possible quality in wrappers/containers that are widely supported (high-quality JPEG for photos and MPEG4 or MPEG2 for videos). Then most modern players will be able to present the content, as well as allowing you to keep good mezzanine quality.


How to merge videos side by side if one of them is cropped

Use

ffmpeg -i L.MOV -i R.MOV -filter_complex '[0:v]crop=in_w-28:in_h-28,scale=640:480,setsar=1,pad=iw*2:ih[int];[int][1:v]overlay=W/2:0[vid]' -map [vid] -c:v libx264 -crf 23 -preset veryfast LR.MOV

Since you want a zoomed-in effect, after cropping, you should rescale it back to 640x480. Your crop dimensions are disproportionate to the input dimensions so I have reset SAR to 1. You can skip this if you apply crop=in_w-28:in_h-21.

To apply the crop to the right video, use

ffmpeg -i L.MOV -i R.MOV -filter_complex '[1:v]crop=in_w-28:in_h-21,scale=640:480[int];[0:v]pad=iw*2:ih[left];[left][int]overlay=W/2:0[vid]' -map [vid] -c:v libx264 -crf 23 -preset veryfast LR.MOV


Best way to output two streams, and add lower thirds keying to one stream?

Much like your Mac Mini approach, you can set up a PC with a free demo of vMix (http://www.vmix.com.au) and see if it will work for you.


Is it worth exporting at the exact 29.97 FPS from Photoshop or just use 30 FPS?

29.97 is the NTSC compromise for 30 fps.  23.976 is the NTSC compromise for 24 fps.  29.976 is a framerate that results from confusing these two numbers into a single bit of nonsense.

The bottom line is that if you have a mix of 29.97fps and 30fps, then every 1000 frames (about every 33 seconds) there's going to be a glitch.  Either you have to double up a frame of the 29.97fps stream to keep up with the 30fps stream, or you have to skip a frame of the 30fps stream so as not to overrun the 29.97fps stream.

If you never have to composite 1000 differently-timed frames in a row, then you can fudge the two as being equal.  But unless you can read the source code of your video editor, you don't really know at what point the program is going to try to "correct" the glitch.  It might be uppity and try to do it half-way through the 1000 sequence to minimize the average divergence, rather than waiting until the divergence is indisputable.  In that case, best to output your generated frames to match the frame rate of the rest of your content.


Audio/Video Out of Sync with Samsung NX1000 Camera - Why?

I have a similar problem and that's how I found your question online today... The Mp4 file from my nx1000 was imported as it is on adobe premiere cs3.

The audio and video seem to have same starting and ending point, but the video alone is faster than the original as if it was stretched, and the audio has the normal speed but ends in the middle of the original sound track.

Knowing that I imported the file to a project with the same settings as video, 1080i 29.9fps... I tried again with 25fps and with a video card and without a video card... In vain

The only way I got it right, is unfortunately by decoding it on a software called procoder, to a different format (i chose *.mov), and it worked like a charm on my editing software. But of course I lost resolution... I did not buy the nx1000 so i can decode it and lose resolution for editing!

There should be an answer, I hope you found yours!


Output format and quality to be same as input

Since these are for broadcast play-out over local storage, these commands are biased towards quality and away from filesize.

For MP4s:

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf "text filters here" -c:v libx264 -crf 8 -c:a copy -map 0 -movflags +faststart output.mp4

For MPGs:

ffmpeg -i input.mpg -vf "text filters here" -c:v mpeg2video -q:v 2 -c:a copy -map 0 output.mpg


Editing movies with FFMPEG in command line

While travelling with my 10-year-old Linux laptop I produced an application video for an acrobatics teacher training.  Nothing fancy, but it turned out decent.  I'm not sure if this qualifies as a "movie" since it's just a series of unrelated clips accompanied by music. The video is about 10 minutes long.  It's also up on youtube but I think not playable in some countries due to use of copyrighted music.

I was working on another one, an acroyoga flow performance shot on a couple of phones, but there didn't seem to be a way to get ffmpeg to do a Ken Burns zoom over multiple frames of video without a weird stuttery effect.  So I decided to wait until I got home to finish that one in FCP.

I found it was a pretty straightforward approach.  I like that the parameters are all explicitly stated and you don't have to go digging into settings in the hope that you might figure out how to, for example, replicate the scaling that you used on a particular clip.  Perhaps that speaks to my lack of experience with video editing.  Also if you're not a relatively advanced command line user it would be more complicated for you.  I probably spent most of my time Googling how to perform particular manipulations with ffmpeg. I think the whole editing process took about the equivalent of a work day.


Easy way to create AudioGrams, ideally with waveform & Subtitles / Closed Captions with progressing marker on them? Free to start with?

Setting up an automated pipeline for this would take days for a trained person, weeks for someone who doesn't work in the industry. I would recommend you use After-Effects for those motion-graphics. Trapcode sound-keys has very good possibilities for audio-spectrums and wave-forms. Animating the text and highlighting it, karaoke-style would be quite easy. However, both After-Effects and Trapcode (by Red Giant) come with a cost.


pssh does not contain any private or secure content. In fact is specifically designed to be attributable.


How to have an overlay move to specific points at specific frames using ffmpeg

Use

ffmpeg -i C:\src\assets\video\base.mp4 -i C:\card.png -y \
       -filter_complex "[0:v][1:v]overlay=x='if(eq(n,439),300,0)':y='if(eq(n,439),300,0)':enable='eq(n,438)+eq(n,439)'[out]" \
       -map [out] -map 0:a -ss 17 C:\temp\j7kthb0v\composit.mp4

You may need to escape the commas in filters depending on your shell i.e. n,438 -> n\,438


How to overlay an image over video in percent

Use

for 10% space from right, and 3% from top,

"[0:v][1:v] overlay=x='0.90*W-w':y='0.03*H'"

for 10 px from right, and 5 px from top,

"[0:v][1:v] overlay=x='W-10-w':y='5'"


Importing miniDV using passthrough on Elura 85 not working

It was the cable (STV-250?) linking the VHS to my camera that was the problem. After borrowing one from a friend, it worked and I'm now capturing video.


Fixing a badly telecined 8mm film digitization

For question one, the short answer is not that I know of with that pattern. Most NLEs today include tools to reverse 3:2 and 2:3 pulldown, and you ~may~ want to experiment with the clips to see if those help improve it. You may also want to export as a targa sequence. Sometimes this export has tools specifically built to remove pulldown. Sometimes not.

As to recording in 16fps, that's not really an option since video systems don't RUN at 16fps. The whole purpose of pulldown in the first place is to take a 24p (or, in this case, 16p and 18p) source and stretch it into a 30i destination. Any way you slice it, it's just not a clean transfer.

16fps should typically be a 3:4:4:4 pulldown, and 18fps a 3:3:4. Obviously, your telecine house got confused. Maybe they'd be willing to re-do it if you bitched loud enough>

While it may not be possible to fix the problem because of the transfer rate, I will share what's worked for me in the past with a similar situation. I had some Super8 and I transferred it frame-by-frame as a series of jpgs. I loaded single frame jpgs into my NLE, rendered out the jpgs as a file, then added a velocity envelope to adjust the speed as if it were 30p. A little cumbersome, but it got me the results I needed.

That being said, I'm sure if I'd hunted some more, I'd been able to find a function that would have played back these stills at a certain frame rate in the project settings. Or, since this was a few years ago, just before true HD was starting to make its way into NLEs, that funtionality was missing, but is available in current versions.

If the pulldown is really screwing you, and you can't get something close enough from the software, I'd recommend a clean transfer For safety, I would do a video file at the correct pulldown rate, and a series of frame-by-frame bitmaps.

Good luck!


Should I rather be shooting 1080/50i or 720/50p for 25fps web use?

If you're mainly concerned about the staircasing, consider where the video will be watched. If interlaced video is shown on a display made for interlaced video, it appears ok. If you play it on a progressive display (such as a computer monitor) the staircasing is easily noticeable even for little horizontal movements (of the camera or of the subjects). For details see https://cardinalpeak.com/blog/interlaced-video-and-computer-monitors/

Best is if you never have to deal with interlaced video if possible.


How to annotate specific parts of video in pre-production?

Disclaimer: You didn't specify what program you are working with, so I assume you are using the current version of Premiere Pro.

Assembly Workflow

Your workflow is a common one for beginners. Back when I gave Premiere Pro introductory courses, I noticed many students start out like this, basically doing the assembly, cutting and arrangement of the footage completely in the timeline. While there's nothing wrong with that approach, you can significantly speed up your workflow by seperating the initial material assembly/screening1 and the actual cutting.

The assembly is where you look through your material, sort and rate/tag it so you know what you are working with and can find specific parts of your material quickly. Mastering the project panel and all the sorting/marking options is a large subject on it's own, so I'm just gonna give you an overview of my workflow and the sorting options I find useful.

Workspace. Under Window → Workspaces, select Assembly. This workspace is optimized for assembly and material screening, it's just easier to work with. You can also rearrange the panels and save it as a custom workspace.
Bins. You can create bins to sort your footage into by pressing CTRL + B while the project panel is in focus. They work similarly to folders on your computer, you can drag your video clips and other assets into them for sorting. For example, you can create seperate folders for every scene in your movie, a seperate folder for B-roll material, a folder for music and other non-video assets et c. You will have a much easier time finding specific clips after you have sorted them in this way.
Color labels, Star Ratings & Keywords. You can use several variants of marking systems if you use the Metadata Display options. For example, I like to use colors labels to mark the best clips and the rejects. Once you have set those up, you can also use filters or sort by color labels to find the good stuff quickly. Other options include Star Ratings (that you can assign shortcuts to), Keywording and several other editable metadata options. I've already written some other answers on this, so ...

Quick setup for Star Ratings
Setting up Keywords and other Metadata options

List and Thumbnail Views. On the bottom left of the project panel, you can switch between the two views and adjust the size of the item display. While in List view, you can rename your assets from the generic filename (like MVI_0817.mov) to something more useful. I like to use a consistent naming scheme so I see what every clip contains at one glance. For example, if you name your clips [scene]_[shot]_[angle] (e.g. garden_establishing_panorama), you can find a specific clip without even looking at it.
The thumbnail view is useful to get a feeling of your material and quickly stitch clips together that fit. I usually open a second instance of the project panel, set it to thumbnail view and put it on my second monitor. It's great for quickly sifting through your clips and finding the right one for your scene.
In- & Out-Point, Markers. This is the most important part of this workflow, and the answer to your initial question (got a bit carried away with my answer). You can mark the In- and Out-Point of each clip by pressing the I (In) and O (Out) Keys respectively. This will add those points at the current playback position in the source panel (they are not temporary, so you can add In- and Out-Points to each clip in your project without dropping any of them in the timeline). If you have set up those points for a clip, only the portion of that clip between them will appear in your timeline when you add it to your sequence (you can of course adjust the start and end point in the sequence using the cutting tools as usual). More information on In- and Out-Points and quick ways of adding clips to the timeline can be found in my answer here.
One problem with this method is that you can only use one In- and Out-Point per clip. So if you have one clip that contains two parts you want to use in your movie, you have a problem. There are two ways to deal with this.

Markers. You can add markers to your master clips in the source panel by pressing M. The marker is added at the current playback position, you can change it's color and other attributes by right-clicking on it and selecting Edit Marker… from the context menu. However, this option is somewhat limited, since you will still have to manually adjust the clip length in the timeline, the marker only provides a visual aid.
Subclips. If you have set an In- and Out-Point for a clip, you can create a Subclip from that. Right-click on the clip in the project panel and select Make Subclip from the context-menu. This will create another instance of that masterclip in the project panel limited to the boundaries marked by the In- and Out-Point. This way, you can split up a large clip into several subclips, each containing only the portions that you need. The downside of this is that it's somewhat tedious if you have many long clips.

This workflow works best if you film your material in a certain way, which will also avoid the problems with In- and Out-Points mentioned above. This leads me to the following point.

Good filming habits

In general, try to film in a way that will make the assembly/screening of the material much easier and streamlined. This mainly means two things:

Press the record button only after you have composed the shot. If you point the camera in some random direction, press record and then compose your shot (i.e. position your camera/subject), you will have a few seconds of unusable material to cut from every single clip. And, even worse, the thumbnail view of the project panel will be mostly useless, since the thumbnails won't show the actual shot. If you start the recording after you are done composing your shot, the thumbnails will show you at one glance what every clip contains, allowing you to cut much faster.
Start a seperate recording for each shot. Many beginners make the mistake of just letting the camera run while they film, resulting in long files that are tedious to check and cut. Try to seperate the video files by stopping the recording and starting a new one for every shot/angle. This way, you only have one relevant part per clip/video file, allowing you to work faster with In- and Out-Points and the other Metadata Display options mentioned above. Also, try to make each recording only as long as you need it to be. For example, if you shoot a couple of B-roll shots from the same vantage points, do not just press record and proceed to point your camera at everything. Instead, compose the first shot, press record and record for 5~10 seconds (no longer for B-Roll). Then stop the recording, compose the second shot et c. This way, you end up with a couple of short, concise clips that you can assemble and add to your movie quickly.

This is all I can think of at the moment, though there's definitely more to say about this subject. I haven't even touched the actual rough and fine cutting yet ... but this answer is really getting too long, so I'll leave it at that. If I forgot anything important, feel free to inquire in the comments or ask a seperate question, I will be happy to edit my answer or add a new one if necessary.

1 Not sure what the right term is. In German it's called (Material-)Sichtung, which translates to sighting or screening of the material.


What format should I use to archive video issued from mini DV tapes?

I think that your choose are good.

H264 will be a bit huge in compare with H265, but will be supportable for more devices at this moment.

CRF you can get experimentally. Less CRF is better quality but bigger size of the file.

Also you can use bitrate settings instead of CRF.
You can Focus on data from video recommendations for YouTube - https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1722171?hl=en

I use approx 8Mbit/s for 1080p, 5Mbit/s for 720p and 1-2 Mbit/s for 480p.

If you need a good quality for video editing and all the videos were recorded on a good camera and you want to do color grading with your videos you can save them in Apple ProRes or Cinegy Daniel 2 or another losless or low compression codec.


Is it possible to encode video using the same codec and container but different parameters for different scenes?

What you are describing is effectively what 2-pass VBR does for you.  It makes a first path that calculates the level of change for each particular time in the video and then uses this information to make the best possible use of the available storage space.

It is, however, entirely possible to do the process manually by doing multiple encodings with different parameters.  In fact, many formats even support having multiple encodings with different parameters within the same file.  This is how you are able to change the resolution on the fly when streaming videos on YouTube and how Netflix automatically adjusts the quality on the fly as you watch to try to avoid buffering issues.

Any professional level encoder should allow you to specify multiple formats for the file in queue and many will even let you specify multiple outputs for one instance of the file.  (For example, the render queue in After Effects allows for this.)

In general, I would recommend running a 2-pass VBR and then adjusting the keyframe and total bandwidth accordingly.  If you are using a format that works based on the motion in the scene, then generally keyframes need to be more often if the video gets lots of motion artifacts (where it diverges from where it actually should be too much in high motion).  If the video is simply too low quality and "pixelly", then the bandwidth generally needs to be raised or the keyframes lowered.


They are for the teleprompter.  The words are on a screen below, the angle is to reflect to the speaker's line of site...

I'm sure there are different implementations, but that's the basic gist.


Video Camera with Detachable Viewfinder and Remote Control

It is probably pretty unlikely in your price range.  Remote monitors are a common feature on high end professional gear where different features of the camera are actually being controlled by multiple operators and reviewed by a director and cinematographer.  Having a removable, touch, control interface however, is an exceedingly rare need in the consumer market.  The closest you will likely come is a wireless, wifi based control that lets you control the camera and record to the camera itself (so minimal lag on the controls) even if there is slight lag in the video feed itself.

You could look for cameras with a firewire interface and remote control software for a tablet.  That would be lower latency than wireless, but I'm not sure that many new cameras include that kind of support.

You could also consider the more limited option of an HDMI or SDI field monitor and a basic LANC controller or similar.  This would allow you to have a super low latency monitor and super low latency controls, but the controls would be more limited.  It would probably still end up pushing the edge of your price range though.  The monitor itself is generally $100 or more alone and can easily go upwards of $200 for a marginal quality one.


The first problem you have to solve is whether the flickering you see is part of your animation or part of the video encoder.  If you have bad normals in your faces, you'll see a flicker.  ProRes 422HQ produces a video file that's both low enough of a bitrate that most modern (post 2008) hardware can play without dropping frames, as well as high enough of a bitrate that you will not see any compression artifacts.  If you still see flickering, the problem is with your model, not your video encoder.  If you see no flickering, then start wandering through the settings of whatever video encoding format you are most likely to use for final product.  If the video's final resting place will be YouTube, that would be H.264.  If it's your laptop or desktop computer, it might be ProRes (Mac) or AVI (Windows) or Ogg (Linux).


Moving image to back- and foreground over time

After Effects by default works in 2D, but you can change a layer so that it can be moved in 3D space.  The layer itself is still flat, but (like a postcard moving through space) it can be positioned using x,y and z coordinates where z is depth.

This tutorial explains it well:
https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/how-to/position-2d-layers-in-3d-space.html

You can also do full 3D work in After Effects, but I think this should cover your question.

Alternatively if you want to only work in 2D, sometimes I duplicate a layer, and have one layer at the bottom of my stack, and the duplicate layer at the top, so that when I need to change its apparent "depth", I make one layer invisible and make the other layer visible (by keyframing the Opacity property).


Term for upcoming TV summaries (broadcast design)

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


How to convert Dolby Vision HDR to HDR10+?

Sadly no, not without expensive specialist broadcast processing hardware.
From the Reddit link,

Dolby Vision is 100% proprietary. There is no incentive at all for
Dolby to convert anything to HDR10+ to help out Samsung users (and
pre-2019 Panasonics) when the only reason HDR10+ exists is because
Samsung didn’t want to pay Dolby for the license.
Dolby Vision is simply an enhancement layer on top of HDR10 which is
the base layer. There are a couple types of DV layers. The MEL
(minimum enhancement layer) and the FEL (full enhancement layer) which
reconstructs the original 12-bit signal. The FEL is what gives DV a
large advantage over HDR10 and HDR10+.
Page 12:
https://www.dolby.com/us/en/technologies/dolby-vision/dolby-vision-for-creative-professionals/dolby-vision-uhd-bluray-authoring-workflow.pdf


How to record the voices of three people in a room?

Save the money for the on-camera mic, it is by far the worst option. Other options include:

lapel or lavalier mics. Wireless lav mics are as you say expensive, but wired lav mics might be the cheapest option. You'll need something that can take 3 inputs, either a multitrack recorder, or a simple mixer to mix it to stereo (I'd mix the two subjects into one channel and the interviewer into the other).

If you use a shotgun you can get excellent sound quality, but you'll need a boom and a boom swinger to make sure that the person talking is on-mic. For an unscripted interview with three people this is quite a tall order. If you don't have someone who can do the job of boom swinger, or if your subjects interrupt or talk over each other this is not recommended.

a surface mic or an omnidirectional mic in the center of the speakers. This won't be as good as three lapel mics, because it will be further away from all of them, and will pick up more room ambience and bg noise. This is probably be the cheapest option, but the second worst (the worst being an on-camera mic).


How can I create this 3D text video presentation?

I use the 3D Extruder plugin/script for After Effects CS5.5 to create the 3D text, then I'll create a camera to animate the movement.

The tutorials plus network has a lot of great tutorials. Though I've never actually watched any of the ones on 3D text...


OBS Studio - 'Blurred background copy' effect. Is this possible using only filters?

I don't believe OBS can live blurring effect. The effect you want is actually called compositing where there are two layers and one does not have a blur effect and the other one does.

Donkey Kong background is actually scaled and blurred.

This can be done in editing but not live.

Check out Blackmagic Design website and look for free editing/color correction software. It is called Davinci Resolve.


to answer your question:

basic setup: camera, scene, computer with editing suite (after effects, premiere, vegas, final cut express, quicktime)

You must trigger record frame every second or predifined interval of time, setup your editing timeline at 25 fps and import your footage.
if you are doing frames you must import frames interpet them and put it on timeline (depends on what software pack are you using)

so, if we want to capture/record every second per frame, that is 60 frames which is 2 seconds and 10 frames on PAL or 2 seconds straight on NTSC (25 fps PAL / 30 fps NTSC), that is, in 2 seconds you will see 1 minute of real time. and the mathematics goes on.

so this is the concept.

some cameras lets you get a movie out of record frames, some do it manualy.
after we have shot as many frames / time we wanted we can move on to assemble those frames and edit them.


Do I need an STM lens for face detection live video with Canon?

The AF subsystem is part of the camera. It is not affected by the lens.
Face detection is also part of the camera.

STM only affects the speed of focus for a lens (assuming that the camera feeds it with correct information.)

So yes, STM lenses are better for video when coupled with a camera that has fast focus on its own.

For your problem there are two solutions

1)Deactivate automatic focus and select a big aperture (like 11) so that everything is in focus
2)Deactivate automatic focus and manually focus the lens on your own.

All hollywood movies, tv broadcasts, commercials etc use manual focus.


How to detect if video had been sized up (Scaled up) in resolution?

May i rephrase your question as

How natural does an image look?

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

scikit-video
Video Quality Indicators

Good Luck!


Extract audio from a multichannel video file

Got it.
start ffmpeg.exe -i %source% -map 0:1 -c:a:0 copy -disposition:a:0 default -vn -y %source%.51.L.wav -map 0:2 -c:a:1 copy -disposition:a:1 0 -vn -y %source%.51.R.wav -map 0:3 -c:a:2 copy -disposition:a:2 0 -vn -y %source%.51.C.wav -map 0:4 -c:a:3 copy -disposition:a:3 0 -vn -y %source%.51.LFE.wav -map 0:5 -c:a:4 copy -disposition:a:4 0 -vn -y %source%.51.Ls.wav -map 0:6 -c:a:5 copy -disposition:a:5 0 -vn -y %source%.51.Rs.wav
start ffmpeg.exe -i %source% -filter_complex "[0:7][0:8] amerge=inputs=2" -c:a pcm_s24le %source%.20.wav


Use the print_info flag to see what the scaler is doing, example from an actual conversion:

-filter:v "scale=w=1280:h=-2:flags=print_info+bicubic"

Part of the relevant output:

[Parsed_scale_0 @ 000001d8187fef00] w:1280 h:-2 flags:'print_info+bicubic' interl:0
[swscaler @ 000001d819bc7fc0] bicubic scaler, from yuv420p to yuv420p using MMXEXT
[swscaler @ 000001d819bc7fc0] 1920x804 -> 1280x536
Parsed_scale_0 @ 000001d8187fef00] w:1920 h:804 fmt:yuv420p sar:1/1 -> w:1280 h:536 fmt:yuv420p sar:1/1 flags:0x1004

Edit:  I also always use "-loglevel verbose", don't know if that changes the level of detail the scaler filter outputs.


How can i open circumference of circle as straight line in After Effects?

Use masks. Make a mask with 5 points, one in the centre of the circle two on either side in line with the first and two far enough away so that the mask covers half the circle. Then animate the second two points to travel together and meet in the centre.

Actually do the above, but reverse the order.

Here it is with a matte layer to show you the shape of the mask I'm talking about.

and the end result

Remember that the points on animated masks travel in straight lines between keyframes. So the beginning and end positions of the moving points have to be far enough out that they don't go inside the circle.

Edit

Here's an expression to create a circle, and a line and interpolate between the two. The intermediate frames are kinda ugly, I'd probably convert the expression to keyframes and delete all but the first and last frames, then manually animate the in-between.

var radius = 100;
var animationDuration = 2;
//You can't draw a perfect circle with Beziers, but this is a good approximation
var handleLength = radius * 4 * (Math.sqrt(2)-1)/3; //Because maths.
var circlePoints = [];
var outHandles = [];
var inHandles =[];
var Tau = 2* Math.PI;
for (i = 0; i < 5; i++){
    circlePoints[i] = [Math.sin(Tau * i/4) * radius, Math.cos(Tau * i/4) * radius];
    outHandles[i] = [Math.sin(Tau * (i+1)/4) * handleLength, Math.cos(Tau * (i+1)/4) * handleLength];
    inHandles[i] = [0,0] - outHandles[i];
}

var linePoints = [];
var lineInHandles = [];
var lineOutHandles = [];

for (i = 0; i < 5; i++){
    linePoints[i] = [radius * (1 - i / 2), 0];
}
var thePoints = [];
var theinTangents = [];
var theOutTangents =  [];

var t = Math.min(time / animationDuration, 1);
for (i = 0; i < 5; i++){
    thePoints[i] = circlePoints[i] * (1-t) + linePoints[i] * t;
    theinTangents[i] = inHandles[i] * (1-t);
    theOutTangents[i] =  outHandles[i] * (1-t);
}

createPath(points = thePoints, inTangents = theinTangents, outTangents = theOutTangents, isClosed = false);


What's the difference between a DVCAM tape that is mini and a MiniDV tape?

Originally there was miniDV which is a standard consumer tape format (using ME tape) holding DV (at the time DV wasn't really a file format in it's own right).

Sony released a professional version of this called DVCAM with locked audio and which records at a shallower angle, running tape faster at the expense of running time, to reduce dropout.

You could use either DVCAM tapes (now known as DVCAM-L) which as well as holding more tape for longer runtimes used higher quality MP tape, or you could record on miniDV tapes in either DV mode (to remain compatible with miniDV cameras) or in DVCAM mode to take advantage of the better format.  (The larger tape format uses the same width tape so the same head is used for either.) More recently DVCAM mini tapes have been available which use the better quality tape in the smaller package.

So DVCAM encompasses a file format, a recording format, the larger tape format and a marque of professional quality tape in the mini size tapes.  DVCAM mini and miniDV tapes are interchangable but they are branded towards their intended use and there is a general difference in quality/price between the two.

In your case regardless of the brands written on the actual tape you should probably use miniDV if it holds DV and DVCAM or DVCAM mini if it holds DVCAM.  If there is nothing recorded on the tape then it is suitable for either.


here are couple of sites you should check out:

1.http://epic-pen.com/

2.http://ink2go.org/

3.https://www.pencilkings.com/drawing-tools-and-drawing-software/

hope it helps, good luck!


Example of film/tv scene where visual triggers audio only flashback?

I can't think of specific examples, but what I can "see and hear in my mind" is:

a single shot of the character who's having the flashback
the actor's face is reacting to the audio in the flashback
the camera slowly zooms or trucks in on the actor's face
sounds in the present-time scene have become quieter and/or muffled
the audio flashback may have an echo or reverb added to it
there may be visual flashbacks subtly transposed over the present-time shot


Have you tried to disable graphic card rendering? Incompatible graphic cards or drivers may cause the exact symptoms you describe. Preview may not use graphic card rendering, as this is controlled by another setting.

Select Options|Preferences
Go to tab card "Video"
Set "GPU acceleration of video processing" to "Off"
When rendering: Open your render template and select Encode Mode:
Render using CPU only.


Animating shapes vs masks in After Effects

Rendering a series of expanding circles (say less that 20) should not be a particularly slow task.

Check this page about how to improve performance in AE. http://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/improve-performance.html

AE doesn't render the same way as non-linear editors like Final Cut or Premiere, so rendering can take longer (but users are usually working on shorter sequences than in FCP).

When you are preparing your work, try to work at lower quality settings, ie at 25% zoom, or quarter resolution, only zooming to 100% to check specific frames - get the motion working correctly at a lower res - this will save you a lot of time.

I don't think animating paths rather than masks will make a particular difference to the speed.


Physical difference between ISO and gain

ISO stands for the International Standards Organization.  They standardize all kinds of stuff, including film stock for photography, cinematography, and digital video.  If you're using a digital camera that uses ISO instead of gain, then it should conform to the specifications they've outlined in ISO 12232:2019, which is available for purchase here.

There's a very good wikipedia article on the subject here.

Gain is just the amount of amplification in decibels that the camera applies to the signal from the sensor before it gets recorded to the image.  Some cameras apply gain before analogue to digital conversion, some apply it after, and some, such as the BlackMagic Pocket cinema cameras do both, to achieve what they call, "dual-native ISO."

So, in short, Gain is a measurement of amplification, and ISO is a standardized measurement of film/sensor sensitivity.  Gain does not necessarily correlate consistently to exposure across different camera makes, models, and manufacturers.  It's just a "volume knob."  ISO is designed to correlate to exposure universally (but it does not consider some variables and imperfections, which is what EI does, similar to the difference between "T stop" and "F stop" measurements for aperture).


BMPCC + rafcamera arri b to mft + optar 1.2/12mm = vignetting

I'm not familiar with the setup you described, but does that adapter have some sort of iris control built into it?  I have the adapter pictured below and it doesn't allow the BMPCC to adjust the aperture of the lens, which means I need to use the iris control to adjust the amount of light getting let into the camera.

The vignetting is caused by how the iris inside the adapter functions. When you close the iris, to restrict the light entering the camera, it also has the side-effect of creating a vignette.  This is the main reason I stopped using the BMPCC and went back to using the regular BMCC, because I don't have any MFT lenses.


What is the drone for a low budget production

The DJI Mavik is one of the most affordable ready-to-fly drones with enough quality (4K) for expert-looking video production.

Alternatively, you could strap an action camera, like a GoPro, to a non-camera drone. You'll likely have to heavily stabilize your footage in post.

In the lowest of budget situations, if you just need a top-down aerial shot, simply rig a phone to some tethered, helium filled balloons. This has worked well for me in the past.

In any case, there are a few extra steps you can take do to improve the footage.

Buy a lens filter kit including Neutral Density and Polarizing filters for the camera.
After importing the footage, correct the wide angle lens warp in After Effects.
Color grade your final cut


What is a good workflow for producing High quality High definition Videos suitable for a final upload to the internet.

In video, there is no "I don't have disk space" or "I want to add compression to files to lower my disk space usage and caching".

You should record uncompressed, work uncompressed, and at the final stage export the uncompressed video to a suitable format for delivery.

Record your video.  Edit wherever you want (I suggest Vegas, because is the fastest on pc).  Cut.  Edit.  Do whatever you want.  Then export your timeline to h.264.

I suggest using Adobe media encoder cs5 + to do the job.  Don't encode already encoded video files, because it will degrade your quality.

Check youtube/vimeo/... what formats they play the best (usually there is a guide for file formats and upload)

One more thing:  FRAPS ENCODES in its own codec.  You need a properly installed DECODER/ENCODER for Vegas/Avid/Premiere to see the files properly.

I did a lot of gaming videos before and after HD was introduced.  I did it with FRAPS, game engines....  Uncompressed is what you want.  Or you could force FRAPS to use Avid's DNxHD code c(you can get it on Avid's site.)


How to create MPEG-DASH variants at resolutions where one dimension is not a whole number in pixels?

The scale filter resets the sample aspect ratio to match the original display aspect ratio. You should add setsar=1 after each scale. In any case, videos don't contain pixel count with fractional components, and FFmpeg won't output those.

I'm not sure about DASH but I suppose the validator expects each variant to have the same exact aspect ratio. In your command list, I can see 640x290 and 1280x582, which are not the same aspect. If DASH needs all to be same, the latter should be 1280x580


Can't tell if prores4444XQ is any different than prores4444 in ffmpeg 4.1

FFmpeg does have 12 bit pixel formats but the prores_ks encoder is limited to 10 bits. The 4444XQ profile features higher bitrates. Open a ticket at trac.ffmpeg,org, if you like.


Premiere CC: How to select/drag clip in program window?

To answer my own question, I found a solution by clicking around finally. In the Effects Control panel, clicking the Motion property label causes handles to appear on the video in the Program Monitor. Then, with the Selection tool, you can drag the image to reposition it, or drag a corner handle to scale it. I believe I was able to do this in earlier versions without first selecting the Motion label, but at least I can do what I want easily now.


You could try using OBS streaming software (which is free), and then check out this tutorial for how to add delay to your stream. Basically you go into the advanced settings of OBS and go to the delay settings. There you can choose to add a delay of your choosing.

You can also record from the software too. Hope that helps.


How to create a ragdoll effect on a human?

it's not super realistic but this tutorial uses the puppet tool in AE to simluate a ragdoll effect as the dude is crumpled over the hood.

http://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/advanced_car_hit/


Is there a way to capture RTMP-stream and output it to SDI?

I found this rack mount device called DVEO D-Streamer IP/DIG. One of DVEO's press relises announced $4000 price for the device.

Inputs: HTTP Live (HLS), UDP, RTP, RTSP, HTTP, RTMP (Open Flash), MMS.
Output: SD/HD-SDI.


Loop the first frame of a video and then play a selected portion of the video

A shorter method is

ffmpeg -i video.mp4 -vf 'select=eq(n,0)+between(n,310,930),setpts=if(eq(N,0),0,(N+260)/FRAME_RATE/TB)' -map [output] -vsync cfr -c:v libx264 -crf 18 -y output.mp4


Here is a workaround I've discovered that seems to work ok. It's not elegant, but it gives you vector support within FCPX, which can be handy in a number of situations. It does require Apple Motion, however.

Convert your vector file into a PDF using Preview.
Create a Final Cut Generator in Apple Motion
Import PDF
Click the PDF in the "Media" pane (next to the Viewer), then in the inspector, un-click "Fixed Resolution" in the "Media" tab.
Drag the file into your composition.
Save As...

This will create a generator in FCPX, which is a little more permanent than making a simple file. But if you're doing work for a client and want a persistent vector version of their logo or something, this can be very helpful.


What does the information on DSLR lenses mean in terms of filmmaking?

They mean the exact same thing they do in the photography context.  The mm measurement is the focal length.  It determines the angle of view the lens produces (ie, how "zoomed in" it appears.)  Lenses with a range are zoom lenses where the angle of view can be adjusted.  "Zoom" is otherwise not a meaningful thing.  Optically, zoom just means you can change the focal length.  The x numbers associated with consumer zoom lenses are meaningless as they just describe the relationship between the smallest and largest focal length, not how much magnification a lens provides.

f/ numbers are measurements of how far the aperture of the lens can open.  The smaller the number, the more light the lens lets in and the smaller the depth of field is.  If there is a range of f/ numbers, it means that the lens' maximum aperture (the smallest number it can go to) changes over the focal length range of the lens.  Generally, the largest aperture (smallest f/ number) will be at the wide end (the smallest mm number) and the smallest (largest f/ number) will be at the telephoto end of the lens (largest mm number).  This can actually be a desirable feature to have on lenses used for video as it allows for smooth lighting and depth of field adjustments on the fly without needing to use third party firmwares to make smooth adjustments from the camera.

On many modern lenses, the f/ selection is done on the camera and the aperture is electronically adjusted.  There are, however, lenses that include manual aperture rings that include both notched and unnotched aperture values (ie, they either move freely between different aperture values for smooth adjustments to aperture (sometimes called iris in video) or to be able to precisely select specific values.

Note that most photographic zoom lenses will not exactly hold focus as you zoom (parafocal), so that is also something to be aware of when zooming optically with a photographic lens.  This is also a big part of why cinema lenses (which are parafocal) cost so much more than similar quality photographic lenses.  You can do just fine using a good photographic lens that is nearly parafocal, you just need to remember to make focus adjustments along with your zooms.


Which rate control algorithm best preserves quick movement?

Here is my understanding of FFMPEG, there are 4 settings for VQ, and they are "codec", "crf", "preset", and "tune". For the "codec", FFMPEG does not do well on VP9; the others are H.264 and H.265. For the "tune", i prefer "film" for H.264 and "grain" for H.265. "crf" and "preset" can get the VQ excellent but there are drawbacks:long encoding time and large file size (bitrate)
"codec" takes care of the bitrate, H.265 has smaller file size(bitrate) that retains same level of VQ but longer transcoding time.
"crf" takes care of the quantization and the bitrate, the smaller the crf, the better the video quality, but the longer the transcoding time, and larger the file size.
"preset" takes care of the bitrate, the slower the preset, the smaller the file size(bitrate), but the longer the transcoding time
Get back to your scenario - the quick movement video, we concern with the high frequency content. We don't want to see blocky images; therefore, we need higher bitrate, but we want reasonable transcoding time.
Therefore, i prefer H.265 "codec" and "tune" grain. Then we need to tweak the "crf" and "preset" based on the SSIM and PSNR results. I had done some experiments on the MainConcept sample stream (1080p content)

Default) codec=h.264 crt=23, preset=medium, the transcoding took 27.9s the bitrate=3118kb/s, the SSIM=0.994413, PSNR=48.644
Setting 1) codec=H.265, crt=23, preset=medium, tune=grain, the transcoding took 130s, the bite 3949kb/s, the SSIM=0.99487, PSNR=50.894298
Setting 2) codec=H.265, crt=1, preset=medium, tune=grain, the transcoding took 202.37s, bitrate=60883kb/s, SSIM=0.999738, PSNR=65.497223
Setting 3) codec=H.265, crt=23, preset=slow, tune=grain, the transcoding took 329.36s, bitrate=4338kb/s, SSIM=0.9952, PSNR=51.452838

Setting 3) has better VQ performance with acceptable drawbacks or you may keep tweaking the "crt" and "preset" to get to the point that reaches your acceptable transcoding time and the bitrate results.
Good luck!


How to compensate for red oversaturation and contrast increase?

Unfortunately, even if you could get an exact amount of the difference, it is highly unlikely that adjusting by that amount will fix your problem.  Since a lossy compression is being used, the codec is deciding to alter the color to something that is more easily stored in a small space.  You will likely get a different color artifact if you try to correct for this one.  Your best bet would probably be to look in to the formats that Vimeo uses and try to encode it yourself such that Vimeo won't have to transcode it.  This would give you control over the compression itself and you might be able to use a better encoder that would maintain color more accurately.


How can I record audio & video synced with another audio file?

You are over thinking it.  Edit a quick beep in before the audio starts on the song, play the song aloud while you are recording the drums.  Hit one of your drums so that you can see and hear it quickly on the video as well.  Record the audio direct from your drums and have a third track that is the microphone for the camera.  The camera audio track will here both the drums and see the drum hit being used to sync.  Then align the song and the drum track based on those markers in the video editor of your choice.


Emulate iMovie PIP exchange effect in Final Cut Pro X

You have to create the effect in Motion.  I'm not sure what the iMovie effect looks like, but I use this technique on a daily basis. In my setup, there are actually six separate effects; left_panel_in, left_panel_static_, left_panel_out, right_panel_in, right_panel_static, right_panel_out.  This allows me to go between a 1-up and 2-up configuration at any point in time, and to do so consistently throughout multiple projects.  If you need step by step instructions, I would be happy to assist once I'm sitting in front of a machine with Motion on it.

best, Jason.


Color Temperature, Contrast, Brightness, and Saturation

Most prosumer-level (or higher) video editing software has monitor panels which show you information about color distribution, luminace, levels and the likes. Premiere Pro for example offers a range of reference monitors.

Contrary to photo editing, you can't get one measurement of those parameters for the entire video, because they of course vary from frame to frame (I guess you could calculate the average values, but that would be utterly useless). So you can't really compare two videos numerically accurate in that manner.


Adobe Media Encoder CC do not work/start/load on Win8 x64

Solution #2 (as Eric Vinyard suggested):
1. Locate file: C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Adobe\SLCache\X19zbGNfZmVhdHVyZXNfXw==.slc
2. Open it with a text editor (may need to open it as an admin as this is in Program Files directory)
3. Delete everything the file contains
4. Save and close
5. Set the 'Read Only' attribute for the file: Right Mouse - Preferences. On the first page that opens for you, look for Attributes at the bottom of this page and check 'Read Only'. Close with OK.


Basic form is

ffmpeg -i livestream -vf select=key -vsync 0 -q:v 1 snaps%d.jpg


You can tap the SDI output port of any RED camera and feed that to a hardware device that reads 1080p video.  Blackmagic make some things that translate SDI -> internal video stream via PCIe card (Decklink), USB (Ultrastudio), and Thunderbolt (Ultrastudio for Thunderbolt).  This would be the easy way to do it.

If you have a RED DRAGON (EPIC or SCARLET) with the latest firmware, there's a RED Tether option.  It requires a special LEMO->RJ45 cable, and it feeds live video out the ethernet port.  See this article for more info.


What are the limitations of AAC-HE codec while doing 5.1 audio ?

HE-AAC v2 can only encode stereo from my experience with Nero AAC and the article in Wikipedia about Parametric Stereo.

  Why is AC3 preferred when compared to AAC-HE ?

Which case are you actually talking about? Are you sure it's HE-AAC not AAC-LC? Dolby Digital / A/52 / AC-3 was the standard for video DVDs which makes it the most common digital audio format for video. It achieves acceptable quality at significantly less bitrates than the competitor DTS and newer formats developed for video on physical media. AAC-LC is usually offered for official downloads and streaming and is part of the MPEG4 specification.

To add some perspective, HE-AAC was one of the early efforts to develop a codec suitable for low bitrates providing high quality audio compared to earlier speech only audio codecs. Opus is a successor with many improvements in this field and which also offers multichannel capability. Some podcasts offer it as an additional option to Vorbis. It's part of later WebM revisions and can be decoded on recent Android devices but its adoption seems to be very slow. If you are looking for a solution to high quality multichannel audio at low bitrates you should be looking into the state of the art Opus, not old AAC with extentions.

The general recommendation has been to use AAC-LC and to avoid HE features which may cause playback issues on some devices.


FFmpeg: afade plugin, how to specify time 1:55 if colon separates filter parameters? Escape

Enclose the time argument in single quotes and escape the colons within.

So,

afade=t=out:curve=hsin:st='00\:0\:30':d='00\:00\:10'


As currently stated, the answer is, you can't.  The only thing special about that video is that it is very well planned out and coordinated with lots of lighting making it almost certainly outside your budget to reproduce something similar.

The video work itself is all actually fairly basic.  Any camera with a decent dynamic range and sharpness could capture the level of detail, though protecting it from the powder is always a fun trick.  It would need a decently fast frame rate for the shots that are slowed down, but 60fps would probably be sufficient.  They are also using a dolly or steadicam for the smooth shots that track across the scene (from one side to the other).

Most of what you see is simply lighting as shot that is then color graded to give it that look.  The color grading and speed adjustment is very basic and even a fairly simple non-linear editor could achieve it.

The problem is that the shots depend entirely on the content actually being shot and the way it was lit.  There is a ton of light on that scene.  There are three or four massive sport stadium/construction site style light arrays in the background and more light (possibly reflectors) in the front.  They all need to be properly aimed and setup to put the light where it is needed and this is a complex and costly operation that is drastically beyond the scope of what can be answered in a simple question and answer.


In my experience (2 years), there's not a great way to accomplish this. Here's how I would do it:

1) Make an additional "background image", in the dimensions of your typical video (16x9, I assume).

2) Drag your original image over that background image, at the top, leaving room for (later) the video clip at the bottom.

3) Save that image.

4) Bring that image into your iMovie timeline.

5) Drag your video clip onto it as a picture-in-picture.

:)


This is a surprisingly tricky question, as Premiere doesn't let you edit transitions like, say FCP does.

One way of doing it is to use presets:

First create a preset for your fade in. Set two opacity keyframes for your fade-in then in the Effect Control panel right click on the Opacity effect and choose Save Preset:

call it fade-in or whatever and choose Anchor to In Point, so that it will apply it to the start of the clip.

Then on a fresh clip with no keyframes do the same for your fade out, choosing Anchor to Out Point in the dialog.

Now you can apply both your presets to your clips to create your fade out / in, and the good thing is that the presets will add new keyframes without deleting the existing ones, so the fade in won't overwrite the keyframes of the fade out. Tip: you can select both presets in the Presets folder in your effects window by holding down Command / Control, then you can drag them both to a clip at the same time.


Export your FCP project as a self-contained quick time video file.
Then import the QT file into X.
You'll be good to go.


How to fix video shot vertically on a smartphone?

VLC Media player, which is free, allows under it's Tools -> Effects and Filters a Geometry Tab, which you could try for rotation.

Then you could use the Encode/Stream option under File - to try to get a decent output.

However, unless your camera has some sort of ccd/cmos rotation feature, if the video was shot vertically, you shot it using only a fraction of the sensor, discarding the vertical space on the top and bottom to create a letter box version at a lower resolution.

You can up-res it, either simply, or with an expensive plugin, but it's never going to be "full resolution" because the information simply isn't there.


How to see if a video file is progressive or interlaced?

You should be able to tell just by looking at it.  When you watch for motion and see a comb-like horizontal pattern, the video is interlaced.  You could also try pausing the video at several points and looking for this pattern, but not every frame will look interlaced.  Pause the video at points where there is quick motion, and step forward one frame at a time.  Make sure the video is displayed at %100 zoom. If you find a frame which exhibits this pattern, the whole movie is interlaced.  Once you know what to look for, you'll recognize it instantly.


Any way to create a dashed line in Premiere Pro?

A possible workaround would be to use the Venetian Blinds filter. Here with a bit of experimentation I've made a path with a stroke of 20 and for the blind effect I have doubled the width to 40.

The Transition Completion value is set to 50% so that half of the effect is achieved. You might want to play around with the settings if you want longer dashes or gaps.

This effect is typically used as a transition, but as we have not used keyframes for the transition there will be no animation. This effect only works with straight lines, if the line is at an angle, you will need to adjust the Direction value.

You may find it more appropriate to design dashed lines in After Effects as there are options for stroke gap and width to easily create a dashed line.


Bad lighting and/or bad camera placement are the cause.  If you can't move the lights or the chalkboard, such as in many typical classrooms, the first thing you should try is moving the camera.
You can think of the chalkboard surface like a mirror.  In fact, if you hung a mirror flat against the chalkboard, you'd see that the position of the chalkboard "hot spots" corresponds exactly to the position of the reflection of light sources in a mirror.  The difference is that microscopic abnormalities in the surface of the chalkboard scatter the light more randomly, which effectively "blurs" the reflection.
If you can't avoid the glare by moving the camera, or by moving/dimming the lights, then there is one other way to fight glare:  Use a polarized lens filter.  These work the same way that polarized sunglasses work to cut glare.  There are screw-on variants made for photography cameras called CPL's or "Circular Polarizing Lenses," which let you adjust the polarization angle for best effect.  Polarized filters don't work for all reflections though, and their efficacy depends on the polarization of both the light source and the reflective material.
CPL's are fairly cheap.  You can probably pick up a used one for $15-ish, and new ones are usually below $100.  Just make sure you buy the right size to fit your lens.  Either inside the camera's lens cap, or written on the lens, you'll see a number next to the symbol "ø".  This is the filter size, and should match whatever you buy.
If you wanted to go totally shittyrigs cheap, you could tape one of the lenses of a pair of disposable movie theater 3D glasses in front of your camera lens.  The 3D variant filter polarized light like any other camera filter or sunglasses on the market.  The difference is that the polarization of the left and right eye is offset by 90º.


What kind of mic can be used for double bass?

You can use any microphone for any instrument. However which one you use will depend on your specifics - is the instrument going to be moving, do you want to be very directional to just record one out of an orchestra, do you want an omnidirectional mic to record a group of instruments?

Do you want to record the vibration of the wood through a contact mic, the string vibration through a piezo pickup, or the air vibration using a microphone attached to the instrument or fixed to a stand?

These are the most important questions you need to answer - and then of course you'll end up choosing based on cost :-)


Is there a way in Premiere to process a file like logging and capture?

Try this:

Create a bin in your project window, lets call it "selected-clips".

Use your source window to mark your "in and out" points then drag that 'clip' into your "selected-clips" bin.

Once you have all your clips in, right-click on EACH clip and select "Make Subclip".

Now, highlight all the 'Subclips', right-click and select "Export Media". A window should appear - add it to a queue - Media Encoder should open - then batch export your 'Subclips'.

Done.


How can I accomplish smooth video playback with QLab 2?

Sounds like a job for either re-compression, solid state drives or both.  It appears that the BlackMagic Television Studio does has the media server that the other Black Magic ATEMs have, so you might also be able to load them in to that depending on their length.

Your bottle neck is almost certainly data rates, and the main options are to increase the rate your system can move data at (solid state drives), reduce the amount of data that needs to be moved (re-compression) or place the data somewhere that it can be accessed more easily (in the media server of the ATEM).


"shift +" while rendering in ffmpeg, how to undo?

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

Press ? to see a list of all available commands.

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


4:2:0 means that only the colour information is subsampled. So while that the colour is at a lower resolution the brightness information is at full resolution. This works because human vision is more sensitive to brightness than colour.

A 4K 4:2:0 image has 3840×2160 luma samples (luma ≈ brightness) and 1920×1080 chroma samples (chroma ≈ colour). So it's still going to have more information than a HD 4:4:4 image which has 1920×1080 pixels of both luma and chroma. What's more, human vision will notice the difference more, so it will look more detailed.

Also it's worth noting that while I've been talking about luma and chroma the information is actually YUV encoded (or more correctly Y,Cb,Cr), where the Y channel is a combination of the red green and blue channels, but it is weighted so that the green channel most strongly influences it (a bit under 60%). This takes into account the fact that human vision is more sensitive to green than red or blue. The U and V channels are the weighted differences between the Y and the Red and Blue channels. This means that more information is recorded for green, and is the reason why video predominantly uses green screen, rather than blue for chroma key.


How to prioritize subtitles in LAV Splitter?

I've managed to ensure the subtitles prioritise forced, then to choose non-forced English as a backup using this:

*|f,eng*
However, this does not guarantee it will always choose forced English (assuming this is your preferred language). So to ensure that you will always get English, I have found this seemingly works consistently

eng|f,eng*,*|f
This checks for forced subtitles in English, if not found, it checks for non-forced English subtitles, if neither are found, it chooses the forced subtitles.
As for setting the default audio track to Japanese, I found adjusting the order to preference did the trick.

NOTE: This is not guaranteed to work for every file, there are many variations to the way subtitles are setup. I have just found this way to be the most consistent.
If you want to learn what these symbols mean I suggest studying Regular Expressions or Formal Languages, or straight up do an online course on Theory of Computing.


Adobe Premiere - Razor Tool screws up clip

The problem is not the razor tool.  You must have slid the contents of the part you razored back in time using one of the other tools.  The easiest way to recover is to undo the edits or to simply drag out the original again.  The razor tool is completely non-destructive, so it hasn't altered your original video at all, just the parts of the video in your sequence no longer line up with the actual time things occurred.

It's worth noting that as a matter of technique, it's generally preferable to open a source clip in the preview window and use the In and Out points to choose just the part of the clip you want to bring over and then assemble clips together.


Easiest way to stitch GoPro videos that have been split due to length?

For this purpose I like to use SolveigMM Video Splitter. It's very fast and lossless video tool (no recompression) and it fully supports H.264 video (GoPro records in mp4 files using h.264 compression).


Is GoPro "Cam_Raw" a true RAW image format?

Camera raw sounds like it is effectively similar to RAW because it is describing the light data without any corrections.  What comes in on the sensor is written out, but it does sound like it may be applying the filter, just using a mix of 1:1:1 for the color resolution.  It's theoretically possible to work backwards from this to the full colors, but you may lose some bit depth if it goes from more than 8 bit sensor read out to 8 bit color encoding.  Possibly even worse if it is encoding to 4:2:0 or 4:2:2.

The net effect of shifting color on this kind of a recording would be that there would be fewer total colors described after applying your corrections since you discard a portion of the possible colors that could be described by the format.  (Where as your more traditional RAW doesn't discard any data, so you can be more selective about what you want to remove when you reduce the bit depth later in the process.)


I hope after 3 years you managed to solve it. But here is an option anyway.
Use any decent video editor.
Some editors have "text" effects, like an "end credits scene". On Davinci Resolve (which is free) you simply add this effect and control the speed, font, color.
Some other programs simply allow you to import an image file with a transparent background and move it around the frame.
You can prepare this PNG file in Gimp, add the text there and import and move it on the editing program.
Some programs that allow you to move elements (Keyframing) are Hit film express and OpenShot, besides Davinci Resolve.


How do i make the different values of two properties change at the same amount in After Effects?

Pick-whipping one value to another sets it to that value, if you don't want them to be the same but rather change at the same rate then try this instead:

value + transform.position

Alternatively, parenting the whole camera to a 3D null object may make things easier to animate and is generally nicer to deal with.

The Angle Script will create a new camera parented to a null for you, which makes things a lot easier: https://madebyloop.co.uk/products/angle-streamline-camera-null-control-after-effects/


Control key frame value with slider control

You were close.

if (numKeys > 1){
  t1 = key(1).time;
  t2 = key(2).time;
  v1 = [95, 95]; //or if it's 3d [95, 95, 95]
  slider = comp("INPUT").layer("CONTROL").effect("Zoom intensity")("Slider");
  v2 = [slider, slider]; // or [slider,slider,slider] if 3D
  linear((time, t1, t2, v1, v2);
} else {
  value
}

You were right that the scale property requires 2 (or 3) dimensions. So you need to use arrays, which look like [value1, value2], or [value1, value2, value3,… valueN] for as many members you want the array to have.

On line 4 I assume you want it to be 95% not 0. I also changed it to an array.
on line 5 I assign the slider value to a temporary variable and then put that in an array. You could do it in one line by repeating the comp("INPUT" … (Slider) phrase inside an array, but it would be really long and awkward. Alternatively you could use a point control if you wanted to be able to set the dimensions separately.
on line 8 the else without curly braces works, but it makes me nervous.


change aspect ratio without stretching video ffmpeg

Have you tried uploading it to Youtube? Their player window will be a fixed 16:9 ratio (on YT.com), but they should accept source videos of any ratio, and simply center it in their window during playback.

Anyway, here's the method:
ffmpeg -i "a.mov" -i "b.mp4" -filter_complex "[0:v]scale=iw*sar:ih,pad=if(gt(dar,16/9),iw,2*trunc(ih*16/9/2)):if(gt(dar,16/9),2*trunc(iw*9/16/2),ih):(ow-iw)/2:(oh-ih)/2,setsar=1[a];  [1:v]scale=iw*sar:ih,pad=if(gt(dar,16/9),iw,2*trunc(ih*16/9/2)):if(gt(dar,16/9),2*trunc(iw*9/16/2),ih):(ow-iw)/2:(oh-ih)/2,setsar=1[b];
[a][0:a] [b][1:a] concat=n=2:v=1:a=1 [v] [a]" -map "[v]" -map "[a]" -preset veryfast -crf 18 "merged.mp4


Blacking out specific pixels in MP4 without re-encoding

No, it is not possible.  Mpeg-4 compression is based around storing information about patterns found within the video.  It doesn't deal with particular pixels.  Blacking out certain pixels alters the pattern and thus alters the way the video would compressed, potentially significantly.


Method 1

In your timeline, stack the matte clip on top of the character clip and add the Ultra Key effect to the matte with the red color as the key.

Nest those two clips, and place another Ultra Key effect on the nest, this time keying the black.

You'll probably have to mess with the ultra key settings a bit (transparency, choke, and soften) for both applications, but after you've got that set you should have a masked clip ready to place on a new background.

Method 2

There's also a way to do this with the Track Matte Key effect that yields slightly different results, you can decide which method works best for your matte.

In your timeline, stack the matte clip on track 3, the character clip on track 2, and your new background on track 1.

Add the Luma Key effect to the matte.

Add the Track Matte Key effect to the character clip with the Matte set to Video 3 and Composite Using set to Matte Alpha

Adjust the Threshold in the Luma Key effect in the matte clip if the keyed content is transparent, or adjust the Cutoff if you can still see the black.

I find that the first method gives more control over how the final key looks, but Ultra Key is a complicated tool and the second method is a little more straightforward.


You should be able to find monitor muting as a default or configurable setup on most radio consoles. Make sure you looking at sound boards that are specifically marketed as radio consoles. Something like this Wheatstone Audioarts analog console or this Lawo digital console. If not specifically called out in the features, you can also look for consoles that can trigger on air lights, as those contact closures can also be used to mute the monitors with some simple, inexpensive outboard gear. A Mackie or other inexpensive all purpose audio board isn't likely to have either feature.


FFMPEG - Audio missing after combining video

You have to mix both audios, else ffmpeg will pick one from among the inputs.

ffmpeg -y -threads 4 -loglevel quiet -ss 0 -t 220.162 -i left.webm
-ss 0 -t 220.162 -i right.webm -filter_complex "[0]scale=320:-1,pad=2*iw:2*ih:0:120[left];
[1]scale=320:-1[right];[left][right]overlay=main_w/2:120,scale=640:480;[0][1]amix" -shortest output.mp4


No.  The HDMI and AV MULTI Cable ports are output, not input ports.  Depending on the OS of your PC, there are programs that capture screen video.  Such programs are used by gamers to capture their gameplay.

This link gives some information about recording screen output for Linux: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/ScreenCasting


After Effects Multiple instances hangs when rendering using PHP and Command Line

You may want to try to write the output of your task to a file and tell your system to start it as a background task by adding the &:

exec('aerender.exe -project myproject.aepx -comp "Final" -mp  -output video.mov >/dev/null &')

It might also be something in your server setup, the max. memory maybe?


ffmpeg replay input to output giving errors

Try

ffmpeg -i rtmp://xxx.114.173.196/live/ninja -ar 44100 -f flv rtmp://127.0.0.1/live/test

The sample rate cannot be 48 kHz, which is triggering the absurd message that MP3 isn't compatible with FLV although that is its default codec.

This command should work, while avoiding transcoding:

ffmpeg -i rtmp://xxx.114.173.196/live/ninja -c copy -f flv rtmp://127.0.0.1/live/test


Improve performance on 4 x 4K mosaic with FFmpeg

The problem was about the overlay filter which is too slow. I've changed for a combination of hstack and vstack as you can see here :

ffmpeg \
-hwaccel cuvid -c:v h264_cuvid -i bbb_sunflower_2160p_30fps_normal.mp4 \
-hwaccel cuvid -c:v h264_cuvid -i bbb_sunflower_2160p_30fps_normal.mp4 \
-hwaccel cuvid -c:v h264_cuvid -i bbb_sunflower_2160p_30fps_normal.mp4 \
-hwaccel cuvid -c:v h264_cuvid -i bbb_sunflower_2160p_30fps_normal.mp4 \
-filter_complex " \
[0:v] scale_npp=1280:720, hwdownload, format=nv12 [upperleft]; \
[1:v] scale_npp=1280:720, hwdownload, format=nv12 [upperright]; \
[2:v] scale_npp=1280:720, hwdownload, format=nv12 [lowerleft]; \
[3:v] scale_npp=1280:720, hwdownload, format=nv12 [lowerright]; \
[upperleft][upperright] hstack [upperline]; \
[lowerleft][lowerright] hstack [lowerline]; \
[upperline][lowerline] vstack [mosaic]; \
[mosaic] hwupload_cuda" \
-c:v h264_nvenc -preset llhp -profile:v baseline -f matroska pipe:1 | ffplay -i -

It works very well and I even can build a 1080p mosaic using lossless preset and high444p profile.


How do I animate an image based on relative position in after effects?

You can move the anchor point of a layer, but this may upset scale, rotation or masking. There is a much simpler and very intuitive way to do it.

Click on the position property to select all keyframes. Park the playhead on one of these keyframes (use j or k keys to do this). Now if you move one of the keyframes they all move. If you don't park the playhead on an existing keyframe then you will just create a new keyframe at the current time and leave the others unchanged.

  Tip: If you need to have the playhead at a particular time to see the
  relative position and there is no keyframe there, just create a
  temporary one at the current time.


How do I detect scene changes in Adobe Premiere?

This isn't part of Premiere, but Scenalyzer is an external tool for this that I've had some good luck with.  It can scan a large video file and split it into smaller ones based on frame change detection.  Then you can work with the smaller files much more easily.  There's a freeware version, and a more featured paid edition.


The best bet is to avoid getting it on the recording.  The use of a wind cover can help break up the wind and prevent it from interfering with a recording.  Once it is there, particularly if it is really loud, there isn't a whole lot you can do about it that will result in satisfactory audio.  You can reduce it some, but it is unlikely to be able to be removed entirely and may well produce artifacts in your audio in the process.

The old adage crap in, crap out still greatly applies to audio.  Once something is mixed in to a signal, it's part of the signal.  The real world doesn't often fit digital models very well and thus there isn't a sure way to separate one part of the signal from another part.  This is why audio recordings are done with multiple tracks rather than recording everything to one output.

As far as what you can try doing with the existing audio, any software with noise reduction or wind reduction can try to reduce it or you can try to EQ the frequencies of the majority of the noise down some to help suppress it, but short of re-recording the audio and dubbing (or just re-shooting) there isn't anything I know of that will get rid of it entirely.


It can be used with different intentions, mainly to give the footage more dynamism.

The off-camera look gives the impression to be filmed like an interview, with an interlocutor in front of the presenter but off-camera.

Of course in this example there is no interlocutor, it is the camera, so it can make the impression of combining some "behind the scenes" footage. It adds a bit of "production value".

Sometimes the second camera does not film the person's face, probably the hands, probably the full body, and sometimes the interviewer, again not present in this case.

Probably a good option is using two off-camera angles.

It is simply a matter of style. Fortunately, the rules are not carved in stone.

One psychological effect from staring at the camera vs off camera angle is that the first one can feel like someone is "lecturing" you, trying to convincing you.

The second feels more like someone is just pointing at "facts" and you can decide or not to take them into account. That is why interviewed people do not look at the camera, but the presenter normally does.

This example probably tries to do both.


Snapping all clips together in Adobe Premiere

If you have a recent version of Premiere you can use the close gaps function, found in  Sequence > Close Gap.

For previous versions (pre 2018), try the method in this video: Deleting multiple Gaps in Premiere Pro all at once, where you add a matte layer, then drag the existing clips over it to cut it into chunks where the gaps are, then ripple delete it. Works in any version of PP.


Camcorder pass-through or stand alone capture box for VHS source

This is really going to depend on the quality of your camera and the quality of your VCR.  In general, the circuitry that is used to digitize an analog signal has grown by leaps and bounds in the past 10 to 15 years, but also VHS tapes and VCRs produce limited quality to begin with.   For maximum quality you will certainly want something with an S-Video input and a VCR deck with an S-video output to maximize quality.

As far as the line input goes, I'd probably favor the line input on a high quality camera from the end of the DV era over a cheap USB capture device, but a modern moderate or high quality capture device is going to do much better than even a high end in-camera analog to digital converter.  Even cheap USB devices now are most likely better than cheap camcorders or early camcorders in the DV era, but millage will vary depending on the specific device.


What codecs/formats are appropriate for full motion video recording for youtube?

Personally I always choose MP4 container and the H.264 codec as this is also the codec YouTube uses in the final video stream.

What key-frame rates and compression you need really depends on the footage and it's unfortunately close to impossible to give as a generic answer for this reason.

If you have a lot of movements you will need key-frames more often as well as lower compression. This will of course result in larger file sizes as a key-frame is basically a full frame image. There are only costly compromises for this.

How much you need to compress depends on the frame size, the bit-rate that will be used, f.ex. there is no point in compressing at a high bit-rate if YouTube then re-compress to match their max output bit-rate, which again means even worse quality due to re-compression.

If I should recommend a generic compromise it would be to reduce the frame size from 1920 x 1080 to 1280 x 720 instead. A viewer won't notice small details if there are a lot going on in the movie. It of course depends on which eyes one uses, the viewer's eye or the producer's eye. What I'm trying to say is that there is the factor of "psychology" you can use as well.

You won't need 32 bits. 32-bit is just 24-bit RGB with 8-bits for an alpha channel. You should record and process in 24-bit in cases as this. This will save you some file size and processing time.

Camtasia uses it's own proprietary codec so you will always need to re-compress to another non-lossy or lossy format.

Basically it comes down to trial and error approach, and then experience from that, as each individual video may require a different approach. I saw a similar post here with a link to YouTube guide-lines. Check them out and use them as a basis for settings (especially bit-rate settings).

Also try not to think of the movie in terms of technical perfection but rather how a viewer will view it and for what reason (is the content interesting enough then quality matters less, think news-reports).


How can I convert a 3D SBS video to individual left side video and right side video?

You can use FFmpeg, a free commandline tool to do this.

ffmpeg -i sbs.mkv -filter_complex "split[l][r];[l]stereo3d=sbsl:ml[left];[r]stereo3d=sbsl:mr[right]" -map [left] -map 0:a -c:a copy left.mkv -map [right] -map 0:a -c:a copy right.mkv


Start here: 10 free video editors mirror.

Keep in mind that free video editors are very simple and do not have many effects.
I recommend you to buy inexpensive video editing software, like Sony Movie Studio or Cyberlink PowerDirector. Take a look at this list of consumer video editors mirror.


Unable to make HD videos in Premiere Pro

A few things to check -

Is your export file set to Maximum Render Quality (enable before you export)? This may help if the MP4 compression is to blame for reducing the contrast of your video. Are you recording uncompressed AVI with fraps?

When you export, do you have any Effects turned on in the export settings - particularly the Limiter? This should be off.

Lastly, your installation of Premiere should include the GoPro Cineform codecs. These are as close to visually lossless as you will get with a compressive codec, and while they are NOT the best route for an eventual YouTube upload (and YouTube will remind you of that if you try it), it would be a good baseline to determine what the issue actually is.


How do I prevent the auto-focus from bouncing on my Galaxy J7 smartphone?

Okay, I found the answer.
After I start recording, I can click for a second or so on the screen where I want the focus to be. The camera is going to make that item appear in focus and then block the focus to that point until I cancel it.
There should be an (AF) button appearing on the side. Clicking that button allows to go back to the auto-focus mode.
Note that there seems to be two modes: one when you do this when you're not recording and one when you are already recording. At this point I have not found the real difference, but the items (buttons) appearing on the screen are different. So I would imagine that there is some kind of a difference between both modes.


All you have to do is output to a .ts container.  It's designed for broadcasting systems, so it works fine with incomplete files.

ffmpeg -i INPUT -c copy OUTPUT.ts

You just have to put a compatible codec in the container.  I haven't been able to find a list of what's compatible, but through testing I've found that H.264 and H.265 work.

.ts containers aren't the best once the file is complete, though, because seeking can take a while and they're about 7% bigger, so you can copy the data into an .mp4 container (assuming you're using H.264) when you're finished with

ffmpeg -i INPUT.ts -c copy OUTPUT.mp4


After Effects: How to do line animation on a moving camera

After more research I found the solution myself:

I created a null track layer from the camera tracker data, then a new shape layer. The shape layer then needs to be a 3D-layer and then linked to the null track layer. Once that was in place I was able to draw the path I needed and then animate it.


convert live hls stream into rtmp stream

Because -rf is a output option, I guess, you should put -re ahead like that:
ffmpeg -re -i http://example.com/test.m3u8 -acodec copy -vcodec copy rtmp://example.com/app/stream


The only thing you can do to mitigate your pain in post is to white balance all of them on the day of the shoot in the conditions of the shoot (shoot lighting, etc), probably right before the shoot. And then get to work in post. Don't hope for a miracle though. No one would use that many cameras and hope for the colors to match.
You're only going to be reduce the imperfections, so embrace them and don't lose your mind over matching everything perfectly 'cause it's technically impossible -- too many cameras and too many models.


"The sample rate of the two audio tracks is different"

To force to 44100 Hz, command template is

ffmpeg -i old.mp4 -map 0 -c:v copy -c:a aac -ar 44100 new.mp4


How to add zoom transition effects using FFmpeg to a variable number of images?

I originally thought I could handle this one, but I'm still new to FFmpeg and don't think I can solve this for you. Below follows what I came up with. Maybe that can help you move in the right direction. Sorry I couldn't be more helpful.

I found the following in a search:

  You can make a slideshow with crossfading between the pictures, by using a combination of the zoompan and framerate filters. "A" is the duration in seconds how long each picture is shown (without the crossfade duration), and "B" is the crossfade duration in seconds.

ffmpeg -i IMG_%3d.jpg -vf \
zoompan=d=(A+B)/B:fps=1/B,\
framerate=25:interp_start=0:interp_end=255:scene=100 \
-c:v mpeg4 -maxrate 5M -q:v 2 out.mp4

From the Superuser post you link we find:

-filter_complex \
"[0:v]zoompan=z='if(lte(zoom,1.0),1.5,max(1.001,zoom-0.0015))':d=125,fade=t=out:st=4:d=1[v0]; \
 [1:v]zoompan=z='if(lte(zoom,1.0),1.5,max(1.001,zoom-0.0015))':d=125,fade=t=in:st=0:d=1,fade=t=out:st=4:d=1[v1]; \
 [2:v]zoompan=z='if(lte(zoom,1.0),1.5,max(1.001,zoom-0.0015))':d=125,fade=t=in:st=0:d=1,fade=t=out:st=4:d=1[v2]; \
 [3:v]zoompan=z='if(lte(zoom,1.0),1.5,max(1.001,zoom-0.0015))':d=125,fade=t=in:st=0:d=1,fade=t=out:st=4:d=1[v3]; \
 [v0][v1][v2][v3]concat=n=4:v=1:a=0,format=yuv420p[v]" -map "[v]" -s "800x450" -t 40 ./out_fade.mp4

Looking at the syntax, it seems you'd just toss it in without the [iN]...[oN] "variables".

So try:

-filter_complex \
"zoompan=z='if(lte(zoom,1.0),1.5,max(1.001,zoom-0.0015))':d=125,fade=t=out:st=4:d=1"


Which software is used to produce this video?

My guess is maybe ToonBoom.

But regardless what software they used to stitch the final cut together, there were a host of software applications involved.

Illustration, likely Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, Compositing, Could be ToonBoom, AfterEffects, or others. Audio was done separately, on the tail end. And I jumped over myself, they likely storyboarded all of the animations out in advance, ToonBoom, likely a good choice for that even if it's not what they used for the final mesh.

In addition, they undoubtably used a host of plugins, perhaps some free, some paid, some very expensive to assist with the motion control and character animation. And last, they likely also relied of pre-existing works, templates, which can be purchased.


I followed your instructions. I changed localhost to 127.0.0.1:10000, and I was using input from an rtsp.
Here is my command. It worked for me. I was able to get the stream in VLC player.
ffmpeg -i "rtsp://someurl/" -c:v copy -c:a aac -listen 1 -ar 44100 -ab 64000 \
       -f flv rtmp://127.0.0.1:10000/live


If I encode a video above source and then later do a final encode, will I lose extra quality vs the final encode directly?

Yes, if you save your video in loseless codec. Unfortunately, this can produce very large files. Also you can try to find frameservers to avoid intermediate files, for frameservers was for older versions of Vegas, I don't know support of this feature in modern versions of Vegas.


Error playing video from snapchat (.mp4)

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

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

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