Best way to get synced audio from multi-cam Premiere project into Audition and back

Adobe Bridge should allow you to open the Sequence in Audition.  If you go to the project panel and right click the sequence you want to edit, you should be able to choose Edit and then Edit In Audition.  This will automatically bring the sequence over to Audition with the tracks properly laid out.  You should then be able to do any work you want to in Audition.

For output you have two options, you can either rely on Bridge to apply your changes from Audition when rendering the sequence or you can output a mix-down from Audition and then import it to Premiere and use it to replace the existing audio.  Since the project in Audition is synced to the Premiere sequence, the audio length should be correct starting from the beginning of the sequence.

More details are available in Adobe's online documentation here.


There are a few problems here that need to be addressed.

First, the pitch shot is vertically oriented or "portrait" (vs landscape).  This is considered very, very bad practice.  This is a huge and constant amateur mistake because many amateurs now shoot video with their tablets and smartphones and hold the device the way they normally do, vertically, but this doesn't match up with the target format, which is generally either TV or even web video, which is generally displayed horizontally to make the most use of the space.

You should always shoot your video "landscape" or horizontal, just like you would see it on a TV so that it makes full use of the screen when being played back.  This orientation stems from the fact that we have a wider field of vision than we have tall, so a wide angle shot fill more of field of view and is more immersive.  A vertical or portrait shot does the opposite and doesn't fill well on a TV and barely scratches our field of view making it feel much less immersive.

The second major issue is that of video quality.  You can technically increase the number of pixels stored in the video by a process called upsampling or upscaling, but that doesn't increase the quality of your video (in fact, it generally decreases it further).  The easiest way to think about it is think about if you had 4 pixel image that had black square a white square and then on the next line a white square and a black square.

XO
OX

You can increase the number of pixels by duplicating what is there, but it doesn't invent more resolution (actual meaningful detail).  Say we scale it up to 9 by 9, you end up with this.

XXXXYOOOO
XXXXYOOOO
XXXXYOOOO
XXXXYOOOO
YYYYYYYYY
OOOOYXXXX
OOOOYXXXX
OOOOYXXXX
OOOOYXXXX

Note that there isn't any more detail than there was before, and we actually lost some detail because the new image had to invent pixels to fill where there are Ys because the original didn't evenly break up in to the new size, so it had to average the pixels that should have been there and made new grey Y pixels.  This means the image is now even less clear than it was before, when we had sharply defined squares because now we have fuzzy ones.

You could technically upscale to an exact multiple of your original to avoid interpolating, such as scaling up to 1428 by 1080 which will make the format meet the file format requirement technically, but it still won't meet it in spirit because the image will still be a 360p image (substantially lower than SD), rather than the requested 720P HD image requested.  Additionally, it would still be another encoding and thus another generation of compression loss to re-encode to the upscaled video, which would further sacrifice quality on your already abysmally low resolution video.

Third issue, though this one less major is that your aspect ratio is wrong.  This isn't necessarily a problem, but the formats they are recommending are widescreen formats.  Your current file is 4:3 rather than 16:9.  This may or may not be a problem for them.  Normally, if you have sufficient resolution and shot planning to do 16:9 it's pretty easy to crop down the video to a 16:9 form factor, but if you made full use of the vertical space in a way that you can't crop the top and/or bottom, then you are pretty much stuck at 4:3.  You also don't have enough resolution to start with to be able to sacrifice anything, which makes this a bigger concern.

Overall, my recommendation would be to re-shoot the pitch/interview portion using high resolution and proper orientation and aspect ratio.  For the existing video sample that you can't reshoot.  Submit it as is and hope for the best.  You can't meaningfully enhance it in a way that they are not going to see right through and probably dock you for trying to sneak around it.  Just explain the situation and why a higher quality version isn't available.  Either they'll go for it or they won't.  Nothing you artificially do is going to change that.


You shouldn't notice in major downgrades in quality from a slower card (which I'm assuming is the main difference between the "expensive" cards and "normal" cards you mention). Higher speeds are required for newer cameras (like the more recent GoPros) that shoot in a much higher resolution and/or frame rate that need to be able to write a lot of information very quickly to the card. You should be more than fine with a class 10 card for the original GoPro HD.


How to capture / digitise a live satellite stream

It looks like most of the content on Azerspace-1 is "in the clear", or not encrypted, which makes things easier. But there is still a lot of "it depends" for exactly what equipment you need. Aside from all of the earth station equipment (dish, LNA, down converter, etc.), you will need a DVB-S2 or MPEG-4 receiver. That could be a vanilla receiver with an external encapsulator or gateway.

There are definitely companies that provide teleport and satellite media services. I'm not familiar with Azerspace-1's footprint to give concrete recommendations. However, two examples of companies that might be appropriate are Intelsat (Fuchsstadt teleport) and Encompass.


Premiere Elements "Debug Event": Keyframe error

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

Correct version:

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

Defective version:

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

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

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

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

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

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

and replace all with

.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and

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

(line breaks inserted for clarity).

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


Remove audio tracks from multiple MKV files

I don't know Windows, but I have just gone through this in Mac OS X (Linux Applicable).

mkvtoolnix is your friend here, and is available for Windows.

I used the GUI to check (a sample of) my files to make sure the audio tracks that I wanted to keep and delete were in the same order in the files. Then I manipulated the options in the GUI to match what I wanted.

Finally, I used the "copy to clipboard" button to copy the command line output to the clipboard and massaged it into a bash script to run on a directory of the files I wanted strip the audio from.

I know it's quick and dirty (and maybe not to your liking), but you can probably use it as a starting point to massage into what you really want to do.

#!/bin/bash

for file in *.mkv; do mkvmerge -o "$file-noeng.mkv"  --language "1:jpn" --track-name "1:AVC-HD" --default-track "1:yes" --forced-track "1:no" --display-dimensions "1:1920x1080" --language "3:jpn" --track-name "3:AAC" --default-track "3:no" --forced-track "3:no" --language "4:eng" --track-name "4:ASS" --default-track "4:no" --forced-track "4:no" -a "3" -d "1" -s "4" --attachments "1" -T "--no-global-tags" "$file" --track-order "0:1,0:3,0:4";

done


FFmpeg pad filter calculating wrong width

it turns out you can not pad subsampled pixel formats at odd boundries.
the workaroud is to make the boundary even by using
ffmpeg.exe -i in.jpg -filter_complex "[0:v]pad=ceil(iw/2)*2:ceil((ih+10)/2)*2:0:0" out.jpg


What are the options for manipulating video in live situation? Kinda like a VJ

The Max/MSP modular environment has a package called Jitter which is used for modifying videos in realtime. I've not had the chance to play with it myself, but I've seen it used in video art installations. Max supports several kinds of control such as MIDI and OSC, so I imagine all of these could be used to control video.

You'll have to make your own patches though - it's not an 'out of the box' solution so much as a realtime programming environment.


As Jason says, if the camera is stationary throughout, this is probably doable.

First, work out how much more scene you need to create, by opening the video in After Effects, and dragging it to one side until it looks right.  Export a frame from that comp as a still (something lossless like TIFF is best).

Open the still in Photoshop, and build your "clean plate" - try using the Content Aware fill tool.  It works suprisingly well sometimes.  Any dodgy bits, go over again with the Content Aware brush, then use a soft Clone Stamp to fill in any further bits that look wrong.  Save your new still image as a TIFF.

Open the new TIFF file in AE, and put it behind your main video in the comp.
Draw a mask around your main video, and feather the mask until the edges start to go transparent.  Drag the edges of the mask, so that you have a nice gradual feathering gradient into your clean plate, but make sure the other edges of your video aren't becoming transparent (make the mask much bigger than the video on all sides except the side you're trying to fix).

Finally, add some noise or film grain to the still image layer - it will help "sell" the shot more, and make the still look more like video - don't overdo it - a little goes a long way.


Remove the space.

ffmpeg -i movie.avi -strict -2 -vf subtitles=subtile.srt:force_style='FontName=ubuntu,Fontsize=30' -qscale:v 3 out.avi


As you know there are two solutions, one using your CPU, the other a dedicated GPU.

CPU Solution

As of today, the CPU solution exit for 4K content, at 60 fps, using x265 or x264 codec. x264 is embededded in OBS in fact, and x264/x265 are known for being the fastest implementation of the standard H264/H265. But, you need a powerful CPU, of course, and then you'll have to make trade off regarding the file size and/or quality. FYI, the x265 has been demonstrated to be able to live encode H265 stream 4K 60 fps, but using a dual socket server (not a standard CPU). It was last year.

GPU Solution

nVidia released end of year 2015 the fist cards with 2nd generation Maxwell architecture that is the first allowing H264 4K live encoding.

Since the Ultra High Definition streams needs a lot of resources, you couldn't really find an acceptable solution before new CPU or GPU are released. If I were you I would go with the GPU solution because you could use that card for both display and capture on the fly. If you could afford it of course, such nVidia card are pretty expensive!


You may want to look into Sony's camcorder line (even legacy; like the NX5U).

The NX5U and I think even the FX1000 (which is an HDV Tape Format and can be had used on a place like ebay for under $1000) could do bursts of full 1080p 240+ for a "limited time".

If I remember correctly the FX1000 by sony could do 240 frames at for 10 seconds. It would buffer the video into internal memory; then queue the tape; then record to tape when the 10 seconds was up.

It was limited in terms of it's usefulness; but it sounds like based of what you want to use the slow motion capture for; it may be worth looking into to.

Burst cameras (even the iPhone now does this); will give you a higher frame rate, with limited record time for a much lower price than say going the RED route or Phantom Route.

Or you could rent a RED, RED Epic's will do 480FPS at 1K; and they can be rented cheap; as they are everywhere... and sit on the shelf most day's of the week by people who own them.


YouTube now have a Creator's Academy and I think they answer your question in this video: Why Subscribers Matter Basically, it matters how long a video is watched, this is measured. But a single view means a single "opening" of the video itself. (E.g., I can produce two views in a few seconds, but this won't matter so much to internal metrics other than views' count.)