I would use three pieces of hardware for this task.

A recording laptop.
A device that allows you to input the HDMI to the recording laptop, aka, a frame grabber.
An HDMI spliter.

A recording laptop

Any old laptop will do, really. It doesn't need super specs, like dedicated graphics, but you certainly want at least a mid-range machine. Like an Intel i5 or better, 8 Gig's RAM, fast HDD (SSD would be great, but not necessary). Software wise, anything that can see the generic devices will work. Pro software like Vegas Pro or Adobe Primere if you have it works great. There's also Wirecast and vMix if you have webcast requirements.

A video frame grabber

I've had pretty good success with the DVI2USB3.0 Frame Grabber by Epiphan. Use that with a DVI to HDMI converter and it will work just fine. It also allows audio capture. I especially like its very small size, solid construction, and that it's USB powered. It will work on USB 2.0, but you will get limited bandwidth in the form of limited framerates per the source resolution (I often get about 45 fps at 1024x768 on USB 2.0). It's a bit on the pricey side, but Epiphan has very good customer service. I know other options are available, but I have no experience with them. About 5 years ago I decided against Black Magic products because of the mixed reviews on Amazon, but that may have gotten better. Other items that are like $10,000 are not the kind of equipment you are looking for. I've never actually seen one of those being used for more than what a $1,000 in hardware can do. Basically, if you don't know why it costs so much, you don't need it.

HDMI video splitter

There are plenty available on the market (Google image search). They're pretty simple. They have a single HDMI input and at least two HDMI outputs, which are both exact duplicates of the input signal. Make sure you get one that is powered because the ones that aren't reduce signal strength and it often shows, especially on projectors (at least, this is true for the VGA splitters). If you intend to audio record over HDMI make sure the splitter you get can handle that.

Setup

Take your source HDMI and run it to the video splitter.
Run an HDMI from an output on the splitter to the projector.
Run an HDMI from an output on the splitter to the Epiphan frame grabber via a DVI to HDMI converter.
Plug the Epiphan USB into the recording laptop.

Alternative, VGA-based setup

I would actually recommend this setup if this is in a professional conference setting and there is a professional audio/visual crew working it. I also recommend this setup if any of the HDMI runs are farther than 30 feet. HDMI just can't push very far and VGA can easily do 100 feet.

If this is a professional setup and you're just hooking in to what they already have, then the projector is not yours and you don't know what to expect. Chances are very high that projector will be gathering it's feed via VGA, not HDMI (you really should call the AV company to find out though).

So instead of using HDMI from the source laptop, use the VGA out (if it has one) or convert it to VGA with an HDMI to VGA dongle. The setup is exactly the same as above except everything HDMI is VGA now, including the VGA video splitter and the DVI to VGA adapter. For audio, just plug into the recording laptop's mic input port. As a warning, you might need some kind of audio cleanup when gathering audio this way. I regularly use the Whirlwind line isolator and the Dsan laptop sound port.

Source

I work for a company that does this all the time. If you need professional help with content production you can find information in my profile.


which camera is best for conducting the interview constantly as one-man show?

Let me start by saying that $1800 is a very, very small budget for this kind of a setup.  Bordering on impossible to get the kind of results you probably are hoping to get, if not over the line in to impossible.

Video is sadly a rather expensive field to get in to and a professional quality camera the likes of what most popular YouTube shows are produced with runs more than your entire budget for one camera alone (often upwards of $5 or $6k per camera when including lenses and support/stabilization gear) and that's considered a fairly "budget" option by the wider video production industry (where broadcast and movie cameras are in the $60,000 or even $100,000+ range).

Now, you don't need the same quality they are using and thankfully lower end gear has come a long way, but even minimal costs run close to or over your budget and it will show in the final product, just so you know what you are getting in to.  It will still be much better than Uncle Bob's family home videos, but it won't look like a top YouTube production either.

So my approach to answering the question is basically to give you what I think the bear minimum is to have any chance of achieving the quality you are hoping for.  It makes sacrifices in areas I'd personally rather avoid sacrificing in, but it's the only way to give you a chance of accomplishing your goal in your budget.  If you could increase the budget to $3000, it becomes far simpler (or considering used gear could also do it, though that really depends if you have a reliable vendor of used gear in your area.)

Personally, I'd still look at DSLRs, particularly Canon DSLRs with Magic Lantern support.  With a remote, it's not a larger distraction than having to stop for re-takes which you will also likely need to do for a top quality end product.  The way you do it is that you have two or more different cameras running and you start them on an offset.  As long as you check every few minutes, you can restart one at your leisure because the other is filming.  It isn't hard or even something that noticeable to your interviewee.

That said, the best bet is to have both the quality of a larger sensor and better optics crossed with being able to record without interruption.  Using a camcorder in your price range is going to have a noticeable negative impact on the footage, but using a Canon DSLR that Magic Lantern supports, it is possible to bypass the 30 minute limitation and have the camera automatically start recording a new file when it reaches 30 minutes.  There might be a gap of a second or two, but it won't matter since the other camera will have a shot then and you just edit around the gap.

Magic Lantern is technically a bit of a hack, but it is a well established third party "firmware" (it isn't actually firmware technically) that offers a wide range of enhancements for Canon DSLRs and makes them far more powerful video platforms.  Alternately, I believe there is also a similar hack for Panasonic's Lumix GH2.

Another decent option, though again limited, is to go with GoPro cameras.  They will get you good quality sensors and video but they limit you to the built in fixed lens.  As long as you don't mind positioning the cameras carefully though, they are cheap, light and high quality, and they don't have the 30 minute recording limit of DSLRs.  They won't get quite the same quality, but it's probably the best quality you'll get in a non-DSLR for your price range (or anywhere close to it).

Don't forget that you need tripods either.  At your budget, you won't be able to get tripods that are good for video, but since they are static shots, that shouldn't matter too much.  (A halfway decent video tripod is around $300 alone.)  For your purposes, go with the cheapest tripod that can hold your camera still, probably around $50 to $80 a piece.

As for lighting and mics, $1800 budget is really not a whole lot to go on, even for cameras alone if you want solid quality.  You are pretty much looking at getting either a stand alone recorder like a Zoom h4n or, if you can have a PC present, a USB audio interface that accepts XLR inputs (would be a bit cheaper than the h4n) and a couple of basic Lavilear mics (the kind that clip on to your shirt) or perhaps shotgun mics with stands depending on how quiet the room will be.  The Lav's are honestly probably the best bet since you don't have anyone to monitor the audio.

Lighting, you'll just need to use what little you have left to pick up some basic lights to fill out the kit.  We're probably talking home depot (hardware store) clip on light cheap with some home made diffusers and reflectors at that point because you will only have $100 to $150 left in your budget probably.  You might be able to squeeze in a really cheap quality lighting kit, but I don't have any direct experience using those to know if they would be substantially better than the home depot solution.

If you do have a reliable used gear vendor and don't mind going used, get used DSLRs (perhaps T2i cameras) and then use what that saves you to get a decent lighting kit and/or slightly higher end LAVs.


Simple Transition Effects for Short Video or GIF

Simply go to the end of the video, set a keyframe how it should look in the end.
Then go to the beginning and move the images out of view. Add some movement speed curves if you want


What should I look for in a video capture device from a Satelite Reciever to PC?

The Easycap Capture adapter is simply a video capture device with no TV tuner, so you would not be able to receive any TV signal.

I would recommend the USB TV tuner.  I'm not sure whether you will need an Analog or Digital tuner as this will vary according to where you live (here in the U.S. all stations are now Digital).  If you are putting this into a desktop computer you can get an internal TV Tuner card.  Hauppage makes a few good ones that will work with Windows, both internal and USB.  Their products also come with software to allow you to watch and record TV.  They should also work with other programs.

Edit:

As for performance the TV Tuner and the Video capture card should be about the same.  The TV tuner is in hardware and the video capture for both is also in hardware.  If you are concerned about performance, your best bet is to get a device that has a hardware MPEG-2 encoder (usually an internal card).  With my Hauppage card with built in encoding, I was able to watch TV and record without any serious performance hit to anything else I was doing at the time.


Is it feasible to manually implement chroma keying?

No you wont be faster, but you could use a different method. As in a different application. Really it comes down to what your bottleneck is. If the bottleneck is the interplay between you and the computer then sure. What you can do is expand the video to frames as a prepass. This takes time but is essentially unsupervised. Likewise you could preprocess the mask somehow (use a half size proxy image for example), and use that as a basis.

The problem is that it might not be economically feasible. Since:

you need to learn a new software, as well as find it. Test it etc.
You may need to write portions of it yourself, atleast scripts.

You still dont get fast enough to get your investment back. I mean its still cheaper to buy new hardware, if you plan to do this more than 3 times in a row. I understand that your circumstances may be special and you havent got the money.

But on that note, we are actually doing what is essentially chroma keying on the graphics card of a raspberry Pi and it works at 15 frames per second on a full hd image. So i doubt its the hardware computation per see. Possibly its a IO problem.


Where are the opacity map presets for CC Particle World in CS5 and CS6?

In the newer versions of CC Particle World the opacity map presets have been removed.

The only way to set opacity now is by drawing a curve on the graph.  See screenshot below:


How to export, then edit, finally replace individual clips in Premiere Pro?

Why not convert your original clip to uncompressed AVI, and then render and replace will "do the right thing".


How to combine multiple audio tracks without sounding blasted?

When you record each track, make sure that the level never goes up to zero on the meter.  If it hits zero, it means that the recording is clipping.  Clipping is when the computer can no longer accurately record the waveform. So instead of recording the shape of the wave, the upper and lower limits of it will be clipped in a straight line. So a tone sound like a sine wave would be clipped as shown below (the black line), instead of looking like the original wave (the grey line):

This results in a very distorted and unpleasant sound.
When you mix multiple tracks together, the combined sound is louder than a single track on its own.  So you will need to make sure that the overall level of your project is also not clipping.  If it clips, you will see the meters in Premiere go red like this when they are clipping:

You need to make sure there is no clipping anywhere in your signal chain, from recording to mixing the final audio.
Assuming the source material isn't distorted, you probably just need to reduce the level of each track in Premiere using the Audio Track Mixer (go to the Window Menu and select Audio Track mixer, and the name of the sequence you're working on).
The Track mixer adjusts the audio on each track.  It is different from the clip mixer, which adjusts audio on each individual clip.
So you might have many clips on a single track, and instead of adjusting each one separately, you can just adjust the whole track once.


Wobble/Wiggle effect in Adobe Premiere Pro CC

This might work:

You could build a project in after effects (or get someone else who has AE to build it for you?)

Get them to set a wiggle using Expressions.
Convert the expression to keyframes using the Animation menu --> Keyfraem Assistant --> convert to expression to keyframes.

Save the layer as an Essential Graphics template.

Open the Essential Graphics template in Premiere.

The item will have the positional wiggle, but you won't be able to modify the wiggle, or parent anything else to it (the positional variable in Premiere won't be wiggling).

I'm not sure whether this will work if you do not have AE installed - someone would have to try it and see).


FCPX: change export resolution and remove black bars

This article should help
custom resolution and frame rate in FCPX


I know one solution, but it's not cheap as webcams. Same time full hd quality is something that webcams usually doesn't deliver.
Device especially interesting for live shows recording and streaming.

http://zoom.co.jp/products/q2hd

Webcam driver is provider by Zoom, so you still can use it as regular webcam delivering high quality video and audio to Skype for instance.

PS: there are plenty of reviews on youtube.


How can I batch remove from videos all material that comes before the first all-black frame?

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

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

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

#!/bin/bash

echo "Enter Source Folder"

read input

cd "$input"

mkdir -p "$input"/output

dir="$input"/output

for video in *; do

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

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

mkdir "$dir"/"$filename"

dest="$dir"/"$filename"

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

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

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

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

rm chapter.txt

fi

done

Breakdown

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

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

Make output directory

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

For each file in the folder do this:

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

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

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

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

Clean up and replace text file.

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

Create array variable from the text file times.

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

Cut video between the two black frames.

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

Delete no longer needed text file and end.

rm chapter.txt
fi
done


What are the names of different ways to fit video when the aspect ratios do not match?

Letter box if you have bars on the top and bottom.
Pillar box if you have them on the sides.
Stretch (or possibly anamorphic, depending on what the intended playback aspect ratio is)   if you are full screening it by stretching it out to fill the space.
Cropped if you are making it full screen by cutting off the edges.


No, ffmpeg does not use a configuration file post-install.

lots of ways to build ffmpeg, but generally you have to configure everything before install.

for example, with brew (macOS package manager) you have to edit the following file to supply your --enable or --disable args BEFORE INSTALLING.

/usr/local/Homebrew/Library/Taps/homebrew/homebrew-core/Formula/ffmpeg.rb

if you didn't get your args in on your original install, then you need to uninstall and re-install again with your desired options and args.

also: instead of supplying your options (--with-webp for example) from the CLI during install, you can write them in ffmpeg.rb.


How to determine which modules needed for licensing FFmpeg as part of an app

In general, the codecs involved in a pure muxing command are the decoders and bitstream parsers for the codecs of the streams in the input file.

Even though there's no decoding or encoding requested in a pure muxing command, ffmpeg uses the decoders to acquire the attributes of the streams in the input. These attributes are then passed on to the muxer, which will write in the header/metadata section(s) of the output file. This has to be done because the attributes of an encoded stream is stored in a form specific to that codec.


Ffmpeg error: 2nd pass has more frames than 1st pass

Two-pass is meant for when you have a fixed input and you wish to analyze the file beforehand, so that the encode is optimized for the target bitrate and other encoder parameters.

Your 1st command is discarding the capture. And so your 2nd command is using the stats from pass 1 to apply to a new capture, which obviously won't match.

Use

ffmpeg -y -rtbufsize 1500M -f gdigrab -framerate 30000/1001 -draw_mouse 0 -offset_x 224 -offset_y 232 -video_size 1280x720 -i desktop -c:v libx264 -r 30000/1001 -an -tune zerolatency -preset ultrafast -crf 0 Capture.mp4

and then

ffmpeg -y -i Capture.mp4 -pix_fmt yuv420p -c:v libx264 -pass 1 -an -b:v 2600k -f mp4 NUL

ffmpeg -y -i Capture.mp4 -pix_fmt yuv420p -c:v libx264 -pass 2 -an -b:v 2600k myVideo.mp4


Do newly designed amateur video cameras still shoot interlaced footage by default?

If you take a look at Bluray video codecs, you'll see that the 50+ fps HD formats at 1080 row resolution are all defined as interlaced formats.

That's a strong incentive for 1080 line interlaced formats not to go away fast in consumer grade cameras.


Live Streaming IP Camera Stream to Youtube Using ffmpeg

Last time I checked, Youtube requires an audio stream even if there is no input audio, so supply a dummy one.

ffmpeg -re -f mjpeg -i "http://192.168.0.101" -f lavfi -i anullsrc -c:v libx264 -g 60 -c:a aac -ar 44100 -ac 2 -f flv "rtmp://a.rtmp.youtube.com/live2/<key>"


ffmpeg error "Error initializing complex filters"

Font paths have to be escaped:

fontfile='c\:\\Windows\\Fonts\\simsun.ttc'


Any software with high quality vfx graphics?

I assume that you want to add lower thirds or logos to your videos. You also seem to have already an NLE (video editing program) for cutting your videos. Choosing one would be out of scope of this question.

There is a simple way of creating high quality vfx graphics for videos:

Design them as static images in photo software like the Gimp or Adobe Photoshop
The image resolution should be the same as your video resolution
Use transparency for all areas where the video should show through
A practical advice: I usually put one frame of my video on the lowest layer and design the vfx on an upper one. This is to have a visual reference how these two would fit together
When finished, make the lower layer with the video frame invisible, so that you only see your vfx on the transparent background
Save it as PNG image with transparency
In your NLE, add a new video track on top of the other ones and put your PNG image on it
To add a bit of animation, you can fade this image in and out, or let it move in from one side and move out to the other side

These animation effects are very basic, but usually you don't need more for lower thirds. If you need more animation, you should look into software like Adobe After Effects, Blender, Nuke, Fusion, ... But these are more difficult to use than creating a single image with the photo software of your choice.

Update

Since the OP asked if there are free solutions, I add the following:

You can use free software like the Gimp as well as paid software like Adobe Photoshop to design these lower thirds. Any photo software that can work with transparency and layers can do this. Having linear gradients in image as well as layer masks would benefit your results, though are not strictly necessary.

The key point is that you use the software that you are already familiar with, to have some quick, but professional-looking results.

If you want to go the way of software explicitly designed for VFX, then you have some free options too with Blender, Natron (both open source) or Fusion (commercial, but has a free version).


Is it possible to create a continuously looping video?

I make similar videos for our corporate reception, interstate and overseas offices, events, conferences and presentations etc. The answer is to look outside the video file itself and focus on the application that is playing the file - you want the application to loop the video file playback.

An alternative approach that works on some devices is to embed the single instance of the video file in a PDF and set the playback preferences of the PDF viewer to loop.


Why are some of my videos I just uploaded to Youtube in HD and some aren't?

Apparently Youtube took some extra time to process the HD. Both are showing in HD now.


What software can be used for pre-visualizing video presentation environments?

Wow, this is a late reply.

Here's the technologies I know that are available at the moment for it.

ESPVision (via Vectorworks/3DS Max): (However camera inputs are broken at the moment which is how I arrived here at this thread--I do expect they will fix it in a reasonable amount of time).

http://www.espvision.com/

Capture: (I have not used this for video in recent history but theoretically it works)

https://www.capturesweden.com/Products/Software

And there are a horde of other options. I'm not a huge fan of Watchout due to their licensing scheme with the dongles--you need two to have output ~ $6000--but it technically has previsualization and it is significantly more affordable than anything from D3.

Frankly, you can do a lot with QLab (Mac only) which is my "daily driver" for most small projection gigs. You can just route that as a Syphon output and "view it" as a texture.

You also might want to keep an eye out on TouchDesigner and VVVV modules if you have programming experience.

However, due to the limitations in most of this software I tend to work off a model and a cheap 480p LED projector. (I design lighting and video for theater, hence my workflow tends to lean towards models)

Hopefully this helps someone!

EDIT April 2018
Apparently this did help someone:

I've been using Capture for the past year and it is a fairly solid 3D previz tool if you are willing to use NDI or a series of capture cards. Right now it is my preference for usability/workflow.

You might also check out Light Converse
http://lightconverse.com/

Or for PC, Realizzer
http://www.realizzer.com/

There's a few others by some major brands, Martin has Martin Show Designer and GrandMA's previz can theoretically work.


Yes, you can! In your streamEncoder.json add the following.

{
...
      "keyint_sec": 2
...
}


Batch process videos from a folder to: remove audio and slow the speed to 0.5x

Slow down and no audio command
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 \
       -filter:v "setpts=2.0*PTS" \
       -an \
       output.mkv


Record video to timeline during playback

DaVinci Resolve, Premiere, and FCPX all support direct video capture.  But depending on your hardware configuration, operating system, and camera, you will most likely need a video capture card or external capture device also.
Most computers don't come with a way to get video into them, they come with ways to get data into them.  HDMI ports are one-way, so you need an HDMI or SDI input, or a way to convert HDMI/SDI to data, and bring it in through USB, Thunderbolt, or PCIe, etc.  Webcams, whether internal or external will need a software driver to communicate to the NLE.  Generally, inbuilt webcams come with their own recording software, and computer manufacturers (hopefully) guard access to the camera. So for built-in webcams, you will need software which has access to your computer's hardware.  As Far as I know, FCPX can access FaceTime cameras, but Resolve and Premiere cannot.  For tethered ones, you'll need drivers supplied by the webcam manufacturer.


How to record OBS Studio in full screen?

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


Is there an app that can Cut, crop, and resize video in 1 encode like imagemagick for video?

ffmpeg will do it. You can either compile it from source, available here. Or more likely, download a precompiled binary for Macs from here. I don't use Macs so I can't vouch for the binary source.

You will have to use the trim, crop and scale filters in a filterchain to accomplish what you want.

The actual corresponding command for your pseudo command would be

ffmpeg -i input -vf "trim=20:40, setpts=PTS-STARTPTS, crop="'if(gte(a*sar,4/3),4*ih/3*sar,iw)':'if(gte(a*sar,4/3),ih,3*iw*sar/4)'", scale=320x240, setsar=1" -c:v libx264 -an output.mp4

You can find the (terse) explanation for all the parameters at the ffmpeg documentation site, but here's a quick run-through, in order:

-i input - Specify the input file.

-vf - this indicates a video filter follows, or a chain of them (separated by commas). If there are multiple filters specified in sequence, then each filter in a chain works on the output generated by the previous filter in the chain. The first filter works, of course, on the original input.

trim=20:40 - trims the video by retaining from the 21st to the 40th second

setpts=PTS-STARTPTS - video is a sequence of images displayed in time, so the frames of a video stream have timestamps associated with them for playback purposes. PTS is presentation timestamp. This clause generates new timestamps for the trimmed video stream so that the first frame of the trimmed stream has PTS of 0 (seconds) and all subsequent frames are accordingly offset as well (I've simplified a bit here).

crop="'if(gte(a*sar,4/3),4*ih/3*sar,iw)':'if(gte(a*sar,4/3),ih,3*iw*sar/4)'" - in short, this crops the input video to 4:3, but based on the input video's effective display ratio, so that the cropped image doesn't contain any blank padding. Video can contain "non-square" pixels so that a 100x100 image with pixel aspect (SAR) 2.5 will effectively display as 250x100 and SAR 0.5 will display as 50x100. My expression evaluates the effective input ratio and sets the output crop window accordingly.

scale=320x240 - scale to the stated resolution

setsar=1 - the crop and scale filters effectively produced a square pixel output, so the SAR metadata should be set as 1 to overwrite the original SAR so that players don't distort the image during playback.

-c:v libx264 - this says, use x264 to encode the video stream. There are many parameters that can be specified in addition , but by itself, it will use the default settings.

-an - leave audio out of the output. If you want to leave the corresponding audio in. replace this by

-af "atrim=20:40, asetpts=PTS-STARTPTS" -c:a aac -strict -2


as an AD.3

you can use HLS or you can use WebRTC with h264 or webm DASH
for DASH it somewhat blurry form me (no straight answer for ffmpeg), but as for the HLS this is supported in a straightforward fashion look here

Some time ago I was looking for a way to publish an h264 stream from the IPCam without the need of extra user actions.
I came across Janus Gateway, this bit of software consumes RTP streams (amongst others types of media) and publishes it as WebRTC media to the browser.
So basically I did the following:

used ffmpeg as an rtsp client and encoder to publish audio and video (separately) as RTP streams
I have setup Janus streaming plugin to accept h264 RTP stream and audio stream (descriptions are coming from the RTSP sdp file)

and it worked just nice.
I had some issues with the h264 from the IPcam so I had to re-encode it using x264 to be visible in the browsers.
Ideally Janus has a support for RTSP, but it seems it's lacking option of interleaved TCP transport of RTP and RTCP, and besides I had to re-encode the stream one way or another.
This are the configs I  have used:

Janus - file janus.plugin.streaming.cfg:

[h264-sample]
type = rtp
id = 1
description = H.264 live stream test
audio = yes
video = yes
audioport = 8005
audiopt = 8
audiortpmap = PCMA/8000
videoport = 8004
videopt = 126
videortpmap = H264/90000
videofmtp = profile-level-id=42e01f\;packetization-mode=1

the ffmpeg stream feeding the pipes should look like that (you can of course re-encode whatever you like in this fashion):

ffmpeg -rtsp_transport tcp -i rtsp://hostname:port/description.sdp \
-an -c:v h264 -profile:v baseline -preset ultrafast -tune zerolatency -f rtp rtp://localhost:8004 \
-vn -acodec copy -f rtp rtp://localhost:8005


Resulting video is bad always on the same place

Two possibilities that come to mind are that it could be a dropped frame that isn't that noticeable until an H.264 compression is applied or it could be that you are using an insufficient bit rate and that particular part of the video has enough going on that it couldn't compress well.

I would check the time code around the problem to make sure all the frames are there.  I would also try increasing the bit rate used and try VBR 2 pass and see if either of those fix it.


after effects - motion graphics/kinetic text

Text in after effects can have animators applied at the character, word or line level. The animators work kinda differently to normal animated properties in that the property that gets animated usually doesn't have keyframes, but is instead controlled by a selector which is comprised of a group of controls that determine what part of the text is to have the modification applied. Normally you animate the selector to add animation to the individual parts of the text.

Select your text layer and choose Animation>Animate Text>Position from the top menu or from the Add menu for the animator group in the Timeline panel. If you add some X offset to the position property that appears in the new animator group, and play with the selector beginning, end, and offset values you'll get a bit of an idea.

Now once you've fiddled with it for a bit, and probably got confused, head on over to the manual and give it a read.

As far as Motion Blur goes, if you turn on motion blur for the layer, and make sure it is on in your render settings you'll be golden. If you want to see it while you're working (at the price of much slower previews) turn on motion blur in the timeline window. How you do all that is also (surprise!) in the manual.


For half the price and DSLRs only, the Ronin M probably makes more sense. The Helix Jr. makes sense for more. It can hold up to 12 lb of stuff vs the M's 8 lb (which is kind of crazy, considering that it's even lighter), and the fact that it's naturally at heart-ish level as opposed to belt level means a lot for good framing and the ability to hold it at a good frame for an extended period of time. You can get it to eye level for more easily than the Ronin, even in Upright mode (or whatever it's called), because it flips the camera upside down. (They both have briefcase mode for very low shots.)

If you want a second person with total control, the Ronin is absolutely the way to go. But if you're a one-man band and can afford the premium, the Helix is probably the better option.

Source: I have demoed both.


There are several methods for interpolating additional frames if you want to slow down footage beyond its original frame rate.

First: duplicating frames. Pros: very fast, easy. Cons: low quality, causes stuttering, even with fairly small decreases in playback speed.

Second: cross fading between neighbouring frames. Basically each frame is dissolved into the next one. This will work well for a lot of footage down to say 1/3 of the original speed, after that it gets a bit obvious. Pros: fast, relatively easy, lots of software does it. Cons: limited capability.

Third: using motion estimation algorithms to create frames from neighbouring frames. Basically you apply a morph between neighbouring frames, with some intelligent tracking of pixel motion to create realistic motion. Pros: very good results with some footage, even with large slow-down. Cons: compute intensive, so slow to render. Not many apps do it, especially free/cheap ones. Can cause weird and very obvious artefacts when the tracking goes wrong–in fact, I've rarely been able to get this to give satisfactory results with real-world footage. If you have simple movement against a plain background, e.g. green-screen footage, it can work really well, but for any complex scene you generally get all sorts of really obvious weirdness.

The final techniques is still under development, and will probably keep getting better. AI is looking very promising as a tool for this kind of thing, so we may see some quality gains soon.

P.S. I'd say that Sony claim about interpolating 24fps to 960fps is 99.999% marketing bullshit.


Difference between 4K Edition and 4K Cineform

It's the compression!

The color resolution is a factor, but not such a big one. In this case the compression is the biggest factor. If you assume that both the 4K Edition and the 4K Cineform contain the same material, 4K Cineform contains more than 13x the information (as stated on the timescapes.org products page).

But is more really better? Cineform states here that for 4K their codec produces a stream between 30 MByte/s up to 90 MByte/s, depending on the color space. This is far more than an average computer can display without interruptions.

So, if you just plan to play back the movie smoothly, choose a smaller format, as timescapes.org offers for 30" or retina displays.


I think the type of lens flare you're looking for is anamorphic lens flare.


The first anime pic is throwing me off, but it seems to be an artifact of how interlaced analog signals were structured and displayed.

  For analog NTSC there is a total of 525 scanning lines of which
  originally 483 lines were visible (241.5 visible lines + 21 lines of
  vertical blanking per field)

Update: this answer at the electronics site gives the full picture.


How to embed cover art into MP4 without errors?

In the Codec Tweak Tool under Miscellaneous > Thumbnails the checkbox for .mp4 was unchecked. After checking it and saving the settings it finally showed the thumbnail.

The Tweak Tool is installed with K-Lite Codec Pack. There are different editions available, I use the Standard edition so I can't talk for the other ones.

Credits for finding the solution: Furty from the same (copied) thread on Super User as a comment


Premiere pro cc 2014 Rendered out video not matching sequence, as well as sequence constantly changing

I'd say you may need to do nested compositions; and pre-renders with that many layers.

The honest truth is there are bugs in premiere... in terms of if you have a lot of layers; with specific opacity settings, or filters applied to them; in particular 3rd party filters; they simply don't always play well together.

Thats why AfterEffects tends to be a more useful platform for projects using lots of layers.

They are idiosynchosies... they don't make sense... in terms of what causes them. They might preview correct within premiere, but output with issues.

The fix is typically to either move to AE, or pre-comp grouped layers to reduce the total layers/effects. Render pre-comps of layers with effects applied, then use the new file as the source with no filter.

Lastly, as stated above, make sure you are interpolating your footage to the same standard, progressive or interlaced.


How to change profile of Openshot project?

Open the project
Goto File->Choose Profile
Select the profile you want
Save changes

Note: checked with OpenShot 2.5.1


How do I edit a video clip without increasing size?

The file gets bigger because the encoder struggles to keep the quality of the resulting file as close to the same as the original as possible. AviDemux allows you to cut out parts of a video file without re-encoding.


Exporting with transparent background in premiere

Do you need to choose "Millions of Colors+" when you select Animation codec, to make sure it generates an alpha channel? Also if it's an animation, you probably want progressive, not interlaced (upper/lower field first = interlaced)


Using ffmpeg, can I remove the color from an area of the video

I found one solution in cropping the video, turning it into black and white and then putting this as an overlay on itself.
ffmpeg -y -i "input.ts" -filter_complex "[0] crop=57:57:79:39 [cr];[cr] hue=s=0 [cr2];[0][cr2] overlay=79:39" -map "[cr2]" -vcodec h264_qsv -b:v  12300k output.ts


If I can buy SSD, how do I best use it to improve video editing?

All computer performance optimization is based on understanding critical paths (bottlenecks), then removing or relaxing the bottleneck until there is nothing more you can afford to improve (possibly because there is simply no known widget, at any price, that will improve whatever else is on your critical path).

Some very common critical paths in video editing are

Reading video data from disk
Rendering video data (for display and/or for writing to disk)
Writing video data to disk

When you import video data into a project, rarely is it all loaded into RAM, though it could be.  If it is loaded into RAM, then buying an SSD is only going to speed up the initial loading of your RAM--a one-time benefit.

More often, video is buffered into RAM, but it fundamentally lives on disk, and thus disk speed becomes important as you play or scrub through your files.  If you have 1080p ACVHD stream, it uses approximately 28Mb/sec of bandwidth.  Modern HDDs can average 25MB/sec to 120MB/sec or more, depending on whether they are connected via USB2, USB3, USB3.1, SATA, eSATA, etc.  But if you need to load and display from 8 streams, it can try to read 28Mb/sec times 8 streams = 28MB/sec from the disk, but because the streams are likely scattered across the disk, it has to issue many seeks and buffer lots of data, leading to uneven performance.  An SSD is an advantage here because the seek time is virtually zero.  A single SATA SSD could easily handle 8 and perhaps 24 streams without choking.

However, the computer's CPU and GPU are typically designed to handle HD and perhaps quad HD video, meaning that they are going to begin to choke if they have to display 24 simultaneous streams.  But 4-8 should be OK.

To optimize your system, you should use a system profiling tool to see just how much disk bandwidth your system delivers under load vs. the calculated bandwidth of your video streams.  And you should measure how much video rendering performance your CPU/GPU can do vs. the estimated complexity of your streams (are they all just passed through a virtual switcher, or does every frame have scaling, translation, cropping, blur, sharpening, noise reduction, color correction, etc)?  You can then do some math: how much does it cost to close X% of the gap for each different gap you can measure.  Which dollars have the greatest impact on closing the gaps you can close?

You might find that indeed an SSD is just the ticket.  Or it might be that your GPU is really your rate-limiting step.  Most serious video editing workstations are a collection of many high-end components.  Having just one piece of the puzzle might only speed things up by 5%, whereas having all of the pieces, even if only half as good as the best, can speed things up by 50%.

It does take a little technical knowledge to profile and tune a system, but what it really takes is dedication to the process and good measurement tools.  Or enough money to keep buying bits until you can no longer see any improvements.


High-end graphics cards: is it needed or useless for video editing at i5 machine with quicksync?

First question to ask is:

Does your video editing software actually use your GPU at all in the editing process? If it isn't written to use CUDA then you will not benefit from getting a better video card, other than being able to view it in higher quality on the screen.

For software that can, all of those factors are important:

Memory size is likely to be the most important as working with all relevant data in memory is faster than having to import from disk.
Memory channel size is also important, as is the speed, for ensuring you minimise latency when reading video data.
CUDA cores are probably the least relevant when editing, as this is not a hugely intensive task. They would be much more important when rendering, or carrying out complex image manipulation.

update based on comments

Adobe Premiere Pro does use CUDA, through the Mercury Playback Engine. From this post on the Adobe forums, whether a frame can be processed by CUDA depends on the size of the frame and the amount of RAM on the graphics card (VRAM), which supports my point that the most important is RAM size.


How to automatically synchronize two recordings of the same event?

There is a plugin called vocalign that will do this. It is designed mainly for aligning vocal overdub and replacment dialog but it should work for what you are doing. You can use it as a VST in audacity. It isn't cheap but, if my memory serves me correct, it has a fully functioning demo.

http://www.synchroarts.com/index.php?PAGEID=products&ID=vocalign


I encountered the same issue when I turned the sound off in the sequence.  When I re-enabled audio export, even though I didn't want to or need to, it saved as an mp4 again.


Preventing audio clipping on inexpensive lapel mics

There unfortunately isn't enough information here to give you a definitive answer but I will try to cover the most likely bases.  The first thing you need to do is determine the source of the clipping.  Is it actually clipping at the recorder or are the microphones themselves clipping.  Clipping occurs whenever the signal level exceeds what a particular piece of equipment is designed to handle and can occur at almost any point in the process.

If the levels you see on the recorder are actually exceeding the levels it is capable of recording, then you need to use a device called a pad to bring down the levels and match the impedance of the microphones to the impedance of the recorder.  You can try working around it by positioning them further away, but any sufficiently loud noise is still going to cause them to clip and background noise will become a much larger problem.  Bringing down the signal level with a pad is the correct solution.

The other possible problem, particularly with cheap microphones, is that the mics themselves could be clipping.  If this is the case, it would likely be a distortion but not peak the recorder.  In this case, you would need to move the mic further away and ensure that nothing is bumping in to the diaphragm that could be causing direct shocks to it.  Alternately, a better mic could be used which would allow it to stay closer to the signal source and thus reduce your background noise.

The main thing to keep in mind when getting clean audio is that you want to sample as much signal and as little noise as possible, which means keeping things as directional and as localized as possible and/or keeping the environment quiet.


Millisecond stopwatch for visual stereo video synchronization measurement

You can only sync video to an accuracy of a frame, or somewhere in the area of 15-40 mSec depending on frame rate. So as long as whatever you're shooting can update and refresh at least that quickly, it's not important to do much better. Even shooting a mechanical metronome will probably get you as close as anything else. The refresh rate of the display shouldn't be a factor, if you're examining both clips on the same screen.


I recommend you do a few things.

Take an online course in video editing. You can either sign up for one at something like linda.com, or even just go to YouTube and search for video editing. There are thousands of tutorials which can point you in the right direction.
If the above isn't reasonable, take a class at your local community college. Many offer classes in video editing and motion graphics.
Read some books. I can personally recommend In the Blink of an Eye by Walter Murch and The Technique of Film and Video Editing: History, Theory, and Practice by Ken Dancyger. Peachpit Press also has lots of books on a number of applications.
Go to a local video editing user's group and ask basic questions. If you're in a major city in the US, you might try the local Final Cut Pro User Group meetings (SF Cutters, LAFCPUG, CHIFCPUG, BOSFCPUG, etc.) or Adobe Premiere or Avid User Group meetings.
Sit down with a local editor (there are probably editors near you who do commercials, if not TV, film, and music videos). If you can befriend an editor or other video artist, they are a good source of ideas for software to write!

I've been writing such software professionally for over 15 years, and that's how I got into it.


Connect GoPro Hero 7 Black to Macbook Pro 2017 via USB-C

According to page 61 of the Hero7 Black manual, you can transfer files to your computer using USB-c.  The manual only mentions being able to do this with the Quik application on your computer.  Most likely your computer is missing the drivers necessary to exchange data with the camera due to either not using or not installing this application.


big Premiere project with many clips - is it better to storyboard on paper first?

Storyboard first, then shoot, then edit.  A storyboard is a tool for organizing your thoughts before you even pick up a camera.  It's like a script, and usually follows from a script, but gives you a better idea of where to place and move the camera.  This is called "shot blocking".

The shotgun method of gathering footage with the hope of being able to string it together into a coherent story is a mistake made by many beginners.  There's nothing wrong with gathering lots of footage.  In cases like documentary work, it's often necessary.  But even when you shoot this way, you need to have an idea of what you're looking for, and how it's going to fit within your story before you sit down to edit.

As for the 40 hours of footage you already have, I'd say no, don't worry about drawing it out on paper now.  I guess you could use a whiteboard if that helps you organize your thoughts, but really you've got what you've got, and you're just going to be duplicating your effort when you sit down at premiere.

It's difficult for a one man operation to compartmentalize the processes to make good video, but you should look to the film industry for guidance.  After all, they have billions of man-hours of experience.  They've got it whittled down to a science.  Directors, cinematographers, gaffers, grips, editors, colorists, producers, writers, and everyone else you see in the credits all have their own job for very good reasons.  When you're trying to do it all yourself, it's best to wear one hat at a time.


How to prevent ffmpeg from dropping metadata?

Other answers here are only working with the "known" meta keys, for custom/arbitrary meta keys, -map_metadata 0 is not sufficient to keep them all.
In my transcoder project, a lot of camera makers like to inject custom meta keys in the MP4/MOV container, and I want to keep them in the transcoded MP4/MOV files. After a lot of head scratching, ffmpeg do have a switch for this purpose:
-movflags use_metadata_tags

Credit goes to the author of this thread and Google:
https://superuser.com/questions/1208273/add-new-and-non-defined-metadata-to-a-mp4-file


Batch resize videos with "pan and scan" cropping

If you had just 4:3 and 16:9 videos, I would suggest:

ffmpeg -i input.mov -filter:v 'scale=-1:768,crop=1024:ih' \
-c:v libx264 -crf 23 -preset veryfast output.mp4

That would scale a video to a height of 768, scaling the width to keep the aspect ratio; and then it crops the width to 1024, keeping the height at 768. The fact that you are using 1:1 videos as well complicates things: a 3000x3000 video would get scaled to 768x768, and then ffmpeg would try to crop it to 1024x768, which obviously wouldn't work, since crops can be no bigger than the input...

The only way I can think of getting this to work would be to crop all of the videos, which you stated wouldn't be a problem. This will crop the output width to be the same as the input height, and the output height to be 3/4 of the input height; and then it will scale the video down to a height of 768, keeping the aspect ratio with the width:

ffmpeg -i input.mov -filter:v 'crop=ih:3/4*ih,scale=-1:768' \
-c:v libx264 -crf 23 -preset veryfast output.mp4

This will only work if the original files have a height of 1024 or more. Note that x264 only accepts an even width or height, which can cause problems (but shouldn't in this case).

To convert every .mov in a directory, you can use a for loop:

for f in *.mov; \
do ffmpeg -i "$f" -filter:v 'crop=ih:3/4*ih,scale=-1:768' \
-c:v libx264 -crf 23 -preset veryfast "${f/%mov/mp4}"; \
done

To do so recursively, you can use find:

find . -type f -name *.mov -exec bash -c \
'ffmpeg -i "$0" -filter:v "crop=ih:3/4*ih,scale=-1:768" \
-c:v libx264 -crf 23 -preset veryfast "${0/%mov/mp4}"' {} \;

All of this will require a recent version of ffmpeg.


Proper way to play 50 fps video as 25 fps in FCPX

Your project's frame rate should be the playback frame rate.  So if you want to output 25fps, make it a 25 fps project.  When you import other frame rates, many NLEs will attempt to automatically adapt the frame rate to your project rate.  If FCPX does not do this for you automatically, then you can manually set the timing of the clip to play back at 50%.

But when you make a 50fps project, you are basically making it impossible for FCPX to do the right thing.  Setting a clip to play back at 25fps in a 50fps project is meaningless.


Switching and Cutting Video and Audio Items Separately

You should be able to drag the original clip from the Browser into the timeline and replace the clip you're working with.

If you want to make sure not to mess up your edit, double-click the 'broken' clip in the timeline to bring it into the viewer, and make note of your in and out points.  Then open the original clip from the browser into the viewer and set the same in and out points. Now replace the 'broken' clip in the timeline with the new one from the viewer.

If you're asking how to switch audio and video independently without breaking the relationship, I'm not sure.


Need overlay the image on video by taking the array of positions

I believe what you're looking for is called tracking. If you have a video in which scrolling happens and need the image to stick on the video, meaning that it follows the scrolling, do the following:

Open up After Effects and import both the image an the video.
Create a comp with the settings of the video and drag the video in it.
Create a Null-Object
On the right hand side, there's a panel called "tracking" or "tracker". Open it.
Select the Video since you want to track its movement and drag the tracking point (you only need one but can use however many you want) on a point of the video with high contrast, like edges or spots. (that makes it easier for the tracker to recognize the movement.)
Track the footage and check if the tracker sticks, correct it if you have to.
As the target, select the null-object and click apply. You need the y-axis at least, having both y and x doesn't hurt though.
Now, drag in the image and pick the whip (the little curly thing) and drop it on the null-object.

If you did all of this, the image will follow the scrolling video. You might need to adjust the size and position of the image, but it will nonetheless follow your track.

Hope this helps, have a good one :)


Video Production outdoor in driveway? Filming me working on my car?

If the tent you get is white, like the one in the picture, you can point a light up into it, and then the tent becomes a giant soft box. The light loses a lot of energy doing this, because the tent material isn’t designed  to reflect 100% of the light striking it, but the same thing happens to sunlight going in the other direction, and any sunlight coming through the material will diffuse and contribute to the total amount of light. A setup like this runs the risk of being too soft, pushing into flat territory, so you’d want to add a second light to use as your key, and use tent as fill.
If you don’t want to have to buy a second light, you could try rolling up one of the sides of the tent, and using ambient daylight (not direct sunlight) to add contrast to the image.  The amount of contrast will vary through the day, however, and will require you to roll up/down the sides of the tent, assuming the tent sits in direct sunlight all day.
For close-up shots of work being done to the car,  an LED panel would be easier to position, and get in the way less than a large soft box, plus it would double as a work light.  The closer a panel light is to its subject, the softer the light appears, which is why they’re good for closeups.


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


FFMPEG Stitch four videos together, then add overlay to result

Add the overlay to the result of the stacked videos.

Use

ffmpeg -i input0 -i input1 -i input2 -i input3 -i overlay -filter_complex \
"[0:v][1:v]hstack[top]; \
 [2:v][3:v]hstack[bottom]; \
 [top][bottom]vstack[v];[v][4:v]overlay=0:0[v]" \
-map "[v]" output.mp4


It looks like the contents of the bubble is a zoomed in view of a video clip or a series of still frames.

The animation uses manually set keyframes to alter the position of the clip to create a pan effect. The cursor is also animated using manual keyframes. The acceleration of the pan is smoothed, probably with 'Easy Ease' transitions.

The video is then masked using an ellipse graphic with a shadow included, which can be easily be created in Illustrator.

It is possible to replicate the effect by taking a clip of a screen recording and tracking the motion of the mouse cursor to directly follow the action. This would be a lot easier to do (provided the cursor does not change and is always visible) but the results would be very rough.

The best way to replicate this effect would be to add manual keyframes as shown in the example video.


Writing to multiple memory cards on a canon 5d mark iii whilst filming

As far as I am aware it will write to both cards at the same time (dual redundancy), I dont think you are going to be able to write from one card to the next.

Using 2 cameras would always be a better option as you will then have multiple angles and or if you have a failed recording on one camera you still have a backup


FFMPEG: Streaming over UDP over Wide Area Network

Unless you are on a network that supports multi-cast, the host computer needs to have sufficient bandwidth to send the video data independently to every single viewer.  If you have multiple viewers, this will rapidly overwhelm any slow connection (and your connection, even on the LAN, is exceptionally slow).

What you need is a content delivery network or at least a media server with a sufficiently fast upload speed to feed the desired number of clients.  Your host would then upload to the media server or CDN and the clients would connect to the media server or CDN to get the relayed stream.


I think what you're looking for is called "photogrammetry" and is produced by taking several images (or an image sequence from a video) and comparing the perspective, scale, and overall shape of the captured image and how it changes.

Using this method, you can both create quite realistic 3D-models of things you just filmed and furthermore, you can thus create animations using these models. Alternatively, you could just use an image-sequence, in which the object is captured from all sides or just rotated and let the viewer go back and forth between frames and / or perspectives.

Photogrammetry

only really works on stills, meaning that your subject won't move
gives you the opportunity to really zoom in and out, create parallaxe (moving the subject seperately from the background)

Skipping between different sequences

is comparable to how the famous bullet-dodge effect in the matrix works, only that the viewer can direct the movement of the camera himself (which is pretty cool indeed).
Needs a lot of cameras however, set up in a ring around the subject. So you need to erase the cameras filming themselves in post, which is quite tedious. (a setup of such rig can be seen here and here. This brings with it a big spike in production-cost.
also, if your subject is moving and you want your camera to follow it, you need to move the entire rig which, if you've seen the pictures of it, is quite a pain in the rear.

So while capturing a sequence with dozens of cameras to allow different perspectives of a subject in motion can be a very very cool and impressive effect, there is a reason why not a lot of movies use it. It's expensive, difficult to work with on set and takes a lot of time to stitch together the sequences in post.

Photogrammetry on the other hand side offers a completely free perspective for the viewer, enabling him/her to look at the subject from any angle imaginable (which the multi-cam setup doesn't offer - you can only view from the perspectives that the cameras were set up on, especially concerning the y-axis)
The downside however is, that the subject won't be moving, unless you use stop motion in which case you can "photogrammetice" the subject in different states of momentum (which again, is very tedious).

I hope you found out what is what you want and my answer was helpful to your question :)


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


Beginning video editing (colouring eyes on a moving face)

Technically, what you're looking to accomplish falls into the scope of visual effects (commonly abbreviated VFX), more than editing.  Editing is mostly making decisions about timing cuts between audio and video tracks.  I don't mean to be pedantic, but perhaps this distinction will help your google searches.

Basically, you want to perform two actions:

Track the eyes
Adjust the color of the eyes over time

For the first task, I would recommend researching "motion tracking"
For the second, I would recommend "color correction"

Adobe After Effects (with the bundled Mocha module) and Davinci Resolve are each capable of accomplishing both of these tasks.  I'm sure there's more, but these are the software packages I'm most familiar with.  Nuke, Houdini, Premiere, Shake, FCP7 (FCPX can't keyframe color adjustments), and Apple Motion are all other names that come to mind, but I'm less familiar with them.

edit Bukkojot correctly pointed out in the comments that I forgot to mention matting and masking, which is the process of isolating the effect on the eyes, and making sure that the effect doesn't show through occlusions, such as blinking or foreground objects passing between the camera and subject.


Need good free HTML5 video player for integrating video ads and Vimeo videos

I'd suggest you looking at the built-in HTML5 outstream video player AdPlayer.Pro.
You can use this video ad player and host your video on AdPlayer.Pro platform or you can use HTML5 player separately. It's compliant with all major video advertising standards, like VAST/VPAID and Google IMA. Also I like the UI and additional tracking tool, which provides watch time, click rate, estimated revenue etc.


I would do this using the built in Foam particle render - it does have basic collision avoidance

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


The most-recommended way to do this is with Twixtor, a pricey plugin for AE and other platforms. They offer a watermarked free trial. There are some free alternatives out there but I haven't used them so I can't say for sure they'll suit your need. One is SloMoVideo and if you google that you'll see videos from people who've tried it.


Simple, easy to configure streaming server for linux - just transcode & stream

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-stream-videos-with-nginx-and-jwplayer-on-centos-6 makes Nginx look pretty simple to set-up as the streaming server. I've not used it but I have used jwplayer and that worked well for me (I was streaming from vlc/vlm). Another good option for the player end would be jplayer.

Web Videos via Watch Folders Transcode is a reasonable approach to the transcode issue.


What are the rights to exported video from the Apple's Keynote app?

This is really going to come down to what the terms of the EULA is.  It should outline what rights you have to use the Apple provided contents.  Most likely you would be fine as included assets are typically intended for reproduction.  It might be trickier if you were going to sell copies, but a commercial is probably ok.

As far as using it as commercial work, I'd be careful about what you use it for.  The quality level is still probably going to be sub-professional for most purposes.  Programs like Keynote and PowerPoint are really more designed for making basic presentations easy for the average consumer rather than trying to actually make a good commercial production.

It is also worth mentioning that while the classical music itself may be in the public domain, the particular recording may not be.  Rights are a complex thing and while classical music in the public domain is free for anyone to play, copyrights can still exist on particular recordings that have been done recently.  Unless you specifically purchased it as royalty free from a reputable dealer, then you may want to double check that as well.


How to losslessly replace a specific area in a range of frames

I don't know if FFmpeg supports the Camstudio Lossless Codec, but if it would. Then replacing the area with a PNG file (hence: adding a logo) could be a solution.
The explanation is done here at "Timing the overlay".
https://superuser.com/questions/683643/how-to-add-my-logo-for-the-first-30-seconds-in-a-video-with-ffmpeg
In that example codec:a copy was already given (for audio). If you would take any lossless videocodec the result will be lossless.


Animating an end of a line along a path. (In After Effects)

Importing stuff from Illustrator to AE is still a pain. Overlord is a good plugin that makes it a bit easier - it can transfer shapes to and from Illustrator. Also this script helps with putting selected objects in Illustrator onto their own layer.

If you want to move the end of a line around, you could make a null that follows the path of a circle.

Make a circle shape in AE. Make sure its position and its Shape position are 0,0.
Convert the circle path to bezier. Keyframe the path of the circle at the start of your timeline.
Copy this single keyframe.
Make a null at position 0,0
Paste your keyframe data into the position data of your null.
Make a New solid layer.
Add a Beam effect to it.
Make sure the beam's length is set to 100%.
Parent one end of the beam to your null layer.
Move the other end on your circle.


Natron - automatically adjust render frame range

Go to the writer properties and change the "Frame Range" value from "Project frame range" (or less probably "Manual") to "Union of input ranges".

This, as the name indicates, determines the frame range as the union of inputs you pass to the writer.


How can I manually set the LFE volume in Premiere's "Audio Track Mixer" panel?

I understand, that by saying "manually" you mean: input digits with keyboard.

There is no easy way to manipulate this exact setting that way through UI - if you want more precise control hold Ctrl while click dragging the slider your mouse left-right.

However if you really need to be on the exact number (and perhaps you will set this once for entire project) - there is a hack, that will allow you to set this value to exact number:

Make backup of your project before doing any changes this way.
Close the project in Premiere if you have it open.
Open your .prproj file with zip archive tool (like 7-Zip), inside you will find xml file representing all settings of the project.
Open it with a text editor - I recommend Atom or something with syntax highlighting.
Search for "LFE", edit appropriately (this may require some educated guesses).
Put xml file back into archive, and re-open in Premiere.

Good luck!


Is possible to use ffmpeg to capture directly a DSLR streaming via USB?

You can capture a live-view feed from your USB-connected Canon DSLR with gphoto2 (param: --capture-movie). The biggest limitation here is that the resulting mjpeg stream resolution is 1056x704, and that's the highest possible quality via USB. This mjpeg stream can be piped to ffmpeg. As an alternative, you could get yourself an USB<>Mini-HDMI recording dongle (e.g. "Elgato Cam Link"), this will give you a FullHD (1920x1080) resolution and you can use your Canon DSLR like any USB webcam, which can also be piped to ffmpeg.


Adobe After Effects Frame-By-Frame Editing

Have you used the Roto Brush? It was designed for situations like these.

For those unfamiliar, there is a nice concise tutorial here on how to use the Roto Brush.


Can you change the duration of a video in Handbrake?

Yes, you can select the desired length by chapters, time or even frames.
BUT this only works properly when Audio and Video have the same length (video is always cutted correctly, audio not).
So you have to either
1. cut the audio track with Audacity or any DAW (Tracktion is really good and free) to the correct length and mux it back together afterwards (Yamb for MP4, MKVToolnix for MKV) or you can
2.add a chapter mark at the end of your video and put the video into fre:ac (the best audio converter I know), check "encode to a single file" and unselect the last of the appearing titles (everything after your chapter mark). Now you can convert your audio into anything you want. fre:ac only detects mp4 chapters, you can edit/add them with Drax and you have to use fre:ac alpha version to use this feature.


Upwards particle effect in After Effects

There are numerous options for particles in AE, without needing any 3rd party plugins. For example the CC Particle Systems II effect which is included with AE CS and later. A PDF manual for the cycore effects (all the CC-something effects that are included with AE) are here

If you add it to a layer you'll see this:

By default the effect produces particles exploding from a small spot, and they fall as if effected by gravity. We're going to change it to look more like what you posted.

rendered version on YT

First, open up the effects control window, and work though the settings.

Change the producer size. This is the area from which the particles are produced. We'll mke it the width of the comp, without making it any taller vertically. So the Radius X will be 1920 for a HD comp. You might also want to wind down the birth rate, to say something like 0.1. Since we're making the particles move more slowly we'll need to increase their longevity. 15-20 seconds might be in the ball park for gently drifting particles.

They're shooting out of the producer at this point, so we'll turn that off. You do this in the Physics section, using the Animation drop-down. This sets the initial motion for the particles. For a more interesting movement you might try twirly. Twirly adds some random directional velocity, explosion adds velocity away from the producer, vortex makes them swirl around.

You probably want to turn the Velocity right down, maybe 0.1 or thereabouts.  For a gentle drift we'll turn Gravity right down, and make it negative. I ended up using -0.25, see how you go.

Resistance acts like friction, slowing the particles down from their initial velocity. A little bit is probably good, but if you want the particles to all have random velocity you can leave it quite low, like 1 or 2.

Play with the physics until you get it to look right. Reading the manual is a start, but fiddling with the controls to see how they work is the best way. Once you've got them drifting gently upwards you might want to move the position of the producer down below the bottom of the frame, e.g a bit more than 1080px. Also, if you want the particles to be there at the start of the comp, slide the start of the layer a few seconds before the start of the comp.

Next change the particle from the default line, to something else. I've chosen lens to create flat circles. Lens uses the original colour of the layer it's on, in this case it's a solid. You can muck around with colours, how the particle looks over time, and change the particle type here.

Remember you can also add more effects before or after the particles to change how they look, eg, blurs, colour correction, distortion, and so on. You can change the opacity of the layer as well as its Blending Mode to change how it interacts with other layers. Go nuts!

Here's a screenie of settings that produce a good gentle swirling particle effect. Don't just copy them though, they literally took me like five minutes, so you could easily refine them. Try twiddling the knobs, just to get a feel for what they do.


Use

"[0:v]scale=iw*sar:ih,setsar=1,pad='max(iw\,2*trunc(ih*16/9/2))':'max(ih\,2*trunc(ow*9/16/2))':(ow-iw)/2:(oh-ih)/2[v0];[1:v][v0]scale2ref[v1][v0];[v0][v1]overlay=x=(W-w)/2:y=(H-h)/2[v]"

First, the scale and setsar make sure the image becomes a square-pixel input. Then the pad checks each dimension and pads to a 16:9 frame size.


How to using Math.round(easeOut(time…) in after affects?

On the second line: Math.round(easeOut(time,inPoint+0.53,inPoint+1.8, 0, x)) returns a value. Since expressions use the first line that returns a value as the value of the property it is trying to use the result of that line as the value for position, and since it only has one dimension it's causing an error.
Change that line to
x = Math.round(easeOut(time,inPoint+0.53,inPoint+1.8, 0, x));

(don't forget the semicolon at the end).
What the amended line is doing is taking the result of the Math.round() function and updating the value of x with that result.
Just as best practice, you should also use a let on the first line, i.e.
let x = clamp(thisComp.layer("Control Values").effect("Value Bar 1")("Slider"),0,100);

The let keyword assigns x as a variable, but restricts it in scope to the local expression, so that it doesn't possibly pollute other expressions.


cutting with ffmpeg results in few seconds of black screen, how do i fix this?

Most videos use codecs which perform temporal compression, so a specified cutpoint may rely on frames before (and after) that cutpoint to be correctly decoded. So, when you use ffmpeg to trim videos and use copy mode, ffmpeg has to include all frames before and after the trimmed segment which are needed to decode the segment correctly.

So, you have two options, use copy mode but set a switch which will allow all players to correctly play these files

ffmpeg -ss %2 -t %3 -i %1 -vcodec copy -acodec copy -avoid_negative_ts make_zero %~n1_cut%~x1

(this will likely result in output that starts before your cutpoint)

or re-encode the streams

ffmpeg -ss %2 -t %3 -i %1 %~n1_cut%~x1


Tips for making multiple video shoots appear Continuous in color?

Consistent camera settings are a good beginning for continuous looking footage. Here below I will try to explain how to achieve consistent brightness and colour of footage.

Consistent brightness

Assuming that the lighting of the scene stays the same, you can pick a shutter speed, aperture and ISO that gives you a desired exposure. If in the next recording you will use the same settings on the same scene the brightness of the image will stay the same.

It gets trickier when the light changes. By using your exposure meter you can get close to consistent footage. If for example in scene 1 your exposure meter shows -2/3 with the desired settings, try to get an exposure of -2/3 in scene 2 with the same metering mode.
This will only work when the scenes are lighted similar to each other. Night/day shots or inside/outside shots are not going to get consistent brightness ever.

Later in post-processing you can of course alter the brightness of two different clips, but you don't have much working space getting it right in camera is the best starting point.

Constant colour

Again assuming that the scene lighting stays the same, you can pick the white balance. On a GH1 this can be done in several different ways, it even allows you to set the colour temperature in Kelvin. Pick a method of your liking, but to avoid Automatic White-Balance (AWB). AWB is a big cause for changing colours across different clips because it can get thrown off easily by changing objects in the scene.

Baseline: for the same scene, set the white-balance manually and don't let AWB decide for you.

Again, in post-processing you will probably need to do some colour grading and this gives you the chance to colour correct your footage.
But, get it right in camera and you will save yourself some work.


How to change active camera in after effects ( or render a different camera )

Just move the camera to the top of the composition. The 1st camera is the one Ae will render.


What effect you see will depend on the content, and your own perception. In a static scene dupes will have no visual effect, but they always lengthen the clip.

With motion in the scene, a duplicated or skipped frame might be quite noticeable. I usually find them visually disruptive, but others might not -- it depends partly on what you're trained to see, and how engaged you are in the content.

On the other hand, a repetitive sequence of duplicated images will generally not be disturbing, though a trained eye may see it. This is the essence of 3::2 pulldown, for example. That doesn't serve to lengthen or shorten the scene, but to convert a taking frame rate to a presentation frame rate.


Low cost frame synchronized (genlocked) 3D stereo camera

You probably will not achieve a 100% perfect result with your setup. That you got them synced to a 1FPS accuracy is pretty amazing actually.

Professional stereo setups use frame locking in hardware to ensure the cameras record in perfect sync.
This is not possible with ordinary webcams. If you fix the recorded video in post you can get to less than 1/RecordingFPS'th of a second accuracy which can be enough depending on your framerate. The higher your framerate the smaller the offset will be.

If the webcams offer some sort of low level api you might be able to improve the results even further but I doubt thats available, thats usually something you only get in (rather expensive) industrial cameras.

Edit: Regarding your edit, Genlocking is the way to go with pretty much any video application if you need 100% sync (or as close as possible to that, you will always have some nano/microsecond delay between frames).

Being it syncing videos displayed on a display wall (all these individual displays need to show the correct portion of the frame at the same time). Or recording with multiple cameras the same frame at the same time.
Resolution isn't a factor here.

Though price definitely is. Do you have a budget for this project or is this for hobby purposes? There are definitely (non-cinema) cameras that would support this though they are not exactly cheap as a webcam.
The cheapest solution I can think of is using the GoPro Stereo Rig. http://gopro.com/camera-accessories/dual-hero-system
This would put you at a budget of 1000$ in total (minus a few cents). Not exactly cheap but definitely affordable.

And the GoPro is also a very flexible solution. You can shoot from 3840x2160@15FPS to 848x480@240FPS. It also supports raw HDMI output which can be helpful if color precision is desirable or live monitoring of your shoot.

A downside is that the GoPro has a fish-eye lens. You can reduce the distortion by setting the camera viewing mode to narrow and using this nifty software hack but you wont get fully rid of it unless you replace the lens.

Edit 2: If you go the "build your own electronics route" you should have a look at the ArduCam project. It's essentially a shield for the popular Arduino boards. It allows you to connect several cmos modules like the OV5642 which is a 5MP sensor that is also used in the Raspberry Pi camera module.

According to this thread on the RaspberryPi forum these modules support genlocking.
While its not possible with the pins broken out on the PiCam module (though there are some ideas about how to do genlocking with it on the last page) you can order these modules cheap (25$) from ebay and use them with the ArduCam board. Even if you don't connect the modules to the same oscillator to do genlocking you should get some pretty good results as you work pretty close metal here also the Arduino plattform is very easy to use.

With such a setup you could potentially make a 1080p stereo 3D rig for around 125$.
50$ for the cmosm modules, ~16$ for 2 Arduino Uno clones and 60$ for 2 ArduCam shields.


Compressing to youtube quality before editing

Use proxy videos to transcode the mts files into something usable. Here's a short tutorial to get you started:


Saving audio while streaming video using ffmpeg

Firstly, you should stream webcam and mic through the udp multicast address i.e. 224.1.1.1:10001.
Secondly, you execute ffmpeg -i udp://224.1.1.1:10001 out.mp3 or more options of the FFMPEG audio to do the audio extraction on another command prompt.


You are a little confused in the MoCap process.

Most mocap is captured live on either a soundstage or direct to your computer with a webcam/video camera with specialized software. This software converts the action footage with markers into data (usually xyz coordinates for each marker on the model for the time of the motion. This data is then used to move the 3D model with the motion file (there are several file formats, 'bvh' being the most generic).

You can also purchase motion data of a variety of actions from certain companies that sell their data online. The motion data will only work with models that have a 'skeleton' file embedded with the object file. There are several file formats that ave used for this. Models by 3D Studio, Maya, Poser, Daz Studio have their models available with the 'skeleton' file available.

Learning this on your own will be quite a challenge! I used to teach whole classes in college dedicated to these individual parts of 3D computer graphics!

I would recommend going to the Daz Studio site, or the Poser site for a ton of information about this subject. Have fun!


Convert mp4 to webm without quality loss with ffmpeg

Answer
Use two-pass Constant Quality mode:¹
ffmpeg  -i input.mp4  -b:v 0  -crf 30  -pass 1  -an -f webm /dev/null
ffmpeg  -i input.mp4  -b:v 0  -crf 30  -pass 2  output.webm

Explanation:
Setting the video bitrate to zero while also specifying the CRF (Constant Rate Factor) enables Constant Quality mode which targets a certain perceptual quality level. For VP9, the CRF can range from 0 (best quality) to 63 (smallest file size).
It is important to set the video bitrate to zero. If you do not specify a video bitrate, it defaults to something low which gets you Constrained Quality mode, where each frame has a maximum bitrate. While that can be useful for streaming, it reduces quality significantly as frames with a lot of motion will not have the bandwidth needed to look good.
Another part of the reason you’re losing quality is that webm (VP9) prefers to encode in two passes for best results. The first pass compiles statistics about the video which is then used in the second pass to make a smaller and higher quality video.
Please see the ffmpeg VP9 documentation if you’d like to learn more.
A word about transcoding
By the way, in general, transcoding formats (taking a compressed video and recompressing it with a different codec) is a bad idea as you’ll not only add the normal errors from lossy video encoding, but you’ll waste bits in the new format trying to preserve the artifacts from the old.
If you mean “without quality loss” literally
The -lossless 1 option of ffmpeg’s VP9 encoder enables lossless quality mode, but with a potentially enormous increase in filesize.
All you need is this:
ffmpeg  -i input.mp4  -lossless 1  output.webm

When I tried -lossless 1 on a low-quality mp4, the resulting webm was 100× larger, which was not accceptable to me. However, if your mp4 files are already very high quality, I expect the size difference will not be so great.

Footnote 1: If you're using Microsoft Windows instead of UNIX, change /dev/null to NUL.


Is it possible for the viewers to get rid of the 60FPS fast forward effect?

60 fps does not look like "fast forward". It simply looks natural. It breaks the old-school film look, so people start paying more attention to what is happening on the screen, including acting and dialogs. A crappy movie, barely watchable in 24p, falls apart when interpolated to 60p or 120p by modern TV sets. Just shoot better movies ;)

By the way, for quite a long time in the U.K. they used movie cameras for shooting outside on location, and TV cameras for shooting inside on the set, so for the British "film look" used to mean outside, "smooth look" used to mean inside.


Why does my video show wrong colors after import into after effects?

I'd recommend trying to convert the source file to another file type before importing into After Effects.
Maybe try the media encoder, vlc or an ffmpeg variant.
If you can, convert to an intermediate mov-codec or an image sequence like tiff.
If your file seems fine in VLC etc. this might work.


ffmpeg "Stream specifier matches no streams", but it exists

For future reference:

as specified, you cannot reuse an intermediate stream more than once so you have 2 options:

either save it, input the saved file and reuse it as many times you need in your filter;

  ffmpeg -i file1 -i file2 -i savedStream -filter_complex "..."

use the split filter and create as many outputs you need; default value for split is 2 outputs so:

  [o0]split[split1][split2]

would be your case.


Thats rather simple if I understand correctly what you want to achieve. One way to do it is to right click your text layer and choose the "Create Masks from Text" option. Then pre-comp your video layer and copy the masks your just created (AE creates a new solid that contains the masks) onto the video comp layer. Now make the video comp layer 3D and you can animate your camera however you want in your master comp and also go into your video comp and animate the camera there as well for some parallax effect.


Add semi-transparent box around subtitle

Use

ffmpeg -i movie.mkv -strict -2 -vf "subtitles=subtitle.srt:force_style='FontName=ubuntu,fontsize=30,BorderStyle=3,OutlineColour=&H80000000',scale=720:-1" -qscale:v 3  Movie.avi

See Style Fields and Data Types for tag info and color syntax.


What could be causing these strange MP4 video playback corruptions on some machines?

Put keyframe distance in the encoding options to KEY EVERY FRAME.

When you export in the export options you have keyframe distance, which is used to calculate "intermediate key points/key frames", and the default is 25/30 frames. The player calculates pixels and frames inbetween keyframes. Sometimes it gets lost in calculation because of lost bits or bytes. Having less distance between keyframes reduces the chance of this, and results in more accurate frame rendering.


Why is my Sony Alpha 6000 not synchronzing with other recorders?

My careful test showed that the Alpha 6000 loses 0.2084 seconds of sound when it changes files, which is good to know in general but not relevant here.  That is, the last bit in the file is silent, but the next file starts with the correct synchronization for the next frame.  If you concatenate the streams, 1/5 second of sound is missing but no other glitch is apparent.  (I did not look too closely at the video frame timing.)

It also shows that over a 30 minute recording it does drift slightly, less than a frame.  Measuring, I see the tick on the Sony's audio track appears to the right of the same position on the Zoom H4N track: 0.0055 seconds after about 10 minutes (end of one file), and up to 0.14 seconds after 27m18s, near the longest a single "take" can record on the Sony.

In comparison, the Canon 70D audio track shifts to the left by 0.0065 seconds over the same half-hour span: about 1/3 the amount of drift, and in the opposite direction.

The real problem with my synchronization was not due to the Sony camera.  For some unknown reason, the Zoom H4N seamlessly dropped close to 3 seconds (2s19f out of 24 fps) in the middle of the file.

That is, the recorded WAV file (one file—not a file break) somehow stopped laying down samples and resumed a moment later with no indications that anything took place.  Looking close-up in Audition there is a line visible in the frequency display where the discontinuity in the waveform is interpreted as noise on all frequencies.  One person is talking before the break, and another person is talking after, as if a section was deleted from the recording and saved back to a WAV file.

Strange, isn't it?


How to cut out corrupted parts of DVD-video extracted from disc so file can be played?

Remuxing it will probably help, as the apps are generally smart enough to detect random crap and skip over it, as well as fix the timing information.

You didn't mention if it's a ripped as in copied direct MPEG-2 file or one ripped using HandBrake or something else.

Either way, use ffmpeg, avconv, or mkvmerge to remux them.

  ffmpeg (or avconv) -i source.mpg -codec copy dest.mkv
  mkvmerge -o dest.mkv source.mpg


How to make audio "internal editing" in a movie?

Instead of deleting the offending bit, overwrite it with room tone, a section of nominal silence either recorded specifically for this purpose at the time of filming, or just taken from a nearby bit of silence.


Why do high FPS videos look less blurry than real life?

Well this answer is just based on my knowledge of video cameras and is largely a best guess.

In video cameras motion blur is not (necessarily) determined by the fps but by the shutter speed (in cinema: shutter angle). The quicker/higher the less motion blur (I guess you can liken this to a screens refresh rate). Thus, things filmed at 24fps (cinema standard) but with a faster shutter speed will have a sort of other-worldly appearance as if everything is faster than in the real world. A good example of this is the opening Normandy scene in Saving Private Ryan.

When you combine a fast shutter speed with more than traditional fps (generally anything over 30) the motion looks surreal. Likely any other phenomenon is related to the way we process images and that I cannot adrquently speak of as I believe research in this field is largely mixed.

Here is a good link on shutter speed: http://www.red.com/learn/red-101/shutter-angle-tutorial


Will a Youtube video with clips from a copyright protected anime website (AnimeID) be taken down even if I give credit in the video and description?

An algorithm decides that. It can go both directions. The system is not smart enough to correctly decide if your video meets the cirteria for fair use/citation. In case of a wrong decision you can appeal and sometimes you succeed.

If you give credit or not does not play a role for Youtube, however it's a legal requirement for correct citation.

If a copyright violation is detected, the video either gets blocked or the income will be redirected to the holders of these rights. And you get a strike.

Funny: As I write this I'm listening to an experienced Youtuber in a live stream and by chance she speaks about this topic and says: "It's a game of luck if you get a copyright strike or not." I think this confirms my point.


Leave the color out and make a png out of it.
Then, create a sequenz which has the length of the bar you want.
Insert as many filmframes as you like.
Now simply draw masks around one frame each.

Put the sequenz in your final sequenze where you can animate it.

(Keep in mind that the holes (little squares) normally don't contain images, as they are holes.)


Reduce render file size in After Effects CC 2017

To render H.264 it's actually very easy.

From your Project window, select the sequence you wish to render.
Right click->Export Media (or File->Export Media)
In the Video tab, select H.264 for format

Then, in the basic video settings below, you can change to smaller-than-original resolution, low bit rates, etc.

If you are trying to export a Quicktime file that uses H.264, that's much more challenging.  When you select Quicktime, Premiere Pro gives you a useless menu of Presets that were relevant for about six months during the early 1990s.  Ignore all of them, as they are stupid.  Instead, look down to where there's a Video Codec selector.  Click on that and you'll see tons of options, including H.264.


Long video clip stabilization with ffmpeg and vidstab

Ad 1:

Presets have (almost) no impact to the quality — their purpose is for adjusting the trade-off of encoding time for the output size (the longer encoding time, the smaller the output stream).

Different presets enable / disable separate algorithms for compression. For example, in my installation, the -preset ultrafast is equivalent to options

--no-8x8dct --aq-mode 0 --b-adapt 0
--bframes 0 --no-cabac --no-deblock
--no-mbtree --me dia --no-mixed-refs
--partitions none --rc-lookahead 0 --ref 1
--scenecut 0 --subme 0 --trellis 0
--no-weightb --weightp 0

As you can see, almost no optimization, i. e. the output will be very large.

Ad 2:

H.264, aka MPEG-4 Part 10, aka Advanced Video Coding (AVC) is good enough, and its particular implementation — x264 library — is a very good one.

The pervasive rule is again the same:

  Recent video compression standards are able to reach a little better compression than their predecessors, but for longer encoding time (and sometimes for lesser compatibility with media players, too).

So if you don't need cutting-edge compression, every contemporary compression standard is good enough.


Color shift FFmpeg raw RGBA images to YUV format

In the end I add to use the following options and tell ffmpeg wich colorSpace i am using and how to decode it to display on screen.

ffmpeg -f rawvideo -r 30 -pix_fmt rgba -s 1920x1017 -i - -threads 0 -y -c:v libopenh264 -pix_fmt yuv444p -b:v 8000K -vf vflip,scale=out_color_matrix=bt709 -color_primaries bt709 -color_trc bt709 -colorspace bt709 output.mp4


How to slice a video at camera angle changes

To correctly detect the scene changes (almost correctly some changes were still not detected) I used Davinci Resolve. Then I had to type the wanted scene's start frame and end frame into a program that automatically cut it.

From Davinci Resolve it was extremely hard to copy the frame numbers as they could not be selected. I am sure there is a better way of getting the start frames and end frames from Davinci Resolve but I couldn't find it.

The cutting can be done using ffmpeg:

ffmpeg -i example.mp4 -vf trim=start_frame=10:end_frame=50 -an -fflags +genpts output.mp4

But it takes really long to get a clip from the end of a long movie for example.

It can also be done using applescript and that is much faster:

tell application "QuickTime Player"
    activate

    set startFrame to 84361
    set endFrame to 84452

    set fps to 23.976

    set startTime to startFrame / fps
    set endTime to endFrame / fps

    set inFile to "Users:me:Documents:folder:infile.mov"
    set outFile to "Users:me:Documents:folder:outfile.mov"

    try
        set theOpenedFile to open for access file outFile with write permission
        set eof of theOpenedFile to 0
    end try

    open file inFile
    trim front document from startTime to endTime
    export front document in outFile using settings preset "1080p"

    try
        close access theOpenedFile
    end try

    close every document saving no
end tell


How to scale video showing the underlying layer/track in the cropped area

You imported the footage with the resolution set in your timeline by choosing set to frame size. Thats not what you want in this case, it adds black bars wherever your footage doesn't fill the frame size set in for the timeline.

Premiere would have kept the correct aspect ratio either way, it doesn't automatically stretch footage thats not the same resolution as the timeline, you would only see distortion if the pixel aspect ratio would differ between timeline and source. Re-import the footage without the set to frame size option and you should be fine.


In PP CC 2017; When I extract clips from a long video, I label them and put them in a Bin but they do not appear as files on my computer. Can I assume that these are just pointers from within my Project referencing the original footage?

Elements of the Project tab (clips, sequences, black video, etc) are all abstract things which, themselves, take up no space on disk.  Clips refer to media files, and those media files, of course, do take up space on disk.  So, yes, you can assume that the clips in the Project tab are just pointers from within your Project referencing the original footage.

  All told there is over 4 hours of video and I would like to re-assemble the scenes into various categories, such as, Holidays, Outings, Family Gatherings and Birthdays. Should I organize everything into one big project or into separate projects, like say, one for each category? Are there any particular advantages of one method over the other?

You should organize all of this as a single project, and you should create difference Sequences for each collection of clips you would like to produce as a short.  For example, if "Dad's Birthday, 1945" is three different clips (we'll get to what that means in a minute), you'd make a sequence that edits together at least those three different clips, possibly with other clips that provide glimpses into the past or future.

Clips are initially the media files you import.  And judging by the fact that these initial files are spliced together from shorter reels, each clip may have dozens of individual subjects.  What fun!  This is where you are going to want to master two things: sub-clips and Premiere Pro metadata.

Normally when shooting digitally, each time you hit the "record" button, the camera creates a digital media file that can then become a clip.  Inside PPro you would then set the IN and OUT points of the clip to eliminate the unnecessary frames before and after the action you really wanted to record.

In your case, you have a clip that's a hodge-podge of recorded actions.  You can select frames that constitute a specific action you'd like to use as a clip in your timeline, (right-click → Make Subclip) and it will create an object that behaves just like a clip, even though it's relative to another clip, not a media file on disk.

As soon as you make a sub-clip, it's a good idea to tag it with metadata so you can find and organize it later: categories, subjects, dates, whatever keys you can think of that will help you find, collect, and edit related sub-clips.  To edit the related sub-clips, you put them into a sequence and edit.

Bins (and smart bins, which automatically collect clips according to metadata tags) can help you clean up the clutter of having 100s of sub-clips.

If you want to make 12 chapters for a DVD, you should create 12 sequences.  If you want to make a monolithic DVD, one sequence will suffice.  If don't initially know what you want to do, you can make sequences for each category you define.  You can render "lossless" media files from each of these sequences, then import the resulting clips which you can then organize into a DVD.

To summarize: one project, sequences related to categories or chapters, rich metadata, and hundreds of clips organized into bins to keep your top-level project window sane.