Format of imported video files in Adobe Premiere

Premiere works with the source files you provide.  Depending on the format it may generate a lossy copy that can be used for faster preview in the editor, but final renders will work directly from your source files.  That's what's going on if you see it says it is conforming  files in the lower right corner.


Lavalier vs. cardioid mic for low-budget amateur DSLR video recording?

It depends no how far away you are shooting from and how centered your subject will be.  You definitely DO NOT want a lavalier mic for your situation.  They do offer very nice noise reduction while not requiring a boom operator, but they still require setup and distinct micing of each speaker.  This will not work at all in your use case.

You absolutely want a shotgun mic, no question at all about it.  The question becomes, how focused of a shotgun mic do you want?  This is a trade off kind of thing.  The more focused the shotgun mic (moving from cardioid in to supercardioid and then hypercardioid on most mics, but some manufacturers label differently apparently).  The narrower the mic's sweet spot, the less noise you will get, but the closer your subjects will have to be to that sweet spot to be audible.

If you are shooting from a long way away or shooting pointed directly at someone, then a hypercardioid mic is the way to go to get the least interference and focus in the most on that spot.  If, instead, you are going to have a lot of people, all over the frame, and right up next to the camera, then you want just a plain cardioid mic on top that can pick up a wide space of sound, but it will also pick up a lot more noise.

Look at pick up patterns and try to visualize where people will be.  You ideally want them to fall in the coverage circle for the microphone if you were looking top down on the scene.


Is it possible to shift a video track a fraction of a second in Sony Vegas Pro 10?

Shift+dragging ignores grid, markers, fade-in/fade-out marks, and all other time points that otherwise would cause "sticking".

The same applies to dragging the Event entirely and its start/stop borders.


what software & How to Synchronize sequence pictures with audio and make it a video just like gif image

You can use pretty much any movie editor that allows the import of single frames.

First line up your audio, work out where you want the key frames to be (eg for reversing the movement when shaking the head) and then fill in the other frames.

If your editor allows interpolation between frames, then you can use this to make the movie less jerky.

Or you can use one of the free online gif creators to join your images into a gif and then import that into a video editor - slightly more effort, but not much.


How can I change/reduce the bitrate of AVI files using Adobe Premiere Pro CC or other tools?

Premier Pro doesn't encode XViD, you'll need to rely on another solution such as FFmpeg.  Using FFmpeg is a different question but the command will be something similar to:

ffmpeg.exe -y -i "in.xvid" -t 480.00 -vf scale=720:301,pad=720:576:0:137 -map 0:v:0 -map 0:1 -b:v 2500K -vcodec libxvid -aspect 1.25 -b:a:0 128K -ac:a:0 2 -ar:a:0 48000 -codec:a:0 libmp3lame "out.avi"

you'll need to tinker with these settings to get the exact quality you want


How to encode from Premiere using nvenc Nvidia codec but still output to mp4/avi

It's funny how you can try solutions for hours but the moment you post a question online or to IRC you find the answer yourself within minutes.. Anyways, digging around I found tat instead of using mp4box as my multiplexer I changed to TsMux as per the thread instructions and that still didnt' work however I noticed I had one more option, mkvmerge, so I tracked that down here: http://www.videohelp.com/software/MKVtoolnix , installed it and used that instead and viola, it did the trick.  Was able to use the nvenc codec and get a video in the end that was accepted by youtube.

Now of course because I have solved this problem it would appear that the nvenc codec is no longer using my gpu at all after upgrading to the latest nvidia drivers so there's that issue to solve but at least I can use the codec and get useable vids.  Hopefully this is useful to someone else experiencing the same issue down the road


Tranferring an iMovie project from iPhone to MacBook Pro

Turns out I finally found my own solution:

Make sure you have the latest versions of iMovie, especially on iOS. This was the main problem causer for me, as iMovie claimed to be updated and would not show up in the updates in the App Store until I restarted several times.

From your iPhone: export the project you wish to transfer to iTunes. Connect your iPhone to your computer via a USB cable and download the filename.iMovieMobile file to your computer.

Open iMovie on your computer, and click File > Import iMovie iOS Projects....

You should have the project imported to iMovie on the computer! Now, you can even transfer to Final Cut Pro X (see here for info on how to do that).

Make sure you are running the most recent versions of iMovie!


Why does editing a video by Adobe Premiere Pro more than once decreases its quality?

There is a big difference between

saving your project, then returning to the project to do some additional changes, such as brightness adjustments, then exporting a media file, and
exporting a media file from your project, importing the result into a new project, doing some additional changes, such as brightness adjustments, then exporting the result of that to create yet another media file.

In the case of (1), you are working with your original source media, which is pretty much as good as it gets in terms of input quality.  In the case of (2), if you export a compressed file (and virtually every playable media file is a compressed version of the originals, which may also be compressed), then you are working with a second generation of quality.  While you may not immediately perceive that the second generation file is not quite as good as your original masters, compression errors and noise accumulates every time through the cycle.

One way around this problem is to only ever export in uncompressed file formats.  But this is not practical, as uncompressed 1080p video is 2.98Gbps (compared that to your typical AVCHD codec that is limited to 28Mbps, about 100x less).

The practical way around this problem is to return to the project that created your first media export.  In that project, add the brightness correction you want as an additional correction, export using the original sources, and then you will have media quality that's as good as your original export, with the color quality you were hoping to achieve with your second export.


Film DCI4k or UHD for exporting DCI-Scope but watching on UHD screen

I researched a bit more on my own and it looks like there is a diffrence but no big one.

While a native image will look better, the image quality isn't much diffrent when "downscaling" to UHD.

It might be noticable on a high quality projector screen, but on desktop and espacially on mobile screens it shouldn't be a problem.


Can not render After Effects CC project as mp4 / h.264 any more?

All Adobe video products are intended to target consumer formats through Adobe Media Encoder since CC 2014, After Effects has almost only intermediate formats now in its internal renderer (which is essentially the exact same thing as the one in AME).

Instead of clicking on "Add to Render Queue" you click on "Add to Media Encoder Queue" and in AME you will have all the formats you had before and even a few more.

This has the advantage that you can continue working on your project while AME is rendering your composition. No need anymore for a background render plugin.


Convert & Burn M2TS files into DVD format WITHOUT LOSS

Whatever else you may be facing, one big obstacle is the DVD players themselves. They're not designed to output 1080p. Even if you could get the image onto them in Bluray format, they couldn't output it. (If they're really Bluray players, then you don't need any hacks, just a dupe of the image.)

If the content is something they want to see, people will be pleased to get standard DVDs regardless of the quality.


In my experience both Premiere and FCP will do pretty much the same thing.
They have similar lay outs and, I would say, are as easy to use as each other. I first used Premiere when I had a PC but moved to FCP when I went to university and got a mac. I find it a lot easier to edit with FCP and the transition to other programs are very simple and effective (file > send to > Color/Compressor).

If you have a mac I would suggest buying the final cut pro studio. It comes with Motion, Soundtrack Pro, DVD Studio Pro, Color and Compressor. Everything you need (pretty much except Adobe After Effects). And if you have a PC then go with Premiere. That's my advice.


What if YouTube owner doesn't respond if I can use their upload further?

Nothing, really. YouTube Standard License doesn't give you any rights to redistribute or remix the video (see my answer here). You can only try to contact the uploader through other means. Look through their channel info to see if you can find a website, Twitter, E-Mail address or any other contact information. Depending on how badly you want to use this video, there are also other means of online stalking finding contact information that you might try. For example, if he uses a distinct user name you can try to search for that user name on Google, Twitter or other social media and see if you find something.


I just found out how to solve my problem. The H.264 codec is the issue, it somehow does not work with it and AE gives you a warning: Output file will be resized from 2085 x 2560 (1.0 PAR) to 2000 x 2000 (1.0 PAR) to meet format constraints.

Solution:

I went with the MPEG4 codec and it worked as I wanted.


ffmpeg log missing "dup" and "drop" key-value pairs

If no frames are dupped or dropped, then those fields are not printed.

If you need a definitive statement, add -progress filename to print progress report to a file and search for dup_frames and drop_frames.


Can't import some .mov files into Adobe Premiere, it says "Codec missing or unavailable"

First off, codec packs are often more problem than they are worth.  They tend to cause conflicts as much or more than resolve them.  You are far better off targeting the particular codec that is needed.  If you look at the information about the clip, it should indicate the codec that is used within the MOV and you should then be able to get that particular codec for your machine.

From the info you listed.  It appears to be an XDCAM format.  I would recommend going to the camera manufacturer's website and looking for their XDCAM codec.  If you can't find it, I suggest posting the actual camera model here.


What exactly does the video rendering quality option do in Sony Vegas Pro?

This is the explanation for the four quality modes, as provided by Vegas tech support long ago:

  Quality: Best

  Scaling: bi-cubic/integration

  Field Handling: on

  Field Rendering: on (setting dependent)

  Framerate Resample/IFR: on (switch dependent)

  Quality: Good

  Scaling: bi-linear

  Field Handling: on

  Field Rendering: on (setting dependent)

  Framerate Resample/IFR: on (switch dependent)

  Quality: Preview

  Scaling: bi-linear

  Field Handling: off

  Field Rendering: off

  Framerate Resample/IFR: always off

  Quality: Draft

  Scaling: point sample

  Field Handling: off

  Field Rendering: off

  Framerate Resample/IFR: always off

  Scaling:

  These methods come into play when conforming sources that differ from
  the output size. They are also used when panned, cropped or resized in
  track motion.

  Bi-Cubic/Integration - Best image resizing algorithm available in
  Vegas. Quality differences will be most noticeable when using very
  large stills or stretching small sources.

  Bi-linear - Best compromise between speed and quality. This method
  will produce good results in most cases.

  Point Sampling - Fast but produces poor results.

  Field Handling:

  This refers to the field conformance stage of Vegas's video engine.
  This includes Interlaced to Progressive conversion, Interlaced to
  interlaced output when scaling, motion or geometric Video FX and
  Transitions are involved. Skipping this stage can sometimes result in
  bad artifacts when high motion interlaced sources are used.

  Field Rendering:

  When the output format is interlaced, Vegas will internally render at
  the field rate (twice the frame rate) to achieve smooth motion and FX
  interpolation.

  Frame Rate Resample / IFR (Interlace Flicker Reduction):

  Frame Rate Resample:

  This kicks in when speed changes are made through Velocity Envelopes
  and/or event stretching. In can also be used when up-converting low
  frame rate sources. This only kicks in if the resample switch is
  turned on and quality is set to good or best.

  Interlace Flicker Reduction:

  This kicks in if the event switch is turned on and quality is set to
  good or best. See Vegas' documentation for a description of this
  switch.


What do I need to know about buying a VCR for digitising old VHS tapes?

so now I'm wondering if my tapes are marked as PAL SECAM, do I need a PAL VCR?

Yes, VCRs partially deconstruct the signal to encode it on the tape, and so are specific to a particular analogue video format.
In practical terms, if you try to play a PAL tape in an NTSC VCR connected to a PAL TV, you'll probably get a distorted black-and-white image, or perhaps no usable signal at all.

I've seen a few local listings on eBay for NTSC VCRs, and confusingly I even saw one that said "NTSC Playback on PAL TV"

It was very common to import North American tapes back in the day.  These VCRs can convert an NTSC format tape to PAL output for European TV sets.  The reverse also existed (though quite a bit rarer) in North America.

I see some are listed as 4-head, 6-head, Super Drive, etc.? Do any of these matter for my purposes?

4 head machines have a slight advantage in quality, particularly with playing ELP/LP tapes.  The extra 2 heads in 6 head machines are only for recording.  And "Super Drive" just appears to be a Panasonic marketing term, as far as I can tell.

Is this true?

Sort of.  VCRs are temperamental machines, and it's all analogue.  During their heyday, the quality of video you'd get from units varied enormously.  A quality S-VHS machine recording to quality tape on a well-calibrated machine was almost as nice as 480p digital is, really.  But I think we're just about old enough to remember what VHS usually looked like.

Will I need to shell out for a more expensive S-VHS VCR to avoid sacrificing quality?

This would only really be necessary if the original footage was recorded as S-VHS.  If so, then yes.  Some later VHS machines can play S-VHS tapes with reduced quality.  Still, play S-VHS tapes on S-VHS machines.
S-VHS equipment was high-end, and so generally better quality than the cheap VCRs that proliferated in the 90s and 00s.  So you will often find a preference for S-VHS machines.  But a good quality S-VHS and VHS deck should play a VHS tape back equivalently well.
Practically speaking, for high quality, you'd want to play back on a good deck that has been calibrated and had its heads cleaned and belts replaced, etc.  That would mean a machine that's been maintained or refurbished, not something that's been sitting on a damp shelf for 20 years.
With all that said, a few years ago I transferred a relative's home movies with a cheap 20 year old VCR and it's about what one would expect for 1980s camcorder footage.  I fed it The Great Mouse Detective first though, in case it might have been a tape-eater.


FFmpeg text overlay add sensor values into video stream

This question a bit similar to I'm trying to add guitar tabs to a music video, do you know any software to do it?

At first, in which format your data, which protocol used from your sensors? I guess, here some closed-source software and proprietary protocol for there sensors? Obviously, you need software which can read this data format/protocol. If you creating own system with micro-controllers, try to find usable and open protocol for data. It very hard to find open protocols with needed functionality.

At this point I guess, you found any appropriate protocol. For example, JSON with custom fields. Now try to find/write software, which will be use it.

One possible way: write web-application, which will display video stream in your browser, loads data from sensors and display funny overlay. Then just grab video from your screen and broadcast to youtube or any other service. This is "dirty" way, but it will work.

Other way: write custom filter to ffmpeg. You can use ass-renderer for reference how to add text on image. Just add reading data from your sensors and your task completed.

Writing fast and dirty video filters

Sometimes we need to somehow filter the video, maybe put some text or graphic on top. Write a full application that decompresses the video stream, imbues the image with new elements or changes the image itself, and then compresses the stream anew, somewhat difficult. Today we will learn how to quickly and dirty make such applications without knowing how to encode the video in general.

To begin with, remember that the images consist of rows and columns of points, which are called pixels. Each point consists of 3 or 4 components, usually Red, Green and Blue signals, and sometimes there is an Alpha channel. Therefore, to change 1 point of the image, we need to change 3-4 components (this is usually 3-4 bytes). So, to change the entire image, we need to change all the rows and columns, in each of 3-4 elements and somehow modifying them, save back. For example, if we have a picture of 256x192 pixels in RGB24 format, then it will have 49152 pixels and 147456 color components (bytes).

Therefore, we just need to read pieces of 147456 bytes, somehow modify them and write them back! It's all! No complicated libraries or algorithms are required! Where do we get these bytes? And we can get them with wonderful utility ffmpeg and its equally wonderful rawvideo mode, the exhaust of which we will give to stdout and receive in stdin your application!

Let's write the simplest application that will slightly change the image:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdint.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

int main () {

// allocate variables and buffer

uint8_t *pixels = malloc (147456);
uint8_t *pix;
int q;

while (1) {

// read frame
if (fread (pixels, 1,147456, stdin) <= 0) {break;}

// process image
pix = pixels;
for (q = 0; q <49152; q ++) {
*pix++ = *pix * 2; // multiple red to 2
*pix++ = *pix + 120; // shift green channel
*pix++ = *pix + q / 10; // lines in blue channel
}

// write frame back
fwrite (pixels, 1,147456, stdout);
}

return EXIT_SUCCESS;
}

Yes, that's all! Of course, here all the constants are hardcoded, never do so in real projects!

Now, run this and upload a video here:

ffmpeg -i video.mp4 -s 256x192 -f rawvideo -pix_fmt rgb24 - | ./a.out | ffmpeg -s 256x192 -f rawvideo -pix_fmt rgb24 -i - -y out.mp4

And we get the following result:

Let's analyze what parameters in this line participated:

ffmpeg -i video.mp4 -s 256x192 -f rawvideo -pix_fmt rgb24 -

Here we read from the file video.mp4, resize the picture to 256x192 (if your video is already 256x192 in size, then you can not do this), then we specify that it should be converted to rgb24 color space (if it is not already in it, what for can spend quite a lot of resources), and the result we need in the form of uncompressed video rawvideo, the result we record in -, i.e. in stdout.

| ./a.out |

And this is our application. Vertical "tubes" mean that it will take data from the previous application and transfer it to the next

ffmpeg -s 256x192 -f rawvideo -pix_fmt rgb24 -i - -y out.mp4

Here we indicate that the input of this ffmpeg will be uncompressed video in rawvideo format, size of 256x192 and in the rgb24 color space. It is also may need to specify fps, as it is lost from such conversion. We will write output to out.mp4, and even if such file already exists, the -y parameter is responsible for this

Here is a very simple example of changing the image, but you can overlay text, other pictures and anything else. Of course, it's better to write a full-fledged application, or at least patch the already existing filter to the desired state, this will be a more correct solution. But if you need a working solution, while you do not want to write a lot of code, this is the solution for you.


Davinci Resolve lite is free, and it contains an excellent motion tracker.  By combining the motion tracker with a power window, and adding a color correction (to darken everything outside of the power window), you should be able to achieve the results you're after very quickly.  For tutorials on Davinci Resolve, search youtube for Alexis Van Hurkman.  He literally wrote the book on it (the instruction manual), and provides a generous amount of tutorials online for free.  Of course, he also has a complete course for sale through ripple training.  You can download Resolve lite here.


The first thing I'd be looking at is Processing. There's a library that lets you read video, there's an example here that shows how to to sequentially grab frames from a video.

Then (instead of displaying the frame like it does in that example) you need to find the channel values for the spot which you could do by copying the frame to a PImage. Then the value of the pixel (x,y) is found in the PImage property pixels[x,y]. Finally use createWriter() to output the data to a file. You could even get fancy and use the mouse to control your sample point, and so on.


Wow, I have found interesting solution:
Method 1 (bad approach):

duplicate main video streams and put over the main stream, just off-seting them 1 frame after

change the opacity of the top video to 31%, second to 51%, (leave third at 100%)

and the flickering will be gone out. However, it has a downside - the motions will be seen a bit stretched (because of 3-frame repeated).
Method 2 (Better):
No need to reinvent wheel, there are priced plugins for it. I can't remember but there was a good plugin in market, named "de-flicker" or "anti-flicker" with free trial to test, which did excellent job!


What lenses are preferred for DSLR video?

Properties that are desired in these lenses are quiet operation, image stabilization, zoom construction that usually cover wide to short tele focal lenght and that have a constant aperture across that range. A perfocal design is good when using a zoom. These are a couple of general characteristics but they may be different for special applications.

Quiet operation helps if you want to avoid focusing sounds appearing in your video. If you're using external microphones this is less of a problem.

Image stabilization makes everything (from static vieography to panning= appear a lot smoother.

To have a zoom lens gives a lot of nice possibilities and constant aperture is an important feature since the exposure won't change when zooming. A parfocal lens is a lens that maintains its focus when changing focal lenght (zooming) and is of course very useful. Also a zoom range from wide to short tele is usually enough and you probably don't want to go out of that range during video production unless you're looking to produce nature films and alike.

Look for for lenses with this kind of properties. Being a Canon user I'm most familiar with them and can recommend Canon EF 24-105/4,0 L IS USM having most of these features but if you're using another brand I can't help ypu more than this due to lack of experience with other brands.


How can I accurately immitate this Picasa filter with Premiere's color correction filters?

This might be better suited as a comment to your original post, but alas I do not yet have those privilegies.

Anyway, my answer to you would be a cliché one: Keep tinkering.

It's really a matter of finding out what effects Premiere can offer, deciding which will be able to assist you the most and then going back and forth between them until you find a result that pleases you.

That said, you might want to check out the Color Balance effect. I find it very useful in most projects.


Proper time stretch in After Effects for multiple layers

You can nest this two clips in new composition, and change time starching on it.


Recording Presentations with OBS and a Bluetooth Mic

You could get a Sennheiser ClipMic, plug it into a cell phone, and then establish a Bluetooth connection between the cell phone and the Laptop.  I can't give any first-hand recommendations on best practices for Bluetooth audio streaming for live mics (I think most professionals prefer dedicated RF equipment to BT), but it does seem like there are options available.  Here's one that came up in a google search for "cell phone bluetooth PC audio microphone" without quotes.


How to automate the rendering of all possible combinations of a composition in Adobe After Effects?

I hope there is a better answer, but my similar case is making lower thirds where I have to change out the name.  In that case, I have a static composition with the title that I use as a source in other compositions.  I then create a text layer for each name, hide all but one, click through to the final render comp (using the parent/child links) and start a generation for each.

It's still manual, but it is a relatively quick way to get them dumped out.  In your case, you could do one comp for the team logos and one for the scores (or just do two sets of layers in the same comp.)

Alternately, you may be able to render the background blank and then render the text and graphics layer's being animated without the background render.  This can save time if the background animation is difficult to render and the composition allows for alpha blending to meet the needs.  I wouldn't generally bother with that added complexity unless the background being pre-rendered would save a lot of time though.


How to convert a .m4v video/audio file to .mp4 on Windows-7, for free

Somewhat of an duplicate of: Can I manually change an .mp4 to .m4v by changing the extension in the Finder (mac) or explorer (win)?

MP4 and M4V are essentially the exact same thing, M4V is usually used to indicate video only files but some sofware/companies are using it for standard MP4 files with video AND audio (lots of Apple software f.e.).
It's just a convention to indicate the type of content. An audio only MP4 f.e. would have the extension .m4a.
You can just rename the extension from .m4v to .mp4.


Final Cut Pro- Reopen Library and Entire Timeline is Gone!

The timeline for which you are looking is actually called a "Project".  Projects are stored within events, which are in turn stored within a library.  Just opening a library (from within the finder, for instance) will not necessarily open your project.  To do that, you need to twirl down the disclosure triangle next to your Library in the event manager, select the event upon which you were working, and then double click the Project name to load it in the timeline.  Also, make sure that you are connected to any drives or network storage locations that you might have stored media to when you created the project.


First reason:
Videos / audios in AVI or MKV containers may be encoded by various codecs, and not all them are supported by MP4 containters.

Second reason:
Containers are more than simple boxes for videos, audios, subtitles, etc. with some not so important metadata as author or date/time. They have a lot of unevitable valuable information, e. g. the synchronization between audio and video is possible only due to it.

So there is not a reliable algorithm to convert any AVI -> MP4 or any MKV -> MP4 (and, generally speaking, from one type of container to a different one) without changing the streams (audios, videos, etc.) contained in them - the result may be similar to the one you described.


Track and replace a t-shirt design on a moving, distorted garment

Nuke's Smart Vector toolset is built for this exact problem. I see you tagged After Effects, but you did not specify that After Effects is needed. I've done this a few times before and Mocha is your best bet for AE, but as you already know it has it's limitations. Nuke can actually track the creases and folds (though of course it isn't perfect). The biggest factor I've seen in my tests is shot duration - the longer the shot the more the vectors get all messed up. That said it can sometimes do magical things! I believe you can rent Nuke for a decent price if you just need to do one shot.

Here's a tutorial showing how to replace part of a shirt. It is a bit older, but because it addresses exactly what you are trying to do I thought I'd link it:

If you absolutely need to use AE I would combine a mocha track with a puppet warp which is hand-animated. Using Mocha you can stabilize the footage, overlay your logo and keyframe the puppet warp, and the re-track it back into the original footage.


How / can you make subclips from sequences in Adobe Premiere CC?

If you convert all the clips in your timeline (video, audio, adjustment layer) into a Compound Clip, then underlying changes will be properly reflected in your Compound Clip.


You can download royalty-free songs for video production or poems free for video production. It is no charge


How to apply multiple chroma keys in ffmpeg?

Instead of always using [1:v], you would use the output of the previous one e.g. [ckout1]
My guess, you want this:
ffmpeg -i input1.mp4 -i input2.mp4 -filter_complex '[1:v]colorkey=0x6AA999:0.1:0.2[ckout1];[ckout1]colorkey=0x4D827A:0.1:0.2[ckout2];[0:v][ckout2]overlay[out2]' -map '[out2]' output.mp4

(Maybe the inputs switched around)
The overlay you are using is from https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-filters.html#colorkey? My guess is, that you misunderstood, what the overlay does in the example there. The example describes overlaying 2 opaque videos on top of each other, where the upper video receives transparency first.
What you are doing is overlay the transparent version of input2 onto input1 and then colorkeying input2 again and putting that also on top of input1 and the first colorkey.


Import Theora video into Premiere Elements

Currently it doesn't appear possible to directly import Ogg Theora video into Premiere Elements 10, however I did manage to convert the video to DNxHD/VC-3 so that PRE would handle it nicely (previous conversions had behaved very badly)

ffmpeg -i out-48.ogv -s 1920x1080 -r pal -b 36M -threads 2 -vcodec dnxhd -acodec libmp3lame out-48.mov

http://blog.jamiek.it/2012/11/encoding-ogv-files-to-edit-in-adobe.html


What's the difference between 3G-A SDI and 3G-B SDI?

Wikipedia does mention it - with a reference link included:

  Within this standard there are three formats known as Level A, Level B
  Dual Link (B-DL) and Level B Dual Stream (B-DS). The Level A format is
  the direct mapping of uncompressed 1080p (up to 60 fps) video into a
  serial digital interface at the nominal 3 Gbit/s. The Level B-DL
  format is the mapping of dual-link HD-SDI/SMPTE 372M (i.e.: 1080p up
  to 60 fps) in a single serial digital interface at the nominal 3
  Gbit/s. The Level B-DS format is the dual-stream carriage of two
  independent HD-SDI/SMPTE 292M signals (720p up to 60 fps or
  1080i/1080p up to 30 fps) in a single serial digital interface at the
  nominal 3 Gbit/s

The PDF reference has the descriptions starting on pg. 17.


The Avid Liquid product line was EOLed in 2010 and Windows XP SP2 is the latest Windows version supported.

At the Liquid forum, someone suggests a method to install Liquid 7.2 on Windows 7. See if you can use it for Windows 8.1


Merge two transparent webm videos with FFmpeg

Since 2016-07-20, it's possible to decode properly a webm with alpha channel (VP8a or VP9a) but you need the -vcodec libvpx option. You must download an FFmpeg compiled after that date (or compile yourself with up-to-date commits) and use the following command:

ffmpeg -i logo.webm -vcodec libvpx -i cortina.webm -filter_complex overlay -vcodec libvpx output.webm

Note that -vcodec libvpx is before the input that needs to be read using the alpha planes (in this case, is cortina.webm the overlaid video, thus we put the option just before it).

(As Mulvya states, the format conversion should be avoided in this case.)


How do I adjust things in 3d in after effects

I pressed CTRL + SHIFT + H and my controls were back


After Effects - Recreate a "distortion" or a special Radial Blur effect / Slowly pitch sound down

You can recreate this effect with the CC Radial Blur effect set to "Fading Zoom" together with the Ripple effect or the Turbulent Displacement effect.
Apply these effects to an Adjustment layer above your video layer and add a round mask in the middle with some feather to have the blur and distortion only on the sides of the screen. Use separate Adjustment Layers for each effect to fine tune the strength of both effects with separate masks.

You also want to set the size wave size of the ripple effect to something like 60/30 to have it closer to the look in Dishonored and to not have it so uniform. Setting it to asymmetric might be a good ideas as well

To get even closer you can apply some other distortion effects available in After Effects, just play around a bit. The Turbulent Displacement effect is also a great alternative to the Ripple effect, might even be closer to the look in the game. It has a far less uniform displacement.


I believe that the effect used for both the zoom in the beginning and the multiple vertical frames later on is the effect 'BlurMoCurves'. It's part of Sapphire OFX plugins and can be installed (and used) in Sony Vegas Pro. It's not a transition but thanks to zooming it can look like one.

The very last frames, when the clip goes down vertically, is probably one of Roll transitions which are a part of NewBlueFX plugins, also compatible with Sony Vegas. Here you can see the examples (the one I'd say was used is the second one in the Roll video). Hope this helps!


Using ffmpeg, how do I trim and overlay two different time periods from the same input?

The parallel processing is happening slow enough that FFmpeg is flushing frames in buffer for the first trimmed clip. You can use the fifo filter to avoid that. Also, you can use vstack and skip the nullsrc/overlay route.

ffmpeg -i input.avi -filter_complex "
    [0:v] trim=0:60, setpts=PTS-STARTPTS, fifo [v0];
    [0:v] trim=60:120, setpts=PTS-STARTPTS [v1];
    [v0][v1] vstack [out]" \
-map "[out]" output.mkv


You want to adjust a mix of gamma, brightness and contrast, or if available, simply use curves.  Gamma impacts the way in which the output intensity corresponds to input intensity, but if you don't also adjust other settings, you will still end up clipping key details outside of either the signal range of your signal or the display range of your display.

Using curves gives the most flexibility to adjust the amount of contrast in each portion of the range of signal intensity so that you can see everything clearly, however it is also possible you are simply near the effective limit of the range your display can produce depending on where the information you need contrast for is.

I suggest starting by trying to make sure your contrast or black point (on curves), is set such that you can tell the difference in shadow detail and then trying to adjust the brightness or white point (in curves) to get it so you can just tell difference in light detail and then try adjusting gamma to give you the needed spread.


Changing aperture within a single video clip

In video terms, aperture is often called iris as well and particularly in live video, it is fairly common to adjust the aperture to adjust light sensitivity.

For both live and post produced video, it is also relatively common to use lenses with smoother apertures.  Most photo lenses have apertures that click in to set values, but video lenses will sometimes have aperture rings that will move smoothly through the aperture range to allow for very smooth transitions in aperture.

Aperture is the preferred means of adjusting sensitivity to light if needed as changes in shutter speed have a more pronounced impact and until recently, smooth changes in ISO were not easily possible in most cases.  (Certainly not smooth as a smooth aperture ring.)

Adjusting aperture live with a click-in aperture is probably non-ideal, but if you have a smooth one, it should be fine and in a pinch you can still do click-in adjustment, it will just be rather obvious when it changes, but that's still better than whited out or blacked out video.


Is there any way we can show live tweets?

I suggest you try out OBS with it's Twitter plugin.

https://obsproject.com/forum/threads/transparent-borderless-scalable-auto-updating-tweets.12277/

Complete instructions how to set it up, in the linkage.


FFmpeg's segment muxer is designed for this.

ffmpeg -i in.mp4 -c copy -f segment -segment_time 1200 -reset_timestamps 1 in%d.mp4

Output files will be in0.mp4, in1.mp4...

Since the video keyframes in the source file may not be present exactly at the start of each 20 minute interval, the output segments won't be exactly 20 minutes each. Expect a deviation of a few seconds.


The best option you have is to use the trial version of after effects. You can create an adobe creative cloud account and try the program for 30 days free of charge there. If it's only one job and you're using a template, the trial time should be sufficient. If not, there's always the option of creating a different account with another mail and beginning the trial anew.


I have tried it on the colab, plz check if
https://colab.research.google.com/gist/xer-rex/90c426cd7dbdfd4ec3330a7c3b46f98f/sidebyside.ipynb helps?


Software or video interpretation to create live dance floor effects

I think most things like this tend to be specialty installations where the system and image processing is designed by the artist making it.  The exact ways to approach it would depend on the particular type of effect you are trying to produce.  It could be as simple as storing the last few frames and blending them together with an average that is weighted towards the last frame to give it a blur look or various other possible methods of effect.

At it's simplest, you might look at some of the simple effects stuff that some webcams make available, but I'd expect you'd need to do custom work for most of it.  You could also look in to video jokey software that might have some components that could be used for this kind of thing, though I don't personally have a whole lot of experience in that particular arena, so the amount of help I can give is limited there.


Is there a way to smooth random audio dropouts with ffmpeg or Premiere?

Neither Premiere nor ffmpeg support such an operation as far as I know.
But you could edit the audio with another program. Most DAWs (digital audio workstation) have more features to edit audio than video editors.
One such DAW is "Reaper". It comes with a free trial period, so you can test it for yourself if it's a good fit for your workflow. I'm sure other DAWs offer similar features but I don't use them and hence can't tell you more. I also don't know whether Adobe's Audition can do that.
The steps to solve the problem in Reaper are:

create a new track, insert the media file that contains the audio track
use the action "Item: Auto trim/split items (remove silence)" where you select the mode "split and keep silent areas". Play around with the other parameters if the splits are done at the wrong place. When splits are created, Reaper automatically adds a crossfade by default (can be changed in Preferences->Project->Media Items Defaults->"Create automatic fade-in/fade-out for new items").
Render the audio and re-import it into the video editor, if needed.


Editing 1440p @ 47 FPS in Premiere Pro CS6

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

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

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


Producing Portrait orientation stop motion videos

This is most likely a problem related to the app you are using to create/view these stop-motion videos. If you have portrait-orientated pictures, creating a video accordingly is simply a matter of setting the right video dimensions (i.e. video width and height in pixels); basically every video editing software allows you to set this manually or choose from a number of presets. If your smartphone displays it like this:

the video was probably exported with incorrect settings, e.g. a widescreen preset; in that case, the video might contain black borders at both sides, which might be why your phone is displaying the video like this. How did you create this stop-motion video in the first place? Your questions sounds a bit like you used some smartphone app, which leads to all kinds of problems, including the video dimension and orientation issues you get when you can't set custom video parameters.

Edit: Since you used the windows-movie-maker tag, I should mention that this is the single most useless video editing program in all known and unknown universes, dimensions and planes of existance. The best solution to any problem related to Windows Movie Maker is switching to another program that actually does anything of what it's supposed to do.


What's the difference between TV and cinema motion?

I don't know where they have "TV motion" from as at least in my area we use 1/(2×fps) for TV too. Or higher for sports.

1/(2×fps) simply has a "natural" motion blur to it which is often used in cinema as it is often the best choise.

A shutter slower than that has much more shutter, I describe it as dream like.
A shutter faster than that often looks like a robot, with each image being sharp and jumpy.

The first can be used in slow scenes as it won't be really notable.
The seconde one can be used in for example sports TV so you can really see each detail and it isn't blured out


Create a movie file from a set of pdf files

A tool to do that would be FFmpeg but unfortunately it does not support PDF decoding.
Though you can convert your pdf's to png's using imagemagick (relevant question on askUbuntu).

And then create a movie out of those PNG's with ffmpeg. This guide on the ffmpeg page explains how, here an example command:

ffmpeg -r 1/5 -i img%03d.png -c:v libx264 -r 30 -pix_fmt yuv420p out.mp4

This read images from the current folder with the prefix "img" and a following number of 3 digits and display them for 5 seconds (-r 1/5) with a frame rate of 30 fps (-r 30).


How can I overlap content in Windows Movie Maker?

There's no native support for any sort of "Picture-in-Picture" functionality in Windows Movie Maker, so unfortunately, what you are asking cannot be done in WMM.


How to automatically divide a large video file into smaller clips?

FFMPEG can do it, with a bit of shell scripting. Here's how you could do it using Powershell on Windows:

$vidLength = <the length of your video in seconds>
$vstart = 0;
$c = 0;
while ($start -lt $vidlength){
  ffmpeg -ss $vstart -t 180 -i inputvid.mp4 -c:v v210 -c:a pcms16le ("output_{0:0000}.avi" -f $c);
  $vstart += 180;
  $c++;
}

What I'm doing is using a loop to control the ffmpeg command line video program. $vstart is a variable that sets the start time of each video segment, $c is a counter that will be used to number the files.

The ffmpeg command works by using the -ss command which seeks to the given time in the input, and the -t command which sets the duration to encode - both numbers are in seconds. inputvid.mp4 is the name of your input video. the -c:v command sets the video codec to v210 which is lossless uncompressed. This will create very large files. Hours of v210 video will run into terrabytes of storage. You might want to use another codec, possibly a lossly one, if so you mightwant to consider using libx264 to encode as h.264. In which case the ffmpeg line would look like:

fmpeg -ss $i -t 180 -i inputvid.mp4 -crf 0 -c:a pcms16le ("output_{0:0000}.mp4" -f $c);

here the -crf command is basically like your compression setting. You can wind it down to 0 -> lossless / big files or as high as 31 -> crappy / small files. 20 is a sane value for good quality viewing copies. The -c:a command is the audio codec, in this case uncompressed. If you don't want audio you can replace this with -an.

the output name of the files is set with the expression ("output_{0:0000}.avi" -f $c) this uses powershell string formatting to produce files named output_0000.avi, output_0001.avi…`. The number of zeros after the colon sets how many leading zeros appear in the file name.

The loop continues, adding 180 (3 minutes in seconds) to $vstart every time, and updating the counter, until it reaches the end of the file.

If you want to get ffmpeg for Windows, I suggest downloading it from here, it's a lot easier than building it yourself.


Yes...possibly, if there is enough to sample from your existing video voice-overs but, as it's your voice, there's no reason to only use your videos as a source and the Acapela-Group, for example, has developed a Voice Factory for custom voice creation.

The main problem is that it will take time and money to do.

Try googling "text to speech sample my own voice" for other resources and methods and consider buying a quality text to speech application and quality sampled voice to use instead of your own. A quick Google of "high quality text to speech" will provide links to many options and demos.


Which scene transitions are commonly used?

Probably fade and cut. But, I must say every transition effect have a a point in terms of story telling. 'Cut' transition tells us the next scene might be in another place and time and so on.


Speech Detection

You havent mentioned what NLE you use to edit, however here is a method you can use to transcribe if you are using Adobe CS4 or later.

This method uses speech detection to automatically transcribe videos - a feature brought in with CS4. It then adds the the text into the metadata of the file.

  Analyze speech to create text metadata

  Select a file or clip.
  At the bottom of the Metadata panel, click Analyze Speech, or Analyze (Adobe Premiere Pro).
  Set the Language and Quality options, and select Identify Speakers if you want to create separate speech metadata for each person.
  Note: Speech Search can use any of several language-specific and dialect-specific libraries, such as libraries for Spanish and UK
  English.
  Click OK.
  The spoken words appear in the Speech Analysis section.

  To retain the speech metadata, save the project.

Obviously this depends on the quality of the audio. Good clean audio will provide the best results. Its also worth noting that Premiere uses Soundbooth to process the detection, so if your audio wasnt up to scratch you could clean it up in Soundbooth, and then perform the analysis there.

VLC Scripting

I came across this article explaining how to take the current timecode from a video and add it to a text document for transcribing. The title of the artice states its a method for Linux. However I'm sure it would be easy enough to take the method and apply it to Windows or OSX.

Manual

In regards to your current method. It depends on how many times you fall behind. when I have transcribed video I have done it at full speed but I havent bothered to fix errors while I'm typing. Usually I'll go back and fix it up later - and being that they are just for editing purposes they dont need to be totally correct.

You might also want to have a loot at Adobe Prelude CS6. Its an ingesting and meta logging program. One of its features is that it lets you add markers (and name them) in realtime as you are watching the video.


Home and end keys not working in kdenlive

The online documentation seems to indicate: <ctrl>
+<Home> to go to the beginning of a project, and <Ctrl>+<End> to go to the end of a project ?  (I found the doc with a very simple google search: kdeenlive hotkeys )
If you indeed press that, check if your keyboard is not in some kind of numerical mode: many keyboards offer different mode for the numeric-pad keys (so that you can go to numerical mode and quickly enter many numbers in a spreadsheet, or go back to the other mode and quickly use the default usage of those same keys), and a <Fn>+<some_key> (or sometimes <ctrl>+<Fn>+<some_key>)  usually activates/deactivates that special mode.


What does a flashing button mean on the Blackmagic ATEM 4 M/E front panel?

tl;dr
It indicates that ME 3 PGM is selected since there is no buttons for M/E 3 and 4.
Blackmagic ATEM Front Panel Tutorial
The switcher's front panel doesn't have a button for all routable inputs/outputs. If you click an AUX in the menu of the ATEM Software Control, you can see that you have 60 items in the dropdown, while there are only 36 buttons on the front panel.
Media Players and M/Es
You have 4 media players and 4 M/Es but there are only buttons for the first 2. For selecting the other half you have to use the same buttons by double pressing them. So to select Media Player 3 you have to double press MP 1. Buttons that work this way:

MP 1 -> Media Player 3
MP 1 KEY -> Media Player 3 Key
MP 2 -> Media Player 4
MP 2 KEY -> Media Player 4 Key
ME 1 PVW -> ME 3 PVW
ME 1 PGM -> ME 3 PGM
ME 2 PVW -> ME 4 PVW
ME 2 PGM -> ME 4 PGM

The mixer is really nitpicky when it comes to registering double presses. If you press the button to slow or too fast it won't recognize it. You have to press them in a specific rhythm with around 350 ms delay between the two presses. This might sound weird but it is true. I had to measure this since it seemed so unreliable. 180 ms doesn't work, 520 ms doesn't work. Between 250-450 ms you are good. Thanks to this neediness I would not recommend the front panel for AUX routing for these inputs when the timing is critical.
Key Masks
Every key's mask can be routed to an AUX. We have 4 upstream keys for the 4 M/Es and the 2 downstream keys on M/E 1. This means (4*4)+2=18 masks. All of these can be selected via the KEY MASK button. This button always flashes if any of the aforementioned key masks are routed to that AUX. On each KEY MASK button press it will cycle through the key masks, selecting the next key according to the order in the menu dropdown:

If the previously routed signal on that AUX was a key mask, the button press will go to the next one (below it). If it reached the end or the previous signal was not a key mask it will start from the top.


What is the name of this type of transition?

Found this double linear wipe as "Barn doors" transition in Sony Vegas video editor.


For a given bitrate, what video resolution is perceived as the highest quality?

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

Here's Vimeo video compression guidelines


I am having problems using xml list in transporting timelines from Adobe Premiere to the DaVinci Resolve

At the Big Picture level, commercial NLE companies' raison d'etre is to make money.  As such, they are obliged to protect their own intellectual property, and distinguish themselves from their competitors.  While a certain level of interoperability is required to appease their customers, they will never co-operate well enough with each other to provide each other with perfect, seamless project exchange file formats.  This is nothing new or surprising to video, not to mention computers, or capitalism in general.

However, DaVinci Resolve happens to be better than its competitors at the process of interpreting an edit created by a different NLE.  This process, by the way, is known as "conform" (that'll be a helpful search term).

Before you conform an edit from PP to DR (or anywhere), the following steps are best practice:

Export a Master Version of your sequence for reference in DR.
Create a backup of the sequence in the PP project.
"Flatten" the edit in Premiere; delete any hidden, disabled, or otherwise unused media, AND overwrite lower-level video tracks with higher-level ones, as much as possible.  Ideally, everything should fit onto V1, but realistically, 2-4 tracks of video is OK.
Remove any unsupported effects, transitions, and plugins from the remaining clips.  This step is a matter of personal preference, because Resolve actually imports and exports unsupported effects, passing them through the pipeline unchanged, at least theoretically, YMMV.  A list of supported operations is in the Resolve manual (pp. 873, Oct 2019 edition).  The "Translation issue: Effect on Clip..." error is telling you exactly which clip contains an unsupported effect.
Finally, export the .XML

The conform process begins once these steps are complete.  Some colorists will do this for you as long as you pay their day rate, others will flat out reject your project.  Patrick Inhofer encourages colorists to include conform time in their budgets on MixingLight.com (which is an excellent resource on this subject.)

Conform isn't a difficult process to comprehend, or even execute.  It is a little bit labor-intensive, and it involves checking the entire program, frame-for-frame, against the Master you export in the first step above (and manually re-creating anything which doesn't match).  Like I said before, Resolve's tools for doing this are unparalleled, but they're also too extensive to explain here.  So, you'll want to cozy up with Part 6 of the Resolve User Manual, "Import and Conform Projects" (pp.867-940 of the Oct 2019 revision).  But basically, the steps are like this:

Import your .XML from Premiere
Re-Link your footage in Resolve
Set up the Master Export you generated in Premiere as an "Offline Reference" in Resolve.
Watch the Offline Reference, side-by-side against the interpreted XML, and mark discrepancies.
Fix the discrepancies.
Do whatever it is you came into Resolve to do -- presumably, color grade.
Optionally, "round-trip" back to Premiere.

Historically, Resolve was designed as a "finishing" program.  It was meant to add the final touches.  But because the real world is messy, and edits never really get locked, BMD fully supports round-trip workflows.  They've also built some very nice NLE, DAW, and VFX/MG software into their first-class color suite.  So, if the whole round-trip thing gets tiresome, you can always just... not.


Software for marking AND describing places in video

I don't know of any sports video shot logging tools designed for personal use. Most are part of MAM systems. This site compares logging tools for cinematic production, but you can extrapolate from that. Both Adobe Premiere and Prelude include logging tools that let you set ratings and enter comments. You can use subclipping and bins to replicate the category part of your workflow.


How to make an image file flicker in a video? (stars twinkling)

Create 10 copies of your star field image. In an image-editing program (like Photoshop or GIMP), open the first image. Pick 10 stars at random, and make them darker/dimmer. Save that image. Open the next image.  Pick 10 different stars and make them dimmer.  Do that for all of your images.  In your video editor, cycle through the images, about 3/4 second each, dissolving from one to the next.


Typically recommended portrait lenses are around 85mm to 135m. These numbers refer to full frame cameras.

Since you are using a m43 camera with a crop factor of 2x you should investigate lenses from 40mm to 70mm that fit your Panasonic


Edit audio from Final Cut Pro X 10.4.5 in Logic Pro X 10.4.4

The solution is to open the menu Preferences > Advanced, then select all. Then the FCP Import menu becomes available. The Help menu did help me, but could be more directly explaining that you need to set this option in the advanced preferences.

Unbelievable that they hide this import option.


Where can I find helpfull reference for film making?

Sites like google are not enough to quickly find reference of valuable information on the topics I mentioned above

Oh, my...

You live in a privileged era, never, ever in the history of humankind was the information, examples, tutorials, were so easily available.

Where? the internet.

The problem I see without knowing you, but reading your question is that you are not focusing.

  3d scene with a female character holding a gun in the nighttime

A torrent of questions:

Is the female a girl, a young woman, an old one; Is it a western, a cyberpunk or an android female; do you want to accentuate the female's curves, probably the hips next to the gun, is she defending herself in fear or she is a badass; is it a thriller or a cop story, a drama, a comedy. Is she facing the antagonist or chasing or running away, is it an interior scene, or is in the middle of a forest... etc, etc...

  how to build scenes, composition, and lighting for either 3d animations or filming.

This is even more general... let us forget for now about set design, character design, and storytelling, drama, and rhythm of the scene (all that can be on how to build a scene) and just focus on composition and lighting...

So, look for tutorials on composition, planes, framing, depth of field. What a plane means, what does it say about a character and about the environment.

Now look for tutorials about lighting. Quality of light, the direction of light, the position of light, the color of light.

The keyword is FOCUS on what do you need. Separate the elements.

Focus on real-life tutorials. In a 3D environment is super easy to cheat and not really understanding what is happening.

There are free youtube tutorials of GREAT quality and there are event masterclasses websites with the people you see in the credits of your favorite movies.

Make a new account of youtube, and do not contaminate the search and view history watching memes.
Type a focused and specific search, and let the automatic feed give you recommendations.

One good place to start, for your specific scene is this video:

You also have a ton of websites where you can search for movies. Look for a scene that caught your attention, and again, focus on one topic. Framing? light? expression? color?

Focus.

An additional tip, with a bit more experience, you can simply find a reference image and analyze it a bit.

Again separate the elements and find out yourself what do you need, for example:

What...

Lens
Camera position
Camera distance
Light position in relation to the subject
Light position in relation to the camera

How

Many lights are there
Is the quality of the light

etc. Element by element.


Advice on Weatherproof HD Camera for Streaming Video / Audio

I've been looking for something similar but haven't found the perfect solution yet.  If you can live without it streaming in real time, I've heard good things about the Bushnell Trophy Cam series.

http://bushnell.com/all-products/trail-cameras/trophy-cam


How to sync motion and music in After Effects

Depends on how much time stretch is key to synchronize the shot.

In order to increase the speed of the whole layer use the Time Stretch feature (Right Click the Layer > Time > Time Stretch) Note: values below 100 increase the speed. Values above 110 often results in bad quality. To solve this, see motion calculation (3.)
To vary the speed of a layer, it's ok in most cases to use the standard Time Remapping feature (Right Click the Layer > Time > Enable Time Remapping) This makes it possible to keyframe the time/speed of your layer.
In some situations, especially for generating slow motion shots you need to calculate the motion in between the frames with optical flow technology like twixtor. You can also play with SlomoVideo as an open source alternative. For further information, see this article: http://www.fxguide.com/featured/art_of_optical_flow/

For audio preview workflow, see: How can I preview with audio in After Effects and be able to pause / resume the preview?


Zoom in and out a video frame panel in Adobe Premiere

Yes, well not for zooming but for maximizing and restoring the panel. These shortcuts may look different depending on the keyboard layout. On English layouts it's ` for the active frame, which is the frame with the thin blue border drawn around, and Shift+` for the frame under the cursor. The ` character is called acute or backtick.
If you use another keyboard layout and the ` does not work or you want to change the shortcuts, go to Edit menu -> Keyboard Shortcuts... Search for Maximize and you'll get "Maximize or Restore Active Frame" and "Maximize or Restore Frame Under Cursor".
Also, you can set zoom-in/-out shortcuts for the program monitor, but it zooms into the video and doesn't make the panel larger. Those shortcuts are not set by default.


What does exactly nesting a clip in one layer do in relation to another clip in a different layer?

Without seeing the tutorial, it's difficult to say exactly, but I think what is happening is that the colour matte nest that you've created, is being used to control the blur on your other layer, probably by being set to being used as an "alpha matte".  If your colour matte layer wasn't nested, I think Premiere wouldn't be able to see the alpha changes on that layer, due to the order in which processes are rendered in its pipeline.
Effectively, by nesting the matte clip, the compound blur "sees" the effect and the matte as a single piece of video to process. Without it, it would only "see" a solid colour block.
Un-nested version (mona is fully blurred)

Nested version - only blurred in the middle

Matte layer:


Delete background, change color of video

You can also use DaVinci Resolve.

First node: You can use a qualifier to get the basic outline of Dr. Manhattan (not the glow around him, but the darker blue parts).

Second node: You can feed one output from that first node through hue vs. hue to convert blue to yellow.

Third node: You can feed another output from the first node to a mask.

Fourth node: You can then then blur the mask (outside only, not inside and outside) and tint it to make your yellow glow.

Fifth node: you can use the mask of the 3rd node to select the output of the second node and composite that with the output of the fourth node to get a yellow body with a yellow glow, and no background.


How to inserty custom background or second plan footage using dynamic mask in After Effects?

Something like that is solved with "Rotoscoping". After Effects has several features that make this process easier. F.e. the "Roto Brush", you can find a tutorial about that here:

https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/roto-brush-refine-matte.html

Then you will have to track the translation and rotation of the sign as its carried around. When you have that you can add a layer that follows the movement of the sign that holds your new content.


Buttons will automatically allign to other button ontop or under existing buttons.
Right now they are not aligned because you are missing a spacer after the first two button in the bottom row. Or remove the spacer in the top row by dragging it into the editor window.


Cheap solution for shooting with multiple (>2) cameras in sync (genlock or LANC?)

A year after posting this question, I'm getting a few extra comments and answers, which is really great. It is technically still a problem, but let me share what I've learned in the last year, in case anyone else stumbles on this page with a similar problem.

We came up with two inexpensive solutions to the problem which I think will work, in the right conditions.

Use a high speed strobe light. This only works if the subject does not emit light (unfortunately not the case for me) and can be placed in a very dark room. Get hold of a very fast very accurate strobe light, then set it to go off at the same frequency as the cameras, say 50fps/50hz. Then set the shutter speed of all the cameras to 1/50th of a second, i.e. the shutter is always open. Place the subject in a very dark room, and set the aperture such that the video appears black without the light. Then illuminate with the strobe light. The videos will naturally be synchronised, because the only light they get is from the strobe, and it happens once per frame. Difficulty is getting a precise enough strobe. But I hear that they are used in heavy manufacturing operations to inspect blades/wheels/belts etc, which can't be turned off. You light the tool only with a strobe that has analogue control, and slowly increase the speed of the strobe, and as you reach the frequency of the tool it will appear to slow down, and eventually stop. Now you can inspect for problems. Just don't touch it ;).
Use the vsync signal on the composite video out of the cameras. This is inspired by http://samj.snappages.com/. This signal is sent out regularly every frame, and with some electronics you can measure the difference between the signal on two (or more) different cameras. You can then power cycle the camera (or on some cameras, take a picture. More on that later...) and measure it again, and so on. If you are clever with the timing on the power cycling you can bring them closer and closer together to within a threshold. We didn't end up trying this just because we didn't end up building the circuit, and we figured this would just be too fiddly to work with, especially with more than 2 cameras.

As I said, we didn't end up doing either of these. We ended up putting in a bid for funding for a not-inexpensive system, one that is designed for this exact purpose, from a company such as NorPix. These are synchronised over ethernet and come set up. I was never able to find out how exactly (protocol etc) they use ethernet to synchronise, so if someone wants to explain that I'd be very interested. Last time I was updated, I was told we did find some money, but of course, if you know anything about academic bureaucracy you won't be surprised to find out that I'm still waiting for the equipment!

If anyone does have a magic idea that achieves true synchronisation inexpensively, I'm still open to suggestions.

To close, I will mention a strategy that did not work, in my tests. And that is the one on this website: http://3dfilmfactory.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=93:gen-lock-canon-5d-mark-ii-cameras-and-shoot-3d

Granted, we have different hardware, Canon 60Ds, and we had very cheap off-brand wireless shutter releases. However I have no reason to think they caused any noticeable difference to the setup in the link. I set up tests using an LED device, like Bokan suggested in his answer, and the average difference in synchronisation only dropped by about 1ms after using the wireless shutter release compared to the control tests, and sometimes it made it worse. I didn't do any statistical analysis, but I suspect it would not be significant compared to chance. I think it's very likely that 3D Film Factory either weren't shooting material in which they'd notice the synchronisation problem, or their more expensive hardware gave a slightly more reliable result which still isn't measurably that different. Scaling to more than 2 cameras, I'm confident that it's not a reliable method.

However, using the remote shutter release does reset the video. If you use the 'record' button on the cameras (or a remote), then it simply starts saving the footage that is already being processed. In other words, if you measure the synchronisation in several different tests without turning the camera off, taking a picture, or letting it go into power save mode, then the synchronisation will be the same. You could incorporate this mechanism into approach number (2) above: rather than power cycling the cameras it could take pictures until the vsync signals were in line. It would be a cool device, we just never got round to actually building it.

Thanks again for any suggestions. I hope someday someone will find this useful, and the months I wasted trying to solve it will save someone a bit of time!


Premiere Pro - Change indeterminate Media Time-base to custom value (say 12 fps)

When you create a new project, on the 'Settings' page, select 'Custom' from the 'Editing Mode' drop-down, then you can select '12fps' as the 'Intermediate Media Timebase'.

If you already have a project, you can create a new sequence and select 'Custom' and '12fps' as above in the 'Sequence Settings' menu.


On DSLRs, a fast shutter can actually be better.  DSLRs scan the image to sample rather than capturing the whole frame at once.  This is why you get a distortion when you do a rapid pan.  A faster shutter will result in stopping motion more clearly (less motion blur), which can seem a little harsher than the softness of film, but a sharper image may be preferable.  That said, a good ND shouldn't have a significant impact on image quality.

So, my final advice is, if you want crisp frames with little motion blur, use high shutter speed, if you need smooth motion for things moving around a static scene, a high quality ND is probably better.  If you simply have a fairly static shot, then shutter is probably the way to go again.


Does version control have a part in the video production workflow?

Version control in the sense of Git isn't very practical in the video world. You would need to make a specific version control tool for every audio and video tool out there as all work with their own project formats.
But being able to read these formats is just one thing, then you also need the render engine of that tool to show diff's.

Though all of these tools work in a non-destructive way unless you pre-render some stuff (compare that to compiling a dll/lib of a piece of your code and work with that from now on), so you ususally can just go back to an old revision by doing ctrl+z or using the history tool in some programs.

Though saving sub versions is usually the way to go. Like stib described in his answer or by doing it manually.

Something I like to do and works well with every software is putting my project files (no source footage) into Dropbox. If you have a somewhat fast upload speed (~1 Mbit/s) and your project file isn't 100MB+, you can upload your project before you save the next time. An average Premiere/AE/FCP project is around 10-20MB so your recently saved files will be uploaded in 1-2 minutes. Even faster if you have more upload bandwidth.

Then if you have to go back you can access Dropbox's history of your files and download or restore to that revision. Dropbox saves file revisions forever* on a paid account (*atleast when they had the pack rat option, now its a year I think) and for 30 days on a free account. I'm sure that there are other cloud hosters that offer similar features.
It's a bit like using a super limited version of git that handles binary files very well and is headache free.
This has the advantage that you don't clutter the folder with tons of files and have a backup at the same time.

Most cloud hosters also offer Team Memberships so you can work with multiple editors. Or you share the project folder with other team members.


Export it from any transcoding software to a frame by frame format such as motion JPEG or an actual image sequence.


Creating transparent video from transparent png files using ffmpeg

You have to specify the pixel format, to force it to include the alpha channel, using the -pix_fmt option. You don't need to use png as your video codec either.
ffmpeg -i anim.%04d.png -r 30  -pix_fmt yuva420p video.webm


Checking duration of a marker-created subclip in Final Cut?

The reason you cant get the durations is because a marker is just reference to a point in time, not a time range. This time around you will need to find the durations manually either by opening the clip or subtracting the time of the previous marker form the current one.

You can give markers durations, but not as effortlessly as just placing a single marker while watching through the video:

  Place a marker by pressing M then at the end time hit
  Option+M, this will extend the duration of the
  marker to wherever the playhead is.


The problem is almost definitely with the tape or the VCR. Most likely the sync or black level is off or the control track is fluttering, which is throwing off the ADC in the capture dongle. You will need a time base corrector (TBC) or frame synchronizer to correct the problem.

Ideally, you should also have a way to view and adjust the video levels. Usually you can adjust levels with a good quality TBC or FS. You can use software to view a waveform and vectorscope after digitization.


MXF files in Premiere Pro cs5 mac only playing/dispaying audio

you could also try an intermediate workflow, like transcoding the MXF files into an appropriate ProRes container. This most likely would be 422Proxy.

The Canon C300 codec is a variation of XDCAM (source: http://www.premiumbeat.com/blog/editing-with-canon-c300-footage-tips-for-when-it-all-goes-wrong/) I personally do not like to edit in Long-GOP or predictive frame codecs. So transcoding to an inter-frame codec like ProRes or DNX is always a safe bet.


How do you do the vlog style cuts? Im new and dont know the name of the effect.

Straight cut is a change of shot without transition effect. Jump cut is a straight cut between two very similar shots, which would be perceived as a single shot if not for a slight change in position or lightning.

Professionals used to consider jump cuts a sign of an amateur, unacceptable for movies and broadcast TV. In the 1960s the French New Wave directors broke a lot of movie rules, including the "no jump cuts" rule. Nowadays you can see them in most vlogs, although the professionals still try to avoid them by using cutaway, which usually is sourced from B-roll.


What image formats to use for basic 2d animation?

That depends on what kind of animations you're planning. I would ask the artist to give you the project files (.psd if he is working in Photoshop, .ai if he is working with Illustrator) so that you are not limited to one final image (of course in that case, you would need said programs on your computer. Consider that if the artist uses CC and you're using CS6 or older versions, project files might not be compatible). If he refuses to send you the project files (which, in my experience, many graphic designers won't do), I would probably ask for high-res .png files (since they support alpha channels) if the artist's work is pixel-based. If the work is vector-based, ask for some vector format like .svg.


How to silence or mute part of a clip in Adobe Premiere?

Okay, the closest thing that I've found so far is to:

Make a cut with the razor tool
Select the audio part with alt + click
Toggle Enable clip with shift + command + e (to disable the audio)


How can I blur an entire video using iMovie or similar?

I work with a company that makes a product called Wondershare Video Editor for mac.  It is what I personally use so i can only offer my solution by this software. Check the screenshot first:

In a word, you can make it by the mosaic function in this software. Now i will show you step by step (8 steps in total).

Step one, import the video file and drag and drop to the video
timeline
Step two, click the power tool button to open the editing window
Step three, choose Mosaic function
Step four, pick up "Apply Mosaic to the clip"
Step five, click "Add"
Step six, adjust the size of blur area you need, if you want to blur
the whole video, drag the rectangular to the border
Step seven, you can change the heavy of this blur by dragging the
percent button
Last step, click "OK"

Done! Check the preview video screenshot as follow:
Export it, you will get a blur video. I wish it's helpful for you.


How do I remove the grey bars that appear after a layer in the timeline?

They show you where the rest the unused part of your clip is relative to your timeline.
So if you used the first 5 seconds of a 10 second clip in a 10 second comp, you would see a greyed-out bar form 5-10 seconds in your comp.
You can drag the edges of your clip out to extend it in your timeline.
To remove them you would need to change the duration of the clips you've created.
A useful function in a pre-comp is "Trim Comp to Work Area" which trims your comp to where your Beginning and End markers are.


How to create a lightweight backup for an iMovie project (i.e. without all the videos)?

This may not be the best workflow, but here is one that works.

To create a lightweight backup of a project:

First, create a backup of your Library in case things break.
Ensure you're only using a single library for each of your projects. Otherwise it'll be harder to backup only the project you care about.
In Finder, show package contents of your iMovie library.
Delete all the "Original Media" videos. You can also delete other large files such as "Render Files".
You should now have a lightweight backup of your iMovie project without all the videos.
Ensure your backup can be restored by duplicating it and following the steps below.

To restore a lightweight backup of a project:

Open the iMovie Library for your lightweight backup.
You'll see that a bunch of videos are marked as missing.
Reimport your original video files, and everything will just work!

Another thing that will make this entire process easier/possible is making sure not to rename/edit/delete your original video files.


FFmpeg filter_complex says filter not connected to source

You can consume a filter generated stream only once, unlike streams from -i inputs. Since [vid] is already supplied to the first trim 60:65, it can't be reused. You can add a split and supply a copy to each:

nullsrc,split=2[vid1][vid2]; ... [vid1]trim=60:65, ... [vid2]trim=120:125, ...


How to animate the outlines of text (After Effects)

Simplest way is to use the Stroke Effect on a solid layer with separate letters as masks.

Create a new solid
Write your text in Illustrator
Convert it to a path
Seperate all letters  with the path finder or ungroup it
Setup same document size as in After Effects
Import your paths into after effects, pasting should also work with CTRL+V. Requirement is to have all of your paths from Illustrator as seperate masks on the solid in After Effects.
Note: you can create seperate paths from an image of letters within After Effects with the auto trace option (Layer > Auto Trace) - use black and white option and set it to the current frame (Note: Tracing letters isn't really accurate)
Apply the stroke effect to the solid layer which should be full of masks now
Tick All Masks option to make use of all masks
Set the paint style to transparent
Go to your first frame and set the End value of the effect to 0%
Click the stop watch of it to enable animation
Go to your last frame and set the End value to 100%

You can play with the settings of the effect, but in general this should do what you want to achieve.

Note: The order of masks determines the order of the animation. To reverse the effect simply duplicate the first keyframe and move it behind the second one.


FIXED - AfterEffect graph editor is stuck on displaying one particular curve and does not refresh

It seems to be a bug with AE. My solution was by just duplicating the old layer and then deleting the old layer.


Moving image from left to right stutters

It seems smooth to me.  I can see some of the resolution loss you are talking about, but I think that is probably due to multiple encoding passes and using too low of bandwidth levels rather than too high.  I unfortunately don't have a large screen available at the moment to check it at full resolution.

The video in question has many small images, which is typically bad for compression as the image doesn't have large areas that can be easily described, but it also has extremely regular motion, which is good for compression as the change between frames can be described clearly.

Using multiple compressions, particularly with any low bandwidth compressions, is likely to lose the motion accuracy and result in drastically reduced compression quality.  Effectively, what happens is that the first encoding, if it handles motion well, will do a good job, but still produce some noise.  The second pass, however, will not see it as purely fixed motion, but will instead see the noise as well and try to encode that information.  That then causes the second encoding to have to spend more data on encoding the random noise and thus ends up spending less data on the hard to describe sea of faces.

Another possible issue that could be going on is drift between keyframes.  That may explain the stutter you are seeing.  One of the ways that modern compression achieves such good compression levels is that it doesn't always describe the full image.  A limited number of frames describe the complete frame.  The rest either describe themselves in relation to the image before them or in relation to the image before and after them.  The keyframe interval is the length of time between full frames being used and defines the length of a "group of pictures", which is all the frames dependent on a particular keyframe.

With very regular motion, if the compression isn't completely accurate in it's motion adjustments, it's possible that the image has to jump an extra couple pixels to get synced back up with the keyframe when it reaches the next one.  You could try reducing the keyframe interval to see if that reduced the amount of jump occurring (lower keyframe intervals is generally a good idea on high motion clips.)

Certainly I would stop trying to improve it with a Movie Maker pass or using non-standard framerates.  Both of these are counter productive as the extra encoding will just further degrade quality since you already have your initial compression and the transcode pass that YouTube does.  Using a non-standard framerate will just result in YouTube trying to do a pulldown (change the framerate) to get it to a standard framerate and will introduce other motion issues related to frame timings not being perfect.


Converting SECAM VHS to a digital format

The ADVC-300 can take SECAM input: http://www.grassvalley.com/products/advc300

This will convert to DV format, which is quite sufficient for VHS quality.


What is the name of that color test in video production with the beep?

Never mind. Found the answer. It's called "Color Bars".

To be precise...

SMPTE Color Bars
SMPTE Bars are "split field" bars composed of:
**Frame Height (Approx)**       **Type of Bars**
Top 67%                     Standard EIA 75% amplitude white bars
Next 8%                     Reverse blue bars
Lower 25%                       Pluge signal

source


Figured it out.

Go to "render" and under "destination" select "audio only".
Choose a profile and tinker the settings.

If you want to export in an undefined format, such as FLAC, you can create  new profile.

Go to "render", under "destination" select "audio only" and click on "create new profile".

You will now use this as parameters:

f=flac acodec=flac ar=48000 ab=384k vn=1 video_off=1

Fill it so it resembles this:

"group" and "profile name" are up to you, however I'd say these are the best as they are semantic.

You can of course define your own format, codec, bitrate, etc., to suit your needs. The parameters "vn=1 video_off=1", however, must remain.

Here you can find some interesting presets you can use to create profiles. They're intended for use with Shotcut, nevertheless they should work here as well as both Kdenlive and Shotcut are built on MLT framework.


How to remove steady video frames from 24/7 video?

mpdecimate filter drop frames that do not differ greatly from the previous frame in order to reduce frame rate.
This command will filter the duplicate frames
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf mpdecimate -loglevel debug -f null -

To remove these duplicates and generate a video
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf mpdecimate,setpts=N/FRAME_RATE/TB out.mp4


Free software to synchronize audio and video recorded at the same time

What you need is called a non-linear video editor or NLE.  Basically you can load in the files and then you put them on a "timeline".  Each audio track and video track goes on a horizontal track.  You move the clips right to left on the timeline to synchronize them and once you have them synchronized, you can cut out portions of the top most clip that you don't want and the bottom clip will take its place since it is under the top clip.  You can also add in transitions to switch between the clips.

There is a lot more to video editing as you get in to it, but that should give you the primer you need to get up and running.  Take a look at the duplicate post for suggestions of some NLE software you can use for free.


Can you put in and animate 3D models in After Effects exactly like in this video?

Combining camera footage with generated objects is called compositing.

The candy scene could be created in three steps:

The girl was filmed ahead of a green screen. Green parts of the footage made transparent.
3D scene was created with background furniture and the candies flying – in Cinema 4D or any other 3D package. It was rendered to a movie clip A. And the frames with candies flying towards the viewer rendered with transparent background to clib B.
AfterEffects or other compositing package was used to combine the three layers (front to back): clip B, green screen, clip A.


ffmpeg with h264 produces smaller file sizes for veryfast preset

I was able to find an answer. https://stackoverflow.com/a/14308561/941493.

In the nutshell, CRF calculation is also affected by preset so the same CRF number is not the same with different presets. Based on some developer difference can be mostly ignored.


Adobe Premiere crop one side - then fill the frame -

To crop just one side of a clip, select the clip in the timeline and open the Effects panel. Search for 'crop' (in the current version of Premiere Pro, the effect can be found under Video Effects → Transform). Double-click the effect with that name to apply it to your clip. Then open the Effect Controls panel, there you will find the effect settings for the crop effect with allow you to specify a crop amount in percent for each side.

To have the cropped image fill the frame, use the effect controls of the Motion effect that is applied to all clips in the timeline by default. Use the Position and Scale controls to adjust the clip's position and size to your liking.


Understanding Region of Interest selection in a Camera

The image is scanned (and data stored) with an imaginary cursor starting at the upper left, working across horizontally to the right, then the cursor pauses to move down one line and resetting to left edge. One could think of the rectangular image as a single string where the "carriage return - line feed" is merely implied by keeping track of the timing (or counting pixels). In most image storage formats, the width and height are tags in the header and the data itself is a long stream without demarcated frame extents. Since the figures speak about clocks and blanking however, file storage is probably not implicated here.

I think that the horizontal scan lines can be skipped (or at least started and then reset arbitrarily), but cannot be started at an arbitrary distance from the left edge.

Selection 1, is optimal for this behavior: you send a minimal set of commands to skip down to the proper horizontal position, and scanning can start at the upper left of the desired viewport scan what is desired and then skip the rest.

In Selection 2, we must scan every single line to at least the rightward extent of the part we are interested in, at which time we can send a command to move to the next line and reset.

Very roughly: if you have a 99w x 99h "units", and are interested in 1/3 of the image centered as in the examples, in selection 1, you scan 99w x 33h units while in selection 2, you must scan 66w x 99h units minimum. It is unclear to me, but the supporting figure looks to me to be speaking about selection 2 only, and the horizontal "2,592clk 1H" implies to me that the right-side mask is skipped for scanning.

Note that if the camera cannot start a horizontal line without scanning the complete line (i.e. can't stop and reset at an arbitrary distance from the left edge), then the selection 2 scenario must scan 99w x 99h units.


Assuming that it's not changing perspective or moving around too much, I would use a tracker on the tattoo and a clone stamp from another area of skin.  More elaborate removal could be done with Mocha, or using a mesh warping tracker like Lockdown, which has a demo of tattoo removal in their showreel at 0m24s:


Oprtical Flow artifacts on cuts in Premiere

Did you apply the Optical Flow to a nested sequence that contains a transition?  This looks to me like Optical Flow trying to invent new frames to fill in the slow motion and getting confused by the fact that a transition is blending two different videos.  You should apply your time remaps to the base clips and then do transitions on top of the already adjusted clips.


Keeping metadata (time/date) when extracting frames from video

If you are saving frames from PP using the snapshot tool, then by default it's saving a file that's of the form SEQUENCENAME_TIMECODE.  If you know the date/time of the start of the sequence, you can compute frame-accurate metadata by adding the timecode of the image to the adjusted datetime of the sequence start.  (By adjusted datetime, I mean that if your sequence starts at 01:00:00:00 and your actual clip was 16:20:25:15 on Apr 1, 2014, then you need to subtract one hour from the clip time to account for the SMPTE offset).

As for programming languages that will do what you want, look at bash (the Bourne Again Shell), Python, and/or Perl.  Perl is wicked cool in how it can slice and dice strings, do math, and put the strings back together.  But it is also wicked hard to learn idiomatically.  Python may be the best starting point.

EXIFtool is a great way to embed correct metadata into image files: http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/

And it's a way to learn some Perl while you are at it.


FFmpeg convert to HD video format that Adobe Premiere Pro will not crash on?

Proxies

Consider using proxies: especially if this is 4k or bigger. A proxy is a lower res stand-in for editing. Upon export the original, bigger, higher quality originals will be used to create the output. See Adobe Premiere Pro User Guide: Proxy Workflow for more info.

You can have Premiere create the proxies, or create them with ffmpeg and have Premiere use those as the proxies.

Lossless

If you don't want or need a proxy another option is to use an editor friendly, lossless intermediate file using a format such as Ut Video. This will avoid the unnecessary generation loss of using lossy H.264–although to be fair when given enough bits you may not notice a difference or care.

One downside is file size, but if it is going to be temporary it may be a moot point.

Premiere can both decode and encode Ut Video after you install it (you may have to restart Premiere).

Example command:

ffmpeg -framerate 30 -i input_%05d.tga -c:v utvideo output.avi


One solution (found here) is to use a very small -framerate value.


Using expressions to create the trail will work, but it will have the disadvantage that you will need as many layers are there are frames of the trail, and since each one will be driven by expressions it's going to get really slow.

An alternative is to make a comp with just your moving layer in it. now make a new comp with say ten of your original comps in it, and use the Animation Assistant to stagger them by one frame. Now make a new comp with this comp repeated ten or so times, and stagger then by ten frames. This will have 100 copies of your original video. If you then nested that video ten times you'll have 1000 copies, then 10,000, 100,000 etc. This should render faster because it's all based on precomps, which get cached by AE and tend to work better than separate layers.


Add a scaler after the crop.

-vf "crop=720:528:120:6,scale=960:540,setsar=1"

The setsar is added to prevent players squashing the video during playback.


I've had success with

import composition > layer size

Double click comp

Highlight all > Create > Create Shapes from vector layer

Delete the .Ai layers

Tutorial here:


Speeding Up, Joining and Increasing Frame Rate FFMPEG

Assuming audio's not a concern,

ffmpeg -i in1.mov -i in2.mov -filter_complex
       "[0]setpts=(PTS-STARTPTS)/5[a];[1]setpts=(PTS-STARTPTS)/5[b];[a][b]concat[v]"
       -map "[v]" -r 60 -crf 18 output.mov


Network Stream reloading in a loop (Nginx/RTMP Streaming Server)

using vlc -vv helped me to track down the issue. It was a missing character in one of the configuration files that caused vlc to not connect to the server.

Sorry for the noise.

(If you are interested in the resolution, check the stack-overflow post linked to in the question)


How can I achieve a smooth animation in Adobe Premiere?

You need to add ease-in to the motion. That's where the motion slows as it approaches the final position. You can add it quickly by hitting the f9 key. This sets the speed of the keyframe to zero, and gives it 16% influence. To change the effect you cn edit this by opening the keyframe properties dialogue. Hit ctrl/⌘shiftk. Alternatively open the graph editor and click on the position property to show the graph. You can adjust the speed of the keyframe and its influence by dragging the Bézier handles there.

You might want to duckduckgo the 12 principles of animation, if you want to do some extra reading. This is a valuable guide to creating pleasing motion in animation and motion graphics, that is as true now as it was when it was written back in the days of cels and paint.


Razor all clips in timeline underneath in/out points

Don't even try to do it this way.  For what you are trying to do, take a look at the multi-camera editing mode.  It is designed for doing precisely the kind of thing you are trying to do in a much simpler way.  You can find more detail about the multi-cam features in Adobe's own documentation here.


Cheap solution to shoot during several hours at night?

I would say your best bet is to look through the surveillance section on amazon and see what your options are for your budget...100 bucks seems to get you a pretty good setup.

http://www.amazon.com/Security-Surveillance-Home-Automation/b?ie=UTF8&node=524136


Convert a 60 fps video to a 24 (film) video - is it possible?

You can, there's a lot of frame blending algorithms that will do it for you. That said, none of them is really great. All your 60fps footage will have a different look than your 24fps footage. You flat out cannot evenly go from 60fps to 24fps, there's just too little overlap in where the frames actually show up on a timeline. For frame conversions of that magnitude (24p->60i for TV, for example), the big boys have traditionally used telecine/telesync setups where they would literally film an image projected from a movie reel with a television camera.

Consider shooting 50fps (if that's an option). It's much easier to go from 50 to 24 (drop every other frame, then drop one frame a second) than it is to do 60->24.


Joining files fail with "h264_mp4toannexb filter failed to receive output packet"

One easy workaround I found while writing this question is simply discarding the broken piece of the input file before trying to concatenate the files, in a separate command, since -f concat and -ss 00:03:00 don't work together when "h264_mp4toannexb filter failed to receive output packet" is present.

For example, to discard the first 3 minutes of the file, then concatenate separately:

$ ffmpeg -i broken.mov -c copy -ss 00:03:00 fixed.mov
$ mv broken.mov broken.mov.ignore
$ ffmpeg -f concat -safe 0 -i <(printf "file '$PWD/%s'\n" ./*.mov) -c copy o.mov

I still can't understand why concatenating is the only operation that fails with that error, but the source code linked above might give some hint.


How was analog video converted to an electrical signal?

Before understanding the answer to this question, you need to understand analog video displays, usually called Cathode Ray Tube Televisions (CRT TVs), often shortened to just "CRTs" in casual speech. There are plenty of answers here on this site, and a more technical one on the CRT Wikipedia Page.
Now, before answering the question, there were a multitude of technological advances that led to the collection of 'standard' Video Camera Tubes, each with its own pros and cons, and advancements throughout the years. In this answer, I will assume a black and white system, will ignore the optics, gloss over the physics of electron beams and photo-cathodes (you did read and understand the CRT wiki page... didn't you? :D ),  and I will ignore the electronics and technology involved in the camera, as well as those in the encoding, transmission, reception, decoding, etc. as those items each are far beyond the scope of this answer. (Many have their own dedicated Stack Exchange!!) For a very simple overview, see here.
Here is the short answer:
Analog cameras were the reverse of CRT displays, and the incoming photons from the optics were converted to an output signal in broadly one of two ways.

Incoming photons hit a photo-cathode plate of some type, which emitted electrons. These electrons may or may not have hit a secondary plate with the ability to amplify the electron (not photon) image. This image was then scanned past an aperture (note that the entire image is scanned, not just one beam). Behind this aperture the signal was detected and converted to an electronic signal via a dissector tube (again, many technologies).

The incoming photon image hits another type of photo-cathode plate. In this second technology, an electron beam of constant strength is then shot towards the rear of this plate (scanned and focused in the way a display CRT is), and the plate in the middle creates a voltage relative to the strength of the photons on the front. This voltage is the output signal.
P.S. This answer is in response to an unanswered question asked here by J. Doe