Using cell phone camera to record and play back in theaters?

1080p is sufficient in terms of resolution, though 2k or better yet 4k is prefered these days, though resolution isn't the only measure of quality. The quality of the color and dynamic range of the camera and the use of a global shutter (or lack there of) can make a big difference on how good the footage looks in a theater environment, depending on what the footage is like. Footage from a cellphone is not going to have the quality of color or the shutter to hold up well in a theater. You'd really want to spend a minimum of probably $1500 or so and preferably at least $4,000 or so on a minimal setup for high quality video.

As far as editing software, After Effects is not an editing package. You would want to use a NLE (non-linear editor) like Premiere to edit the footage. After Effects is useful for things like titling, color grading, stabilization and effects work. Sufficient quality H.264 is ideal. Probably a high data rate All I frame would be ideal, though the exact best option would depend on the playback gear available at the theater.

As far as how to play it at the theater. The majority of theaters are rapidly going digital. It is easier to manage digital cinema since there are only large files to deal with that can be delivered electronically and don't wear out. Also, the editing is generally done digitally anyway, so there isn't quality loss that would be necessary to move back to film.

320kbps is low for editing sound, but fine in terms of final output. Ideally you would want to record 96khz, 24bit PCM audio for each channel and then do your edits on that and only compress it for the final output.

The bigger deal is that technique and skill make a far bigger difference when blowing it up a lot. A little bit of vibration that isn't that bad on a TV screen quickly becomes physically nauseating when blown up to an entire wall. You need to use good tripods and dollies and such when shooting for the theater. It would likely be possible for a really skilled individual to make something passable with a cellphone camera if the rough quality made sense for the piece, but without proper shooting technique and stabilization (physical, not added in post production) the footage would make people ill to watch in a theater.


According to the SD association, Class 2 SD cards have a minimum writing speed of 2 MB/S. That is not sufficient for HD recording, let alone Full HD. Even though that is only the minimum speed, I don't think the SD card will be nearly good enough. If you already have the camera and the SD card though, why not try it out for yourself? Worst thing that can happen is the camera won't record anything or stop after a few seconds.

Here's an overview of the different speed classes. Depending on your camera model, I would recommend you get a class 6 or 10 SD card. The manual of your camera should also state which SD writing speed is required to record Full HD video. Most cameras (at least in the medium to high pricing range) will also allow you to change the (average) bitrate video is recorded at, you should also look into that. Use that information to decide on an optimal SD card for your needs.


How to enlarge/zoom into a specific area in After Effects

You need to animate the anchor point. This is the point towards which an image will zoom if you increase its scale. So when you zoom in to the paperwork you have to put the anchor point under the paperwork.

Trouble is the anchor point is also the point at which the image is attached to the composition, so moving it will normally cause the image to move. After Effects has a tool call the "Pan Behind" tool , which deals with this problem. It moves the anchor point of a layer and at the same time adjusts the layer's position in the composition to match so that the layer doesn't move. To use the Pan Behind tool hit the letter y.

So to zoom in to one point, zoom out, and then zoom in to another point you need to first set keyframes for your position, anchor point, and of course scale properties. Do this at the time when your first zoom starts. With the Pan Behind tool adjust the anchor point (and thus the position as well) so that it's sitting under the papers, then animate your zoom in, and out.

The keyframe for your anchor point and position should be made "hold keyframes" so that they won't change until their next keyframe, at which point they will change instantly. Otherwise you'll have to set position and anchor points each time you set a scale keyframe (which would work too, but it's more work and harder to edit). Select the position and anchor point keyframes, right-click on one and choose Toggle Hold Keyframe from the context menu, or from the top menu by choosing Animation > Toggle Hold Keyframe.

Now go to the time when you want to zoom into something else on the desk. Use the pan behind tool again to set the anchor point (and position at the same time), then add scale keyframes for your zoom. Rinse, repeat.


How to digitise old NTSC home videos for highest quality (with PAL player)?

For VHS, the signal will be kept highest quality if you connect via s-video, so yes, you should use an s-video cable if your VCR has an s-video output.

Depending on how good your VCR is, you may get a significant improvement from a better deck.  Quality of the read heads on various VCRs can vary a fair bit and while the majority of the difference was in recording quality, there were difference in playback quality as well.  That said, finding a good VHS deck in good condition is probably difficult these days.

I'm not sure about the color correction, most likely it is something specific to your capture device.

The signal is most certainly interlaced.  Both NTSC and PAL were interlaced formats.  NTSC video should be 29.97 frames per second.  That is the NTSC standard.  The resolution should ideally be 720 by 480 using oval pixels with a .9 pixel compression.

You didn't ask about it specifically, but using a DV codec should give the maximum quality though it will also be quite large.  Once you have a DV codec capture of the VHS tape, then using a traditional 2 pass transcode to either h.264 (viewing on computer or blu-ray) or MPEG-2 (DVD) should work well.


Live-stream HD camera to stream on one's own Wordpress website

I think the answer to your question depends largely on your budget. A pretty easy and standard config (but which is not really cheap) would be using GoPros with the corresponding helmet / head mount and plugging it into something like a Teradek VidiU http://teradek.com/pages/vidiu - configuring it for your favourite streaming provider and pointing your WordPress plug-in to show that stream.

A wired article about the vidiu and two other streaming devices:
http://www.wired.com/2014/10/hd-streamer-boxes/

Depending on how long this needs to run, you should maybe add an additional battery solution to the setup, the vidius internal battery only seems to run for 60 minutes...

Apparently GoPro themself announced a streaming transmitter / receiver System called heroCast but it seems to be even more expensive than the teradek.

Alternatively you could use a smartphone to do the recording / transmitting with something like the bambuser app / service, most certainly the quality will be worse than the GoPro / vidiu solution, but cheaper. For both solutions you additionally need to make sure you got a decent WiFi coverage for the areas you want to be part of your project or - broadcast the stuff over LTE / UMTS, involving extra cost for the appropriate data plan you need to get in that case.


In Sony Vegas you can use Text Wizard from Vegasaur Toolkit. It can easily create various counters. Vegasaur has free 30-day trial, so just install it and go to menu View > Extensions > Vegasaur > Timeline > Text Generation Wizard.
Please note that the appearance of the text (font, color, size, etc.) is determined by the selected preset.


Smoothly keyframing a wheel to decelerate from point A to B

For good or bad, in Davinci it's all about maths. Since you want to move the wheel you will change position x/y and rotation, as you mentioned. But you will have to add time points and make the calculations (i.e. if you want to speed up/slow down, change move/rotation direction etc).

For example you want to have the motion for 5 secs, 1 full rotation lasts 1 secs. So you are gone have something like that:

time=0s x=-200, rotation=0
time=1s, rotation=360
time=2s, rotation=720
time=2.5s, x=0
time=3s, rotation=1080
time=4s, rotation=1440
time=5s, x=200,rotation=1800

I hope to help you out a little.. :)


FFmpeg read, ignoring remaining -vf options: Use ',' to separate filters

It's a false positive in this case. You can ignore it. The check is supposed to catch duplicate filter invocations for the same output stream, e.g. -filter:v:0 scale=hd1080 -filter:v:0 hue=s=0 where only the hue would get applied. The correct way is -filter:v:0 "scale=hd1080,hue=s=0". But the check is buggy.

There's an open ticket for it.


Option placement matters

  Is there an option I'm missing?

No, but option placement matters. Options before the input apply to the input, and options before the output generally apply to the output. The exception are global options. See the FFmpeg synopsis and FFmpeg description for more details on option placement.

Therefore, you must move your -q (alias for -qscale) option:

ffmpeg -i video_test.avc -q:v 2 frames/frames_%04d.jpg

-f image2 is superfluous here since ffmpeg knows that your outputs are images.
A sane range for -q:v for the encoder mjpeg is 2-5; lower is higher quality.
It is recommended to be explicit as to which stream you want to apply -q to since ffmpeg can not know if it should be applied to video or audio, so in your case use -q:v. This is good practice, although it does not matter for your input since you have no audio.

A fake "ffmpeg"

  I've noticed that FFMPEG on my Mac works as expected and generates nice frames, but FFMPEG on my production server that runs Ubuntu exhibits this problem.

Ubuntu no longer uses FFmpeg:

Who can tell me the difference and relation between ffmpeg, libav, and avconv?
The FFmpeg/Libav situation

Since I do not use the fork my answer may not work for you.

Getting ffmpeg

FFmpeg development is very active and it is always a good idea to use a recent version. Two main ways of getting it are:

Follow a step-by-step guide to compile ffmpeg
Use an already compiled ffmpeg build (instructions)


Blackmagic Design's Decklink cards are a starting place for desktop computers: https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/decklink

For laptops there's both Intensity: https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/intensity

And UltraStudio: https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/ultrastudiousb3

Other companies also make such products (and even Blackmagic Design offer yet more options), but the above provides a range of answers to your question.


How to transcode HEVC footage on a mac if you don't have CC2018 yet

Install Homebrew.

Open Terminal.
Install FFMPEG with extra features by entering the following on a single line:

brew install ffmpeg --with-fdk-aac --with-ffplay --with-freetype --with-libass  --with-libvorbis --with-libvpx --with-opus --with-x26

Wait about 10 minutes for it to install.

From the Terminal, run FFMPEG, using a line like this:

ffmpeg -i input.mov -c:v prores -profile:v 3 -c:a pcm_s16le output.mov

input.mov is the name of your HEVC file.  It can also include a full path, but spaces need to be preceded by backslashes  “\”

output.mov is an exported ProRes quicktime movie that will play in Premiere

Do process more than one file at a time:

In terminal, go to the directory where your files are.

for i in *.mov; do ffmpeg -i "$i" -c:v prores -profile:v 3 -c:a pcm_s16le "${i%.*}_out.mov"; done

Output files will appear in the same folder appended with “_out.mov”


The comb-like pattern on the text makes me suspect an interlacing issue.  There's a mismatch somewhere in the image pipeline regarding whether Resolve/Fusion is expecting interlaced or progressive footage, and whether or not it's actually getting interlaced or progressive footage.  It's hard to diagnose without knowing your settings, but look for options related to "fields" and make sure you haven't changed any from their defaults.  If your footage actually IS interlaced (unlikely if it's from a camera built in the last 15-ish years), then you would need to change these settings from their defaults.
Assuming progressive footage, in the Resolve Project settings, make sure that under "Master Settings,"  the "Enable video field Processing" box is unchecked.  In all Fusion Nodes, in each "Image" tab, make sure "Process Mode" is set to "Full Frames."
Another possibility is that the viewer is showing you an inaccurate preview.  On the Edit page, the viewer takes certain shortcuts to speed playback.  Exactly what Resolve does isn't documented, but it's likely to affect scaling, which might cause display artifacts.  For a more accurate (but slower) preview, you can disable "Performance Mode" under the "User" tab of the System settings, in the "Playback Settings" category.  If your rendered output doesn't display the same artefacts as the edit page, this is likely the culprit.  Setting the viewer scale to 100% would also show an un-scaled image.  Alternatively, viewing the image on the Color page will prioritize image quality over playback speed.


Nuke particles escaping bounce node with geometry input

This looks like a bug in Nuke's ParticleBounce node. The geometry input is new to Nuke 9, which was released pretty recently.
That said, the bug seems to manifest only in this idealized environment of two spheres. The first sphere (radius 1) emits the particles, and the second sphere (radius 3) kills them. It is likely because of the exact alignment between vertices that causes it to penetrate.
Rotating one of the two spheres 0.1 degrees on each axis solves the problem
In theory, the "real world" wouldn't see this bug as frequently, but I've submitted this bug report to The Foundry.

Response from The Foundry

Thanks very much for providing reproduction script, we can see the
problem easily. Your comments and script are logged:
Bug 47417 - ParticleBounce - Leaks with static primitive geometry
input in some cases
We recommend checking upcoming release notes for updates on this
issue.


Resuming a partially-completed encode with FFmpeg

I've come up with a "good enough" solution to this problem, as it doesn't appear possible at the time of writing to actually pick up a partial encode that was cut off arbitrarily and accurately concatenate the rest of the video to it.
A Solution Using Segmenting
First, use FFmpeg's segmenting functionality to output segments at some interval for which losing such an interval is an acceptable loss. Also output a .csv file with segment start and end times. An example command that achieves this is:
ffmpeg.exe -i .\source.avi -c:v libx264 -crf 20 -c:a aac -pix_fmt yuv420p -f segment -segment_time 30 -segment_list segments.csv -reset_timestamps 1 seg%03d.mkv

Assume that during the encoding of the fourth segment (seg003.mkv), it becomes necessary to stop the encoder and reset the machine. Sending a q keystroke to FFMpeg during the encoding of a segment stops it arbitrarily at some point and leaves that segment incomplete.
The segment that was interrupted is effectively lost and can be deleted. Opening the segments.csv file reveals
seg000.mkv,0.000000,33.390000
seg001.mkv,33.390000,62.586000
seg002.mkv,62.586000,91.782000
seg003.mkv,91.782000,98.655000

Using this information, we know that seg003.mkv started at 91.782 seconds into the source. In order to pick up where we left off, we use the same command as above to encode segmented output, but also seek (-ss) to the start of our fourth segment, and change the numbering (-segment_start_number):
ffmpeg.exe -ss 91.782000 -i source.avi -c:v libx264 -crf 20 -c:a aac -pix_fmt yuv420p -f segment -segment_time 30 -segment_list segments2.csv -segment_start_number 3 -reset_timestamps 1 seg%03d.mkv

FFmpeg will pick up at the beginning of the fourth segment, and correctly name it seg003.mkv. Notice that the name of the output .csv file has been changed so that the original does not get overwritten. This new .csv file will start at 0.00, so further interruptions will require adding times in this file to the previous file to find a starting point.
Finally, when all segments are ready to be concatenated, we construct an .ffcat file as outlined in the examples on the wiki page:
file seg000.mkv
file seg001.mkv
file seg002.mkv
file seg003.mkv
file seg004.mkv
file seg005.mkv

and run this command:
ffmpeg.exe -f concat -i .\segments.ffcat -c copy output.mkv

This outputs the full, concatenated encode. The option -fflags +genpts is mentioned in the linked answer of the question, and may be necessary to achieve perfect output, but I have not found it to make any difference in my testing.


Add path operation to multiple shape layers

Use Expression Slider Controls to drive multiple Shape Layer Wiggle Path Values.

Here is an example of driving Size and Detail values of the Wiggle Path Property on 6 Shape Layers with 2 created Slider Controls on a seperate Null Layer:

Note: To save time, it's a good idea to create one shape layer first, set it up as described below and duplicate it afterwards to maintain the expression links.

Create a Shape Layer and a Null Object
Add Wiggle Path Property to the Shape Layer
Add a Slider Control to the Null for every value you need for animation (size, speed, correlation ...) and name it like these for a better organization
Select the Null and go to Effect > Expression Control > Slider Control
Open up the properties of the both layers by clicking on the small arrow  >  right beside the layer's name to see the values of the Wiggle Path and the newly created slider control at the same time
Holding down Alt while clicking on the stop watch of a Wiggle Path Value like the Size or Detail, this automatically will insert an expression
Use the expression pick whip and drag it onto the predefined Slider Control of the Null before to link/parent it, for e.g. the Size of Wiggle Paths, this should create something like: thisComp.layer("Name of the Null").effect("Size")("Name of Slider Control")
Repeat the process of parenting the Wiggle Path Values to the Sliders as long as all needed values are parented to slider controls correctly
If you duplicate the Shape Layer with CTRL+D now, all expressions will retained for the duplicated layers


Question about using the DeShaker plug-in for VirtualDub

The built-in stabilizer in Vegas Pro is very convenient, but some may still want to use Deshaker because it is more flexible.

It is available as an FX plug-in for Vegas Pro:

http://www.vegasvideo.de/plugins/104-deshaker-interface-for-sony-vegas-pro.html

Some people report having problems getting the plug-in to work, and continue to use the very handy script that calls out to VirtualDub:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/a.edmiston/deshaker.htm

Some settings that are useful to fiddle with:

Remove pan/crop prior to rendering - unclick this if there are a lot of index marks in pan/crop and you want to smooth them out
Block size and scale - needs to be finer if there is a lot of black or walls or lack of things for Deshaker to lock onto.
Ignore pixels inside/outside - allows you to eliminate the moving things so that the whole smoothed video doesn't bounce up and down with the moving things.
Edge compensation: None
Yes to Use prev and future frames to fill borders
Yes to soft borders
Yes to Extrapolate colors into borders
Motion smoothness - all appropriate ones at 3000. Include Zoom only when appropriate (1500). Zero for Rotation if using a tripod.
Correction limits - all appropriate ones at 99. Zoom at 50 only when using.


One thing that you learn pretty quickly when you begin producing film or video, is that what looks right in a mirror in person usually doesn't look right to the camera. You end up having to place the mirrors at very different angles than you expect.

Fun houses/houses of mirrors are usually recreated on a sound stage or other set. Fun house mirrors can be rented and placed to accommodate production equipment. On screen, you will often see fewer mirrors than what might be used in an actual house of mirrors.

For instance in this Bruce Lee sequence, except for the final shot, you only see mirrors on one side of the actors. In that final shot, the mirrors behind Lee are obscured by other set pieces. The actors probably could not see the image of their opponent that they were punching in the mirror, everything was staged specifically for the camera.

Similarly, in this Key & Peele sequence, the mirrors are noticeably far apart, you generally see only one actor in a mirror at a time, and mostly only see mirrors on one side of the actors at a time.


Why doesn't the Play button Play in Premiere CS6?

Okay, this worked for me:

Re-Plug-in ALL your External Sound-Hardware.
Open your Sound Menu from Windows and set your Microphone to your current one. (For me it was the external Soundcard)
Now Open up Premiere Pro and set everything on your Preferences as previously stated.
Save your Current Sequenz/Project. Close premiere.
Reboot your PC.
Check your Sound Options in Windows, if everything is set right.
Open Premiere and check again, if your Prefences are still in (everything should be in order)
Now hit play.
If the Re-plugin doesnt work, use different USB slots :)

Hope I could help you.


The best way to answer this definitively would be if you know the model of the camera.
RCA cables from video cameras are nearly always analogue signals.
It is possible for a camera to have both digital outputs such as HDMI and SDI, and analogue outputs such as component or composite video from RCA sockets.
The analogue outputs are almost always standard definition (ie 480 or 576 lines of video).
HDMI outputs are usually high definition 1080 lines (or possibly 720 on older cameras, higher on newer 4K cameras).
If you are asking how to capture video from a camera with HDMI output in high quality into a computer with USB3, I would use an adaptor such as the Elgato HD60 S Capture Card.


How to export a video in expecific ratio

Go to your sequence settings Sequence>Settings and change the resolution to match the size of the rectangle you want.

When you want to export the media, in the export settings click the button in the video tab that says Match Source, this will set the export resolution to match your timeline. Some codecs (e.g. avid DNxHD) will not allow non-standard resolutions, and most will only allow even numbers of pixels in either dimension (e.g. h.264) so you may have to change codec.


ffmpeg - horizontal align of multiple drawtext

Make ASS (Advanced SubStation Alpha) subtitles and use the subtitles filter:

ffmpeg -i video.mp4 -filter_complex "subtitles=your_subtitles.ass" -c:a copy output.mp4

You can make the subtitles manually or with Aegisub.
SRT (Subrip) subtitles are much simpler than ASS and would be easier to make manually, but they will lack features that ASS can support. SRT will suffice for simple styling however (underline, bold, italics, etc), but not individual per-word color changing as far as I know.


Setting different resolution for encoding and display when encoding in ffmpeg

There's the setsar and setdar filters for this purpose

-vf scale=960:720,setdar=16/9

Since you know the output display ratio, it's convenient to use setdar here, although both filters only alter the SAR.


I think you might be confusing pixel aspect ratios with image aspect ratios.

I suspect you want square pixels - ie a pixel aspect ratio (PAR) of 1:1

Most HD videos are 1920x1080, which is an image aspect radio of 1.778 to 1.
Most HD videos have a pixel aspect ratio of 1:1.

Is your desired image size actually 1280x720 ?  I suspect it is, rather than 720x1280 (720 horizontal x 1280 vertical).

Non-square pixels are only usually used for SD widescreen videos - more of a legacy requirement these days.  Unless maybe you're designing for a specific custom display like a big advertising screen or something like that?


This command, which used t reference for aselect, worked for me:

ffmpeg -i AV36_1.avi -vf "select=between(n\,200\,399),setpts=PTS-STARTPTS" -af "aselect=between(t\,(200/15)\,(399/15)),asetpts=PTS-STARTPTS" -y test.mkv

If you want to use n (frames), then you will need to know the frame size of the audio codec e.g. 1024 samples for AAC, variable for MP3..etc


Animating particles with collision avoidance?

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


Compressing video recording- file gets bigger!

I solved it by reducing the bitrate
thank you


Strictly speaking, fourcc is the codec ID used by Microsoft. It has been adapted for use with many other formats, thus making it seem like a standardized ID format, but it's not.

ffmpeg, in particular, seems to only consider XDCAM standard MPEG2 for inclusion in MOV.

From the source code:

else if (track->enc->codec_id == AV_CODEC_ID_MPEG2VIDEO)
    tag = mov_get_mpeg2_xdcam_codec_tag(s, track);

where if the xdcam tag function doesn't find a matching XDCAM stream, it runs

if (!tag)
    tag = MKTAG('m', '2', 'v', '1'); //fallback tag

which ffmpeg, interestingly, thinks is tha tag that should be used for recording MPEG-2 in a MOV by a camera.

{ AV_CODEC_ID_MPEG2VIDEO, MKTAG('m', '2', 'v', '1') }, /* Apple MPEG-2 Camcorder */

and mp2v is signalled as required for (an old version of) Final Cut Pro.

{ AV_CODEC_ID_MPEG2VIDEO, MKTAG('m', 'p', '2', 'v') }, /* FCP5 */

mpgv is not on that (ISO media) list that the MOV muxer can be forced to work with, but it is on the RIFF list (for AVIs) where it's only declared for MPEG-2, not MPEG-1

{ AV_CODEC_ID_MPEG2VIDEO, MKTAG('m', 'p', 'g', 'v') }

All the tag variants exist because each vendor or program decides to mark their streams a certain way and there's no single body policing their use. Stick with mp2v since that works for you.

Update: I just realized that any stream can be tagged with any tag if -strict -1 or -2 is applied. I was able to tag an AVC stream in a MOV with mpgv :)


Camcorder vs. not a camcorder and separate audio and video recording

Terminology

In theory, a camcorder is a video camera that also records video. A long time ago, this was an important distinction, since movie cameras (which are analog and record to film) and other now somewhat obsolete cameras didn't have inbuilt recording capabilites.

(DISCLAIMER: opinionated paragraph ahead!) This distinction doesn't really matter anymore, since most video cameras are camcorders anyway, and/or can record to film and on a digital storage simultaneously (on a professional level). I have really seen the term 'camcorder' used more often to distinguish inexpensive consumer-level cameras from full-fledged, professional video cameras. Since the technology of those aren't fundamentally different (any more), this terminology has lost much of it's meaning.

  I learned that a camcorder is a portable video camera that records both visual and audio

I don't know where you heard this, but I don't think that's correct. At least I have never seen it used in that way, but then again, people are mixing up the terminology all the time and especially terms like that that have to some extent lost their original meaning get used in all kinds of contexts and meanings.

Most cameras will record both audio and video. Prosumer-level and some consumer-level cameras will both have an inbuilt microphone as well as an audio jack for external ones. I'm not sure about high-end professional cameras having inbuilt microphones, but at that level you really only use external microphones, since the internal ones have some shortcomings (see External vs. internal microphones).

  What do you call a NON-PORTABLE video camera that records visual and audio both?

A video camera. Or call it whatever you like, it doesn't really matter.

External vs. internal microphones

As mentioned, most cameras on a prosumer-level (which seems to be the right type of camera for your purpose) will have an inbuilt microphone and an audio jack to record with an external microphone. I would definitely recommend you use a good microphone. So many Youtube channels are unwatchable because of their terrible audio quality. And while even low-cost cameras have pretty good video quality nowadays, the audio quality is usually very poor.

Internal mics suffer from some problems. For instance, they are by design built in to the camera, so in most cases they won't be close to the source of the sound. Combine that with the fact that they are usually omnidirectional (i.e. they record sound from every direction) and they are generally not of high quality and you will get noisy, unclear audio with much reverb and ambient noise. Poor sound quality is one of the first things that people will notice about your video, and at least for me it's a reason to quit your video and never come back.

Your questions sounds like you plan on recording your videos at home. In that case, I would recommend a solid desktop microphone (that is one that has it's own stand). Depending on what microphone and camera you get, you might be able to plug it into the camera and use it as an external mic for your video recording, but you will probably have to connect it to a computer and record your audio from there. While editing, you can use the wave form of the camera's audio or automatic matching to match your external audio recording to your video.


FFMPEG, Extract first frame and hold for 5 seconds

Use

ffmpeg -start_number 501 -framerate 30 -t 60.0 -i input1.%04d.jpg
       -framerate 30 -t 15.0 -i transition1_%03d.png
       -filter_complex "[0]loop=149:1:0[bgheld5];
                        [1]loop=149:1:0[fgheld5];
                        [bgheld5][fgheld5]overlay=eof_action=pass"  out.mp4

The first frames of both sequences are repeated 149 times, so that there are 150 instances (30 fps x 5s). The 0 at the end of loop is the starting index of the frame(s) to loop. The middle 1 is the number of frames to loop starting at the index in the 3rd argument.


What Beginner Video Editing Software Should I Use?

I think pretty much every editing program would allow you to zoom, pan and insert text. Inserting another video into the main video is a little more complex and the only program I know for sure that does it is After Effects. But I'm sure there are others that will.

I would suggest using Premiere because it's a very powerful program. Even though I've never had to insert video into another one like you've described, I'm sure there's a way to do it. You don't have to learn the program inside out to be able to edit in it. There are hundreds of tutorials online that take you step by step through the process. A quick Google search would reveal that.

However, if you still don't want to go with Premiere, here is a list of free video editing programs that might be able to do the job. I haven't used any of them so I can't make a recommendation – but it's a good starting point.


Optimizing MPEG2 Encoder in Adobe Media Encoder

After some deep Googling, I did find explanations for a few of these options:

  MPEG macroblock quantization level. Valid values are from 2 to 31. Low
  values of this variable mean higher quality and higher bitrate, so 2
  is the highest quality and 31 is the lowest quality.

  VBV buffer size in units of 16k bits. The meaning of this parameter is
  confusing because it is used to help predict if the MPEG decoder might
  suffer buffer overflows or underflows. VBV buffer over/under flows are
  more commonly a problem when in CBR mode. If significant artifacts are
  present in the generated movie, try increasing this parameter.

(http://vis.lbl.gov/NERSC/Software/express/help6.2/help/relnotes/mpeg.htm)

  Intra DC Precision: the MPEG-1 DC value is mandatory quantized to a
  precision of 8 bits. MPEG-2 introduced 9, 10, and 11 bit precision set
  on a picture basis to increase the accuracy of the DC component, which
  by very nature, has the most significant contribution towards picture
  quality. Particularly useful at high bit rates to reduce
  posterization. Main and Simple Profiles are limited to 8, 9, or 10
  bits of precision.

http://www.gadegast.de/frank/mpegfaq/mpe1736.html

  In MPEG-2 video, Intra DC Precision indicates the number of bits for
  quantized DC coefficients of intra-coded blocks; it takes one of the
  values of 8, 9, 10, or 11 bits. The more bits are used, the more
  precise quantization is achieved.

http://avs.kddilabs.jp/mpeg/mpcs/faqe.html


Text titles like in tv shows, After Effects or another software?

After Effects is professional software for creating motion graphics, and can do what you are asking. There are a plethora of plugins, scripts and presets available to make it even easier, but out of the box it is very powerful software.

AE can also be scripted using Adobe's Extendscript scripting API. Within compositions (the name for the sequences created in AE) individual elements can be controlled by expressions. Both Extendscript and expressions are javascript-based.

For titling a show the workflow would depend on the content. For say a regular show the best approach would be to create templates. Adobe Premiere works very well with After effects, so that templates can be re-purposed within Premiere - e.g. the text content of a lower third title can be changed for different people's names.


Looking for a tile slideshow transition effet

Here is something similar, http://www.mihaipanait.com/portfolio-items/hexagon-transitions/

I know Noise Industries used to have that effects with squares and I am sure you could make the squares into hexagon shapes if you wanted...but their website seems to be down at the minute

Also check out videohive.com they have some pretty cheap templates for transitions etc and you may be able to find something that you can tweak to make work


Is there any option for mirror imaging in video editing software?

I don't think it would matter that much other than for the actor writing, easier if (s)he doesn't have to think about reverse-writing. The flipping effect is a one-click effect and wouldn't require much in terms of hardware, software or brain-power.

What editing software are you using - the effect should be easy to find in any way. It might not even be an effect as such but rather a transform feature but it would help if the editor was brought out.

I doubt that your editor DOESN'T have this effect but in the strange case where it doesn't, you can also try setting the width of the image to -100%, that works on some editors. But I'm pretty sure there is a flip.horizontal effect somewhere.


What kind of camera do I need to record a moving object in order to do motion tracking?

When tracking there are two (main things) that you need to be concerned with in tracking.  While there are many variables that need to be taken into account, when shooting there are two things that you should keep in mind.

First off, contrast, 99% of all tracking software uses contrast in the luminance channel (brightness) to determine a point and where it is going, green and black is not going to work very well.  White and black is your best bet...

Second is going to be the camera you are capturing the video with, obviously then this introduces a lot more variables...you want the footage to be properly exposed, and the shutter to be correct, the lower or too high of a shutter will make it more difficult to track shots.

Also when choosing a camera understand compression, the more compressed an image is the harder it will, also the lower the resolution.  For example, 1920 TV has a better resolution than a 720 TV.  But compression also matters, an image could be as big as texas but if it is highly compressed chances of pulling a track out of it is unlikely...

Take a look at this image, you can see all the images are the same "resolution" however the further right the more compressed the image is, and the harder it is to detect edges...

So now that you understand how to capture your footage, you need to check out a simple tutorial or two on how to track your footage.  there are several types of tracking but from what is sounds like you are looking to track a point or track a motion of a point.  Your best bet is going to be After Effects motion tracker.

You can get a 30-day free trial from the adobe website, and check out some awesome tutorials on VideoCopilot.net on how to do tracking.

I hope this helps


CMX 3600 (or earlier 340) is very common and understood by many systems. GVG (Grass Valley Group) format is almost as common. For simple cuts, dissolves and keys the two are highly compatible, but for more complex edits, including speed changes, there are significant differences. Neither deals well with multiple layers or multiple sources in one event.

Many other companies use proprietary formats that are often only slightly different from basic CMX/GVG. Things like the size and contents of the source ID, the use of notes for special effects, and so on, may change from version to version as well.

To list the specifications would take a very long post. If you have specific questions about what each can handle, try asking here. But in general, for interchange you'll probably find XML-based EDLs to be most flexible, and CMX/GVG will be understood by the most different systems, within their limitations.

Google "EDL XML AAF" for a lot more information on the topic.


ffmpeg - Trouble adding watermark + convert video quality in same command

Use

find /home/video/archive -type f -execdir ffmpeg -i '{}' -filter:v "drawtext=fontfile=/root/FreeSans.ttf:text='www.website.com':fontcolor=white@1.0:fontsize=26:y=h-line_h-30:x=w/20*mod(t\,120),scale=854:480" -pix_fmt yuv420p -c:v libx264 -preset slow -b:v 1000k -minrate 500k -maxrate 2000k -bufsize 2000k -c:a libfdk_aac -b:a 128k -movflags +faststart '/home/video/watermarked/{}.mp4' \;


Does SSD reduce render time significantly?

It depends entirely on the type of rendering you are doing and the specs of your computer.  Bottle necks can occur in many different parts of the rendering pipeline.  Generally speaking, rendering is very GPU or CPU intensive, depending on if the render engine is CUDA (or similar) enabled.  If the renderer is able to utilize a GPU, then GPUs and/or dedicated encoding cards will generally provide the largest boost to performance if they have not already been optimized, if not GPU enabled, then CPU becomes the biggest factor if not extremely fast or doing very light rendering.

Memory is a potentially large factor as well and would compound with the hard drive.  If there is not enough storage space for the CPU or GPU to work on the video stream, then it will have to spend much more time moving data on and off the hard drive.  In this case (if the memory is showing high utilization during render) then increasing the amount of memory is likely to yield a significant improvement in performance.

Data transfer rate is still potentially a bottleneck though.  If rendering is very minimally CPU/GPU intensive and/or the system already have very high performing CPUs or GPUs, then it is possible that a HDD would not be able to keep the render engine supplied with data to process.

An easy way to tell if your disk drive is a problem is to look at how long the render takes relative to the rate at which you can playback video in the editor.  If you are encoding to a different drive than your source material is on, then if the HDD is a bottleneck, it would be expected that render speed should move at the same rate as you are able to playback.  If you can playback footage at 20fps, then your HDD is capable of feeding at least 20 frames per second (with no effects applied).  If the render engine is processing less than 20 frames a second, the processing speed is the limit.  If it is processing 20 frames a second, then it is entirely possible that the HDD is failing to keep the render engine supplied with data to process.

If you are storing the render on the same drive you are reading your source from, it becomes much harder to tell as a HDD requires moving the read/write head between where it is reading the source data and writing the render results.  This extra seek time will drastically slow the performance of the drive.  As a rule of thumb, I'd say to consider looking in to disk related solutions if your render time is better than 1/3 of the playback rate when reading and writing to the same drive, though I'd encourage trying to do a test on different drives for source and output to be more certain.  So, if you are reading and writing to the same drive and you can play back 30fps, then if your encoding is running at 10fps or higher, an SSD might be helpful. (As might more memory as that would reduce how often the system has to switch between reading and writing and help cover the gap.)


Blur whole text and then "unblur" part of it

What you need to do is to use a regular blur effect. You also have to apply the effect to an adjustment layer. I'll explain why later on. Why don't I just make a recipe for you to follow first, and then I'll explain what's going on! :)

  Make your text layer and fill it with text.
  Make an Adjustment Layer. (Layer -> New -> Adjustment Layer)
  Make sure the Adjustment Layer is selected, and go Effect -> Blur -> Test some of them (Gaussian Blur is very common.)
  Go to the Effect Controls panel to set the blur to what you want it to be.

What is happening now, is that the Adjustment Layer is blurring all the layers below it. So if you have other layers below, you may need to Pre-Compose the two layers so that the Adjustment Layer doesn't affect more than the text layer. And the reason why we are using an Adjustment Layer, is that now we can either animate the layer away to reveal the naked text layer, or we can animate a mask to do the same thing. If you use a mask, you can add a feather that will make it look much better in most cases.

Alternatively, you can make two copies of the text, one with the blur directly on it, and one without any blur at all. Then you could animate the mask of the naked text layer to reveal it, but this is a bit difficult if you are animating the text or something like that, because you'll have to do exactly the same on both layers...

Here I'll explain how to do it with the Adjustment Layer with a mask.

  Select the Adjustment Layer and select the Rectangle tool from the top toolbar, and draw a rectangle covering the whole of the text.
  Press M to open the mask settings on the layer. Now you can set the feather to what you want it to be.

Move the mask a bit to the right to see how the effect will look like. Remember also that when you are adding feather, you'll have to make the mask bigger because the mask will fade away in the corners...

  Animate the mask as you please. Tell me if you want me to explain how to do this! :)

If you need to have more layers below the text layer, you need to Pre-Compose it:

  Select both the layers, right-click and select Pre-Compose.

That's it! Good luck with your movie :)


ffmpeg: Make letters appear one at the time, like a typewriter

Typewriter effect on ffmpeg using an .ass file, I generated this gif using the following line:
ffmpeg -f lavfi -i color=size=640x480:rate=30:color=black -vf "subtitles=typewriter.ass" -t 8 ffmpeg_typewriter.gif

I used the Eagisub program to get the parameters used in karaoke !! I created two styles (style1 and style2) both with different fonts, background etc. The shadow colors, background colors were chosen transparent because they appear however transparent, and the time of {\Kn} defines the character display time or time of the word or phrase, just change the n as long as you want !!! Too simple !! follow the file generated on Eagisub that can be easily edited by hand !! That's it thanks !!
    [Script Info]
; Script generated by Aegisub 3.2.2
; http://www.aegisub.org/
Title: Default Aegisub file
ScriptType: v4.00+

[V4+ Styles]
Format: Name, Fontname, Fontsize, PrimaryColour, SecondaryColour, OutlineColour, BackColour, Bold, Italic, Underline, StrikeOut, ScaleX, ScaleY, Spacing, Angle, BorderStyle, Outline, Shadow, Alignment, MarginL, MarginR, MarginV, Encoding
Style: style1,Ubuntu Mono,100,&H00FFFFFF,&HFF0000FF,&HFF000000,&H00000000,0,0,0,0,100,100,0,0,1,0,0,4,10,10,10,1
Style: style2,DejaVu Sans Mono,37,&H00FFFFFF,&HFF0000FF,&HFF000000,&H00000000,0,0,0,0,100,100,0,0,1,0,0,4,10,10,10,1

[Events]
Format: Layer, Start, End, Style, Name, MarginL, MarginR, MarginV, Effect, Text
Dialogue: 0,0:00:01.10,0:00:12.00,style1,,0,0,0,,{\pos(109,187.5)}{\k25}H{\k25}e{\k25}l{\k25}l{\k10}o{\k15}!{\k15}\NI{\k15}'{\k15}m{\k15} D{\k15}i{\k15}v{\k15}e{\k15}r{\k15}s{\k15}a{\k15}l{\k15}i{\k15}z{\k15}a{\k15}n{\k15}d{\k15}o{\k15}!{\k15}!
Dialogue: 0,0:00:05.50,0:00:09.40,style2,,0,0,0,,{\k15\pos(108,374)}Editing{\k15} a {\k15}.ass {\k15}with {\k15}Aegisub {\k15}to\N {\k15}generate {\k15}the {\k15}typewriter {\k15}effect.


How do I PROPERLY slow down a 60 fps clip in Vegas Pro 11?

You should be safe setting playback rate at 0.400. 59.94 is actually 60/1.001 and 23.976 is actually 24/1.001, so the 0.4 multiplier is technically exact. Switch off resample to be sure. Of course, how Vegas actually handles this internally is anybody's guess.

One way to test this would be to generate a frame sequence just containing an incremental numeral display (1,2,3...) in AE or similar, then render that as a 59.94p video. Import in vegas with playback 0.4 and resample off and then cycle through the frames to see if there are any duplicates or missing.


Y4M has no timestamps, only framerate in its header. So, if your source has any variability in its framerate, you'll see a shift in apparent timestamp in the Y4M.

e.g.

n     src     y4m
0       0       0
1    0.04    0.04
2    0.07    0.08
3    0.12    0.12
4    0.21    0.16
5    0.24    0.20
6    0.27    0.24
...

Over a long period, these perturbations can add up. Here frame #6 in src is at TS of src #5 in Y4M.

Edit: the sample TS file has VFR timestamps.

Use -c:v rawvideo -vsync 0 -vf setpts=N/FRAME_RATE/TB -an and save to .nut.


What are these two things on the side of a stage?

I believe they are teleprompters. They contain the text of the speech the person at the podium is reading. In this case, the camera is very far away, so they can't be projected onto a half-mirror in front of the camera as is normally done.

Here is a close-up of one used by President Obama.


I would go with either jing ( http://www.techsmith.com/jing.html ) free or Camtasia ( http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.html ) both from Techsmith.

Camtasia allow you to zoom in on part of the screen after recording but before rendering. This basically solves your problem and is great when you need to create video to a resolution that is less than the recorded resolution.


I am trying to generate Speech with audition but option is not visible

Generate Speech was added in Audition CC 2015.1. You will need to update to use that feature.


Brightness/Contrast Difference from PC to YouTube

Looks like Handbrake is outputting full range but flagging it as video levels, so the Handbrake output actually has Y=0 as black and Y=255 as white but the flag is telling Youtube that Y=16 is black and Y=235 is white.

If you upload a short segment (3-5s) of both your Handbrake input and output, that can be confirmed.


You will need a one-way mirror for this. It's related to something called front projection.

This setup is typically, except from the touch part, used with auto-cues (text projected in front of a camera that f.ex. a news anchor reads from appearing looking into the camera).

For example:

For a full body you would of course need a bigger mirror and you would need to project the image from top (or side), turn the mirror 90 degrees so it reflect what comes from top (or side), as well as a layer between the projector and mirror (can be as simple as a cloth)

In addition to that, you would need a video mixer so you can super-impose/mix in the interface that is supposedly touched (same as the projected image from the TV or projector) (alt. do it in post with composition/video editing software).

The tricky part is to get the overlayed video (the user-interface) synchronized with the touches from the talent. You would need initially to perform some calibration, f.ex. an image with fixed corners and a center that is projected while the talent touches these spots. Then scale/zoom/place video/camera to match the super-imposed image that is projected.

The other tricky part is the lighting conditions. The room need to be relative dark for the mirror to work properly at the same time as the talent is properly lit for the camera. You can darken the area behind and around the mirror with black colored textile in addition to turn off all none-talent lights and so forth.

Hope this helps!


Can I set the start number for image sequence output?

The image sequence muxer has a start number option, so

ffmpeg -i video.webm -start_number 98 image-%03d.png


How to take multiple inputs with specific trim times to one output, single command ffmpeg

#1 Using concat filter i.e. without textfile

ffmpeg -ss 0 -t 20:00 -i inputA.avi -ss 0 -t 10:00 -i inputB.avi -filter_complex "[0:v][0:a][1:v][1:a]concat=n=2:v=1:a=1" out.mp4

--OR--

#2 Using concat demuxer i.e. with textfile

file inputA-trim.avi
inpoint 0
outpoint 20:00
file inputB-trim.avi
inpoint 0
outpoint 10:00

and then your final command

ffmpeg -f concat -i inputList.txt [rest of command] final.mp4

See https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Concatenate for details.


Why is Audio and Video out of Sync during recording?

You should check your recorded video with MediaInfo. Regarding your problem, it shows,

if the durations of the video and the audio is the same or not,
if the interleave of the audio (the starting offset) is set correctly
in which sampling rate your audio was recorded.

Then, I would import your video file into Audacity (which imports only the audio, of course).

On the left side of each track you find the sampling rate, too. Is this the same sampling rate as being reported by MediaInfo?
Does Audacity play the audio too slow, too?

My impression from the symptoms that you describe is that the audio is recorded at a certain sampling rate, but reported as a lower sampling rate, or not at all.

Try to modify your sampling rate, either in your recordings settings, or in the Windows system. On Win7, it's under Control Panel->Hardware & Sound->Manage Audio Devices->Recording. There, select your microphone, then Properties->Advanced. There you can change the sampling rate.

If changing the sampling rate doesn't help, then you can only try another webcam software, or record the audio independently.


CMOS readout time, frame rate, and delay between frames?

Between frame is frame gap. In there, camera don't expose and coresponse it can not receive data at frame gap.
And i think, frame_readout include frame gap (time between frame adjacent)


FFMPEG convert video with multiple audio streams?

If you copied your command there then your issue is probably -acodec:0 mp. That should be -acodec:0 mp3.

You can just use -c:a mp3 to apply the encoding options to all audio tracks at once, no need to apply them for each individually.

Other than that your mapping is correct and shouldn't be the issue.

Edit: To conclude the discussion in the comments regarding the actual reason behind the question: When it comes to editing it is no problem to just transcode the video stream if the source codec makes problems and import the audio from the source file by either muxing the audio into a new container with the transcoded video stream or just importing the transcoded video and audio streams separately (by demuxing the source) into your editing program and skip on the container format.


Microphone outputs are typically very low level and have only enough output to drive a sensitive preamp, not headphones.  To drive headphones you need an amplified output.  According to a variety of sources, the D3300 does not have a headphone jack, which means you have to provide a separate amplifier, which means you have to provide one, and the power to drive it, and the cable to connect to it.  I suspect the best solution would be a battery-powered preamp that receives your mic output and then delivers two amplified outputs: line level for your D3300 input jack and phones-level for your headphones.


It was my own fault -- when I had exported it, I didn't make sure to export it in full resolution because since it already was, I thought that step was automatic.


How do I take optically faithful videos of glow props in the dark?

Deciding whether or not to shoot interlaced is really a matter of matching your destination format.  If you're shooting video for the web, you should record it in progressive scan mode.  You can record interlaced, and then de-interlace it in software, but this will likely lead to video artifacts, especially considering your subject matter.

I think the picture you posted has misled many commenters into giving you the wrong advice.  Because the picture is blurry, they recommend a faster shutter speed, which will sharpen a moving object.  But, given the nature of the video you linked to, I think more motion blur will result in a smoother, more natural look.  So try recording progressive, with a slow shutter speed.  This will let more light into the lens, brightening the exposure and making longer motion trails.

Also, try to match the framerate with which you're recording to that of your destination.  If you are recording at 29.97 and vimeo or youtube is playing at 24fps, they're going to introduce some frame blending on their end, which you have no control over, and which is likely to introduce artifacts.


compare two video then cut the different

A Clip(C) is a sequence of frames, each frame(f) consists of video and audio frames, the duration(t) of each frame is constant and is determined by the frame rate.
For the i th clip(Ci), it is defined as (fi_n) n∈ℕ
back to your question, the idea is to find the result of
⊕Cj , where j ∈ {0,…,19}
Since the sizes of all Cj are not the same, the elements or frames of ⊕Cj are not guaranteed to be monotonic increasing. Therefore, different frames, with expected sequence, cannot be identified in this problem.
=======
IF you can guarantee the sizes of all Cj to be the same,
a video frame can be extracted by ffmpeg to a png file and a audio frame can be extracted by the t second of wav file. The ⊕ operation can be handled by image diff and easily be found in Google.


Which export for display a loop illustration on Facebook?

Giphs have the problem that they are heavily compressed most of the time. Uploading the file to Giphy or facebook might additionally re-format the file and compress it even more, as does youtube or vimeo with their files aswell. You might want to try and increase the resolution of your composition and upscaling everything. In your viewer, not a lot will change, but with a higher resolution, the gif should be a bit more readable at last. Also, try to make Text as large as possible, without blowing it out of proportion.

If none of that helps, you might want to look into other containers and formats that support high web-compression and looping, such as webm.


What is the proper workflow for slightly different framerates, i.e. 30, 29.97, 29.976?

First off, you are correct in your assumption that 23.98 and 24 are indeed different. They are not effectively the same, and they are not "rounded up". Sometimes 24p means 23.98, and sometimes it means 24. They are both separate and it can be quite problematic to treat them the same.

But in practicality, you don't need to worry about the quality, especially if you are using something like Premiere, which is very good about matching your sequence settings with those of your footage (and warning you if they aren't the same).

Your 60D does indeed shoot in 23.98, and modern editing software will know the difference. You can make a 23.98 sequence yourself if you wish; your footage will suffer no quality loss, as no conversion is actually occurring.

Thankfully, the reason we have to distinguish between 23.98 and 24 is that we are moving on from the standards and hurdles that lead to drop-frame frame rates. Plenty of new cameras (such as the RED) can shoot 24fps, and they actually mean 24. And doing exactly that can be quite nice.

So yeah, don't worry about it. Just always match settings with your footage, but newer versions of Premiere do this without fail, faster and accurately.


Best way to increase the display size of a web video

If it is a flash source, then there is a good chance it has vector elements.  You should export at a higher resolution from the source rather than trying to upscale the mov file.

Working from the original will ensure accurate pixel data for any vector elements and produce a much higher quality upscale.  (This is actually one of the major reasons for Flash's early popularity.)  If that isn't an option or it was a raster format asset in Flash, then it is really a toss up between the two options depending on the quality of the original encoding.

Encoding to a new size can do slower and more accurate upscaling that will produce fewer artifacts, but if the original source you are upscaling from is already pretty low quality, a second generation of encoding loss may very well exceed the amount of quality improvement you get from the rendered out upscale.

So in summary, the best option is to export from Flash at a higher resolution.  If you can't do that, re-encode if you can do it without another generation of loss or have a high enough quality source (200kbps is not high enough for a re-encode most likely).  Finally, if you don't have that, then stick with the re-size in the player on the fly.


"Is D-Cinelike just a flatter colour profile with less contrast (to capture more detail in shadows and highlights)?" Yes.  It's closer to log color rather than linear.  The big thing to be aware of in post production is to make sure you grade it to where you want it to be and possibly use their LUT to convert back towards Rec 709 depending on what you are looking for.

If you don't want to have to work on your color, don't shoot D-Cinelike.  If you want the best recovery in highlights and more ability to adjust the tone, shoot D-Cinelike and spend the time to apply a color grade to your liking.  (D-cinelike isn't so great in shadow unfortunately).

Personally, I always shoot D-log on my Mavic 2 Pro, which is similar in concept to D-Cinelike, though it has better shadow recovery and a bit more balanced, though slightly less cinematic looking without more effort to tweak it, but last I knew, D-log isn't available on the Mavic Air.

If you want to see some good samples, this youtube video seemed like it had relatively good comparisons of the 3.


GoPro Dual HERO 3D stereo system only compatible with HERO3+ Black Edition units?

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

HD HERO Original camera
HD HERO2 camera

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

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


3d max change the opacity of an object's edges rendered in After Effects.

When you render in 3D Max make sure pre-multiplying is turned off.

Given the situation you want to render an object to be used for post-production within Photoshop, then…

Be sure you set the background to complete black: Rendering > Environment > Background > Colour (click on the colour field and set
red, green and blue to 0)
Set the antialising in your render settings to Blackman - this type of antialising is quite sharp and doesn’t blur the edges. In
V-Ray this is located in Renderer > Image sampler > Antialiasing
Filter.
Set the file type in the common rendering dialog to tga, 32-bit, premultiplied and alpha split off, compress on.
In Photoshop, load the TGA image, double click the layer to convert it from a background layer into a normal layer.
Go to channels, CTRL-select the alpha channel, invert the selection, go back to layers and hit the delete button.

[...]

If you already have rendered your image and your alpha is accidentally
pre-multiplied, you can add a 6th step to the 5 I mentioned above. In
Photoshop go to Layer > Matting > Remove Black Matte. Voilà, you got
rid of the black ‘halo’ again.

Full article:
http://www.onoff.ch/2007/01/04/premultiplied-alpha-problems/


How to animate text overlays, in iMovie or similar

Since you asked for a program...

If you're referring to the title specifically, this can be accomplished is After Effects with relative ease.

You'll simply need to...

create the three text box shapes
the three lines of text
parent-child them together
animate them all with keyframes

If you're referring to the changing of speed effect, this can also be done in After Effects.  You can simply animate the speed with keyframes.


Best Way To Improve Davinci Resolve 12 Playback Speed?

Try generating optimized media (i.e. proxy files). Optimized Media is a nice feature that will allow you to playback, edit and grade video files that are optimized for smooth playback, but Resolve will still render from the original video files when you are ready to deliver.

Head over the Media tab and right click on the file(s) you want to optimize, and select "Generate Optimized Media". This may take a little while to run, so grab a coffee while you wait.

You can choose what compression format to use as optimized media (ProRes, DNxHD, etc) by opening Project Settings > General Options.

Here's a nice video tutorial that will walk you through it in more detail:


Sync several movie clips with one audio file

This sounds like a perfect candidate for using multi-camera editing. You can automagically synch all the clips using their audio, and turn them into a multicam source, which lets you edit from the multiple synched cameras quickly and easily.

How to do it in premiere:

Select your clips in the Project panel. Then, right-click the selected clips and choose Create Multi-camera Source Sequence from the context menu.

It will then let you choose the synch method, in your case use audio. Also set the audio Sequence Settings to the clip with the good audio, and it will only use it in the sequence.

You now have a multicamera source clip, you can edit from it as if you were doing a live vision mix by choosing the camera you want to use while it plays (with of course the luxury of being able to go back and redo it and tweak the edits. The details of how to do multi camera edits are here.

The workflow in FCP7 was very similar to Premiere, but I'm not familiar with FCX, have a look here to get started.


To make the distinction: PAL is just an encoding system, which only really defines the resolution and frame rate for analogue systems. Rec601/709 are  colourspaces generally used by TVs.

Sounds like you might be having trouble with colourspace conversion. The black point on an 8-bit Rec601 image is 16, not 0 (it's to do with the way analogue systems transmit video data - sync, etc.), so as a result, anything below this, from 0-15 will be displayed as black.

Video editors, DVD burners and other video processors may not take colourspaces into account or may manipulate your video, resulting in a change of colourspace, which will ultimately change the colours in your video.

The 'Sony Levels' effect essentially applies a LUT to your image (think of it as scaling the values 0-255 to the bounds 15-235, the 8-bit luma range). This means that your image will be displayed correctly on a Rec601 system, but will look flat on a computer.

Working in a 10+ bit workflow may help to solve this issue. However, to answer your points:

  1. Is this the correct way to handle the situation?

Your camera shoots video in the RGB colourspace, not the Rec601/709 spaces.

Ultimately, the best way is to apply a RGB -> Rec601 LUT, essentially remapping the colours correctly across the board, but I'm not sure if Vegas supports this off the top of my head. Using the Levels effect will help with the black/white values (make sure the centre is at 0.5), but there may be some colour variation.

  2. What is the correct value to use for the levels effect?

The black point should be 0.059 and the white point should be 0.918 to comply with the standard.

  3. Is it correct to not apply the levels effect when rendering for Youtube etc.?

That's correct - YouTube will accept your video with the default colourspace and should display it correctly. You may as well test this, though.

  4. In which situations do I have to use the levels effect, and in which situations better not?

Any time you're displaying your content on a Rec601 device.


I know this is an old topic but wanted to answer in case someone else is having the same question.
In general, you can use both the Live and On-Demand DASH profiles for VoD content, for live content you need to use the Live profile. The difference would be that if you have a 1:30 hrs VoD file if you are distributing it using DASH Live Profile you will have a long manifest file with a big segment timeline list and a lot of mp4 (90 * 3600/{segment duration}) segments while if you are using the On-Demand profile you end up having a much shorter manifest file and a single mp4 file.
In the case of Live profile, the player would need to download the segments, while with On-Demand profile it would simply send HTTP byte-range requests to the CDN to target a particular time in the content.
Of course, this would result also in a lower CDN load, because in DASH Live profile, the player would need to download all the segments to play the video, meaning that it would need to download the same mp4 header for each segment.
If you are willing to optimize the content delivery, I strongly recommend adopting On-Demand DASH profile.


How can I find good quality discounted audio gear?

Nothing beats word of mouth. Ask other producers, technicians, and musicians in your area who you talk with (I presume you do some networking). Everyone likes a deal; see what your contacts do for theirs.

Here are a few approaches that I've had luck with:

Check classifieds, both on paper and online classifieds such as Craigslist. Look for organizations that are going out of business or upgrading their stock. Check the garage sale section, too. People occasionally clean out their home studios. Does your area have an auction site? I bought a nice synthesizer once from a site like that, through a local college that was upgrading their music program's equipment.
Look to see if there is a regular swap meet or flea market nearby. In my area, there is an audio swap meet every six months, plus a weekly general market. I've found decent used gear at both of these, and generally you can try it out.
Finally, search for pawn shops. Most cities have at least a few, and most of the ones I've seen tend to have a bit of musical equipment.
Look for "deal of the day" sites such as goingtoday.com or woot.com or Musicansfriend's Stupid Deal of the Day. You will probably have to wait a while before something you need shows up, but when it does, it's usually under retail price, and usually refurbished.

Very little of this applies specifically to audio equipment - variations on these basic ideas could work for finding TVs, cars, computers, whatever.


The audio is clipping internally somewhere from the sound of it.  The background noise gets louder and so does the speaking, but the speaking is getting crushed.  I'd double check if there are any adjustments being applied in the render.  It sounds like either an incorrectly adjusted limiter or possibly an additional signal boost being applied.  It might also be rendering in to a lower bit depth that clips.


How to record multiple days worth of video without interrruption

The problem with recording video while also playing is that you are forced to split processing time between video compression and the game.  Your best bet for this kind of extended recording is a real-time encoder that can take the load off the CPU, however such devices are not particularly cheap.  Devices such as the BlackMagic Intensity and Matrox MX02 will perform such a real time encoding task, however they cost $200 to $500.

For best results, I would suggest outputting to an HDMI splitter and using a completely separate computer for recording with the capture interface installed on the secondary computer.  This should also greatly reduce the space required since real time encoding hardware will provide a much higher degree of compression than real time CPU only encoding.


You could use multiple cheap cameras recording at low fps, but slightly out of phase.  Bennett Wilburn talks about this in his 2004 Stanford Doctoral thesis, "High Performance Imaging Using Arrays of Inexpensive Cameras".


With Adobe After Effects and a script such as PT_TextEdit, you'd be able to do something like this.  You create the text styles you want to use, add all the text to a spreadsheet or google sheet, then run it through PT-TextEdit, which will generate a load of different comps for you with the different names.  You can then batch export all the comps.
http://aescripts.com/pt_textedit/


Correct workflow in Adobe Premiere for work with interlaced content

As for how to work... it all depends on what your final destination is. Are you working on a piece to be broadcasted, or for the Web? In the latter case, the final product should be progressive. If the former... the in turn it depends on your source material, which seems to be interlaced.

So you should:

Create an interlaced project, "1080i50". The "50", in this case,
doesn't mean "frames per second", but "fields per second" (2 fields
= 1 frame).
Work as you would normally in Premiere.
Export it in an interlaced format too. "1080i50" sounds good, but again, that
depends on the final destination of your piece.


Davinci Resolve 17 Omitting Clips from within Fusion Clips in Render

The best way to control the order-of-operations is to do all of your compositing in a single Fusion clip; all of your keying and corner-pinning happens in a single Fusion clip, ideally. To set this up, lasso both of the clips on V1 and V2, right-click, and choose "create Fusion clip" from the contextual menu (do this to new, ordinary video clips, not ones you’ve already made into Fusion clips).
But in case you are trying to preserve some amount of edit flexibility, or have another reason to keep the Fusion clips distinct on the Edit timeline, I suspect that the issue is an order-of-operations problem related to the Color page.
I think that when Resolve sees two Fusion clips stacked on top of each other, it processes the
bottommost clip’s Fusion effects first, passes the V1 Fusion to the Color page, then calculates V2 Fusion and V2 Color.  I could be wrong about bottom-first processing, but it definitely does send to the Color page before returning to Fusion to handle the second clip, whichever one that actually is.
So, it’s likely the Color page that’s messing up the alpha channel. You could try opening the topmost clip on the Color page, right-clicking anywhere in the node tree background, and choosing "add alpha output” from the dropdown menu. In previous versions of Resolve, it was necessary to inform the Color page that it should output an alpha. Since your alpha is coming from Fusion, you'll also probably need to right-click in the background select "add source," and wire the new green triangle on the left to the blue alpha output on the right.  This is the manual way to tell the Color page to "pass through" an alpha channel.
Resolve’s image pipeline undergoes frequent modification, especially with respect to alpha channels, and the way different Edit page containers prioritize and calculate (including premultiplication).  For the most part, it has improved greatly over the years, but you'll still run into situations where it doesn't do what you'd expect. The developers are great about incorporating user feedback, but on the other hand, that's why the image pipeline is in a constant state of flux.  And since the codebase changes more frequently than the documentation, sometimes the order of operations isn't clearly defined…
Which is why it's still best to contain all of your Fusion compositing in a single clip.
One last thing that might help, and I always forget to recommend, because it's a new feature; Render In Place.  You can render either (or both) clips to disk, which will both speed up playback and help you troubleshoot, and depending on your requirements may be a sufficient solution itself.  Right-click on either clip in the timeline and select the option from the dropdown, but be sure to select a codec which supports alpha channels, such as ProRes 4444.


How to show number of available streams using ffmpeg?

If you have ffprobe installed:

ffprobe <input> -show_entries format=nb_streams -v 0 -of compact=p=0:nk=1

You can also filter for video or audio streams by adding -select_streams v or -select_streams a, respectively. See the manual for more details.

If you do not have ffprobe, ffmpeg can be used too, but in a slightly less robust way (i.e., this may break if the output format changes or something contains the words "Stream #" in the output):

ffmpeg -i <input> 2>&1 | grep "Stream #" | wc -l


I believe you can do it with ffmpeg with command drawtext

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf "drawtext=enable='between(t\,0,60)':fontfile=/Windows/Fonts/Tahoma.ttf:fontcolor='White':> > text='YourText'" -acodec copy output.mp4

See this tutorial, for batch conversion.

You can add drawbox to make it more nice. See documentation here.


privacy: the easiest way to blur out some location specific objects in a video

You are going to need to use; preferably After Effects to do this. You could also do it in Premiere; but AE is the way to go, because you can use the tracking feature to auto follow objects; combined with a custom mask (with a blur filter applied).

Other than that your options will be limited.

I believe Adobe CC allows a 30 day free trial; and it's monthly in terms of cost, you could always try it and see if it suits your needs, and go from there).


GitLab like program for easier collaborative video production

Try Resilio Sync it will push or pull or both files from a server, pc etc and keep them all updated.


How to convert encrypted mpeg dash created with Bento4 mp4-dash.py to MP4

After you have made concat with your method 2:
You need the decryption key value (not the KID) for each track (I will not explain how to find the key value;) and then from your video and audio files use mp4decrypt from bento4 (just google it if you don't have it yet):
mp4decrypt --key KID:00112233445566778899AABBCCDDEEFF audio.m4a audio_decrypted.mp4
mp4decrypt --key 1:00112233445566778899AABBCCDDEEFF video.mp4 video_decrypted.mp4
you will have to replace KID with your 16 bytes hex key ID and 00112233445566778899AABBCCDDEEFF with your real key value
then ffmpeg will work (as expected) with your decrypted tracks :
fmpeg -i video_decrypted.mp4 -i audio_decrypted.m4a -c copy output.mp4


How do you edit a sliding effects for a behind the scenes reel in the below video

That effect is known as a wipe, it's a transition effect in Premiere. Have the graded and ungraded effects above each other in the timeline and apply a wipe to the top one. Adjust the timing as you like.


I don't have a sample of your file so I don't know if this fixes it or not, but have you tried a simple remux?

ffmpeg -y -i h264_file.ts -c copy remuxed.ts

This is also basically the same thing, but helpful if you want video and audio in separate files before you remux:

ffmpeg -y -i h264_file.ts -map 0:0 -c:v copy -muxdelay 0 video.ts -map 0:1 -c:a copy -muxdelay 0 audio.ts
ffmpeg -y -copyts -i video.ts -i audio.ts -c copy remuxed.ts

You could also try reencoding audio but copying video.  Encoding audio but copying video will be fast and usually concerns about reencoding loss is a lot less significant with audio.  (Use audio synchronization, see -async in documentation.)


How to retroactively extract media out of a Final Cut Pro library?

I think the best way would be to create a new library with a new project, then select the entire timeline in the old project, then drag all into the new project in the new library. That should give only the media used. Make sure that in the settings the leave file is selected.


How do I convert a series of PNGs into an AVI using Avidemux?

Use ffmpeg instead, e.g.

ffmpeg audio.mp4 -framerate 50 -pattern_type glob -i 3_DucksTakeOff_720p50_CgrLevels_SINC_FILTER_SVTdec05_/'*'.sgi -sws_flags lanczos+print_info -c:a copy -c:v libx264 -preset slow -crf 22 -pix_fmt yuv420p output.mkv

adjust the input file naming as necessary.  ffmpeg can read png just fine.  If there are other PNGs in the same dir that you don't want to include, use
-start_number 090001 -i dir/1I%06d.png  -frames 180.  (Note that it matters what goes before -i input, and what goes after.  Stuff before is input options, stuff after is output options.)

leave out the audio file if you don't have an audio track to mux.

Decrease the CRF to get higher quality at higher bitrate.

Increase the preset to slower or veryslow to get higher quality at similar bitrate but slower encode time.

Leave out the -pix_fmt yuv420p to not force ffmpeg to subsample the chroma after converting from RGB (PNG's color format) to YUV.  (Most hardware players will only have hardware decoding for 8-bit 4:2:0 h.264, unfortunately.  Same for GPU-accelerated decoding on PCs.)

Hmm, I'm not sure whether ffmpeg defaults to the bt.709 or bt.601 color matrix for RGB -> YUV conversion.

If you really need to make an AVI (with a DIVX / MPEG4-ASP video stream, I assume) for compatibility with an old hardware player, then see the guide.  With avidemux, did you make a non-standard AVI, like h.264 in AVI?

I highly recommend against avidemux for video encoding.  Its x264 options dialog is ancient and terrible.


How to decide where to place and what zoom to use for a camera

You're on the right track. Your set looks okay to me and that's probably what I would do. But, no, there is no webcam I've ever seen that would be a good fit for this. You need a proper camera and possibly some additional hardware and software to assist in the upstream process.

I believe you can best accomplish what you want with a consumer grade camera. There are plenty of consumer grade camcorders that also have an optical zoom at 10x or higher, and they are fairly cheap too (I assume budget/time is tight, hence the webcam/gotomeeting solution). I would get something with at least 10x optical zoom. Completely ignore digital zoom specs and if you can, turn it off in whatever camcorder you get.

It seems there are camcorders out now that can send the video signal over USB, for exactly this purpose. I've never use that, however, and it may not work that well with Gotomeeting. I would use a camcorder with an HDMI out, then incorporate an HDMI to USB hardware option, which should be able to connect to Gotomeeting as if it were a webcam. There's several hardware recommendation found here.

You will also need to change to location of some of your set. First, I would move the sound box and the laptop running GoToMeeting to the back with the camera (item six on your diagram). Whenever possible, always put all tech in the same location: "The tech table". The primary reason is the ease for your techs to manage the equipment. The secondary reason is the lines. USB and HDMI can't run very far without additional hardware, also longer runs means more work, more expense, more risk, etc.

Here's your new diagram:

For this set, you will need:

Camcorder as previously discussed
Tripod that moves nicely
HDMI to USB converter as previously discussed
HDMI and USB wires
At least one tech managing mostly the camera, plus the other hardware.

If budget and time are not big factors here, I would consider adding one or two more cameras, possibly reposition the original camera, and add a video mixer. In this kind of audience set, called "arena", a dynamic speaker will tend to turn frequently and rapidly to address and engage all the attendees. This means he will be facing your camera less than half the time, which makes for a boring and unengaging shot for your remote attendees. Adding one or two more cameras would significantly increase your set complexity and cost, however, it would add a level of professionalism that is worth it if you have the budget, time, and space. Consider this resource that discusses specifically using multiple cameras for Gotomeeting.

Here is a diagram for that, where 7 and 8 are cameras and 9 is a video mixer:

For this set you will need much more:

3 Camcorders as previously discussed
3 Tripod that moves nicely
3 HDMI to USB converters as previously discussed
HDMI and USB wires
HDMI extenders. There's several varieties, discussion of which is too much for this answer.
Video mixer, some of which are discussed in the resource link.
At least 4 techs managing mostly the cameras:

One for each camera
One managing the video mixer

It total, I would say this set would cost 5 to ten times more than the first set, most of that being labor.

Source

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


Audio monitoring w/ headphones through HDMI port

What you want is generally called an "HDMI audio extractor". There are several hardware products on the market that will extract the audio in the HDMI stream to an audio out connection and pass-through the video part.

A search on ebay gives you several results: http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=HDMI+audio+extractor

Though if you need very high quality audio you probably need a more professional product with a good built-in DAC (digital to analog converter). HDMI audio is digital so it needs to be converted to an analog signal and the hardware used in these products isn't meant for high fidelity audio production. Or buy a cheap one with an digital output and use an external DAC.


Post production removal of uneven green screen with glass object shattering in foreground

If the example were a lightbulb at the top dropping to the bottom you would take one frame with the bulb at the top and one frame with the bulb at the bottom, then simply use half of each as a mask.

Choosing a range of colors is also possible if it's not so wide as to reduce the remaining.

Movement detection is also possible.

Where this would be really tough is a moving camera and a light colored Green Screen that was poorly lit with a darker green object that moved slightly and rotated in one spot - better to use a red or blue screen in that case.

Here's a manual and automatic Photoshop technique example: https://phlearn.com/tutorial/automatically-remove-objects-photos-photoshop/ .

Uploading the Video to YT as unlisted would allow us to give a more precise answer than guessing the situation and providing a general answer.


How does the “AUTO TAKE” feature on the Panasonic WJ-MX12 work?

According to the Instruction Manual for the WJ-MX12 from Panasonic, the "AUTO TAKE" feature allows "A WIPE MIX EFFECT mode" to be "operated automatically without changing the MIX/WIPE lever."

This is from pp. 2 of the manual that you can read here:

http://tda.panasonic-europe-service.com/docs/2z4fd648faz3z1f340z656ez706466z35z6265ac2843a7c8785ba2cc5185b68bc80d0f9dea/ttips/Visual/Mixers_Edit_Controllers/WJ/MX12/727808/BMX12.pdf

On pp. 16 item 4 of the same manual there are more details


Dealing with dropped frames in background plate when doing keyframe animation in After Effects

Try frame blending.

Show the switch column in timeline.
Check, and enable the Frame Blending switch on the timeline.
Check, and enable the Frame Blending option of the layer.
Always check your composition frame rate.

Shortcut:
ctrl + k (Win) or command + k (Mac)


VirtualDub was made to operate exclusively on AVI files; however, a plugin API was added from version 1.7.2 which allows the import of other formats. Appropriate video and audio codecs need to be installed.


Why are there so many color spaces available?

There are a number of reasons why there are so many color spaces:

Color resolution - sRGB and similar color spaces only cover a portion of the visible spectrum. This means that they can be represented with fewer bits per color channel. (8 in the case of sRGB.) For something like Rec. 2020 or ACEScg, you need 16 or more bits per channel. If you don't have enough bits for each color channel, you'll start to notice banding in displays of gradations of color in the color space. If your hardware is limited, you'll use one that requires fewer resources, whereas if output quality is of the utmost importance, you'll use one that can represent more colors.
Output Devices - televisions and until recently computer monitors are only able to display a portion of the visible spectrum. (Likewise with printers.) If the output device can't display it, what's the point of being able to store and transmit it? Color spaces used for televisions and earlier computers were chosen based on what they could produce. Recently we've started to see wide gamut and HDR displays that can display a much larger portion of the visible spectrum (but still not all of it), so we're starting to see new color spaces for these devices.
Proprietary Needs - various vendors have created color spaces that match the devices and software they sell. The vast majority of photographers and videographers are home users doing it for fun. They don't need high bit depths and wide color gamuts. But professionals do!
Color spaces can also be designed to have certain properties that others don't. For example, some color spaces separate the colors based on perceptual uniformity (colors that appear similar to humans are grouped together), whereas other color spaces separate the color based on display hardware (RGB color spaces are generally used for displays that have red, green, and blue sub-pixels). Depending on what you're using the colors for, you choose a color space that makes working with colors in that way easy.


An easy way to create videos for YouTube from mp3 files

Thanks to Brads recommendation, I used ffmpeg for the job. Here is a small bash script that converts all the mp3 files to mpeg4 avi files (a jpg image must be included in the folder):

#!/bin/bash
# Requires: ffmpeg
# Usage: ./convert.sh

for file in *.mp3;
do
    ffmpeg -i *.jpg -i "${file}" "${file%.*}.avi"
done

Some more info here and here, but that didn't work for me.. All these options they used made it too complicated and it just didn't work - nothing would get converted (I would get files with audio but without the image in the video or videos with image but without audio, -loop option was unnecessary, -shortest option was unnecessary, works fine without it)..


You are interested in blending mode "Difference"

You can use it in "Blending mode" of layer, or on masks.

UPD: Adding screenshot, as asked

Red — Mask Blending

Blue — Layer Blending


How can I update instances of a text template after changing the master template?

Unfortunately, that isn't currently supported. Your text items will preserve the state from when they were first added. So you're stuck doing it manually. It's number 4 on the list of top requested features for the next update though and Apple seems to be aware of this site, or they've just been reading minds the last few updates- http://fcpx.tv/top.html

One thing that has helped me though is that you can drag your new Motion titles on top of the old ones already on your timeline, hit "replace", and it should retain the original text of the old title.


You can use Premiere Pro or similar video editing software and plugin Flicker Free from Digital Anarchy with one of the preset.

Result of plugin work

Settings of the plugin in my case

Also I know some other methods but they are poorer and harder.


Given your are using a VPS this is no suprise (guessing you only have a single core with 1-3GHz) and you won't be able to crunch the conversion down to a few minutes. You can try using -c:v libx264 -presets ultrafast but I'd guess it will still take you about 45-60 minutes to encode.

Also remove the -crf option when using a preset (they choose a default that produces a very good balance between speed and quality, I only recommend to modify that value when you know what it really does)

Be advised that the quality you get from that preset is not exactly great. If you NEED fast encoding speed over everything then go for it, if it's not THAT important I'd suggest using fast oder faster instead of the ultrafast preset.


How do I remove night footage from 300 days of Time lapse video

Using ffmpeg, a command line tool, you can use

ffmpeg -i in.mp4 -vf select='trunc(mod(t+2,3))',setpts=N/FRAME_RATE/TB -crf 23 out.mp4

The select filter is used on the video stream. This filter evaluates the supplied expression on each frame and keeps the frame if the expression evaluates to a non-zero value.

The expression used is trunc(mod(t+2,3)). The modulo function returns the remainder of the first operand when divided by the second. The first operand here is the timestamp of the evaluated frame. The truncate function truncates that result to an integer. If it is zero, the frame is discarded, else kept.

e.g. for a 25 fps video

t       t+2      mod(t+2,3)       trunc(mod(t+2,3))    select
0.00    2.00     2.00                    2             KEEP
0.04    2.04     2.04                    2             KEEP
...
0.96    2.96     2.96                    2             KEEP
1.00    3.00     0.00                    0             CUT
1.04    3.04     0.04                    0             CUT
...
1.96    3.96     0.96                    0             CUT
2.00    4.00     1.00                    1             KEEP
...
3.00    5.00     2.00                    2             KEEP
...
4.40    6.40     0.40                    0             CUT
...

Since you want to 'collapse' the video by removing the night time portions, the setpts filter is added to make all the kept frames continuous i.e. after the frame at 0.96, the next kept frame (2.00) will have the new timestamp of 1.00.

The video has to be recompressed since a filter has been used. For MP4s, default codec is H.264 and default encoder is libx264. The -crf 23 sets the bitrate control method (CRF) and value (23). Lower values retain more of the source quality at the expense of larger size. 18 to 28 are typical values.

You can get a ffmpeg binary for your platform from https://ffmpeg.org/download.html. Always get the latest nightly or snapshot build.


Search two hour video for a specific five second clip

I can think you should try this project, https://github.com/nielstenboom/recurring-content-detector. I would recommend trying the Color Histogram or Color Texture Motion algorithms. The Convoluted Neural Network one is quite compute intensive and the results haven’t been that good for me. Since your looking for such a small clip, you might need to reduce the frame skip parameter to get more accurate timings.


Here are some things to try:

Switch to OBS Studio. OBS classic is no longer supported and has been replaced by the "studio" version.
Tell your OS to run OBS in "high priority" mode.
Set your encoding preset to a lower quality and/or lower FPS and/or lower definition
Use your GPU to encode (NVENC). Your CPU will no longer encode your stream and will be able to run other tasks, but it will downgrade the quality of your video.


Personally I use Pinnacle Studio to record the TV shows. I have used it to record over a 100 hours of TV footage till now and I'm pretty happy with it.

What You Need

TV Tuner
Software to record.

For the card you can buy Pinnacle TV Tuner (~ $70), but any compatible card will do. Many good cards are available for a lower price. Just make sure it has a coaxial cable input.

Pinnacle Studio comes along with the card if you buy that. This software can be used to record/edit videos. Recording is straightforward. You can select the encoding format, resolution, quality and begin recording. You can also schedule TV recordings to record when you are not at home.

But once you have the driver for card, the rest is easy. You can use any software to record the feed (including VLC player).

The only thing to keep in mind is storage. More often than not, live recording won't have the best encoding used, so it will take up a lot of space. To take care of storage problems I record in HD only if really necessary. Otherwise I would need additional tools to re-encode in high compression formats (like h264 or h265). Use ffmpeg or Handbrake for that.

Good luck!


Looking for recommendations on editing Premier Pro on a MacBook Pro

I've seen a few reviews of the Retina display machines that suggest that the graphics chip has trouble pushing the display at full resolution. At this point, I think the Retina machines are better suited to the processing of static images for iPad development than for high-res video editing.


mplayer/ffmpeg How to set caca filter's output size

Found. Caca library is driven mostly by environment variables rather than filter params.

export CACA_GEOMETRY=200x78
mplayer -vo caca $INPUT


codec/container with additional reconstruction information for archival?

Typically, error correcting code (ECC) is added to the storage mechanism as with Reed-Solomon on DVD and Blu-ray and the modifications for forward error correction in DVB and ATSC transports. Another common video archival medium, LTO tape, has two levels of ECC. Building ECC into the codec would be redundant and wasteful, so they mostly focus on error concealment.


Is it possible to remove a border from a Webm video losslessly?

See here https://www.webmproject.org/docs/container/ under section Track. There you find PixelCropBottom, PixelCropTop, PixelCropLeft and PixelCropRight - all of which are supported. These parameters should do what you want. They also exist for Matroska.
Look for a tool that can manipulate those parameters.


Real time ffmpeg / x264 encoder behavior when input resolution suddenly changes

FFmpeg will automatically insert scale filter to rescale to first resolution when it encounters input resolution changes. Obviously this only applies when encoding.


What is the correct aspect ratio to publish video for broadcast television

Please provide more information as commented by @MichaelLiebman
But default would be:
30FPS, 16:9 (1920x1080, 1280x720) either Progressive or interlaced.
Mostly you'll need 4:2:2


Creating effects/transitions in AviSynth or Lightworks

You will need so-called video composition software such as Adobe After Affects or even Blender.

A few years ago Combustion was available which was very good for things like this, but Autodesk came along and purchased it, sucked it dry of blood, and put it in a drawer never to be seen again.

AE comes with a price tag, while Blender is free (site http://www.blender.org appear to be down when I tested it now - see Wiki link above for information on it). Both have a pretty steep learning curve though if you never used composition software before. But there exist a lot of free learning material on the web to help you up and going.

Update: Adding some links to resources that hopefully can be of use:

After effects, layers, compositions - This will show how you can first create elements, then how to place them with different position and angle onto another video. The more relevant part starts from about 8:30 or so:
http://library.creativecow.net/articles/rabinowitz_aharon/Jumbotron/video-tutorial

After Effects introduction:

This site gives you bucket loads of video tutorials on AE and composition effects, layers and so forth:
http://library.creativecow.net/

Video editing with Blender (part 1):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sODml0PBlo

Special video effects with Blender:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3ytZrGJ1ZQ

Hope these will be of help!


How to judge a tripod.

Generally I would go with the heavier tripod of the two which appears to be the first one weighing in at 9 lbs vs. the 2nd one at 4.5 lbs. However, this is at best a calculated guess as I have not played with the head. Fluid heads can vary on smoothness, and the only way to really tell what's going to make the smoothest shot is the old 'A vs. B' test. This would require you to take similar footage with the same camera on both tripods and compare the results.

Suggested tests:

1) make a pan and a tilt shot for each with the widest angle lens.

2) repeat pans and tilts, continue to work the focal length with more telephoto, see which one is smoothest as you use more magnification.

3) take it outside on a windy day, see which one can handle the wind the best.

4) how does it feel? Is it easy to adjust or does it feel sticky and sluggish.


Sit behind a sheet of glass, write, flip video, key dissolve.