How do I create a lower third for a music video in After Effects?

This is really just a typical title.  You can prepare it either in Photoshop, Illustrator or After Effects directly.  It can also be created in Premiere with a little work.

At their most basic, an MTV style song information could just be text that you put in a layer that you fade in and fade out of the video.  Alternately, if you want a more complex one, you can use vector objects and animate them using keyframes in After Effects.

You would want to start with a vector graphic from Illustrator or a raster image with a transparent background from Photoshop.  Each keyframe will store the position and rotation of the image you want and the underlying video will be visible wherever it is transparent.

The exact way to animate it depends on what kind of animation you want it to have, however there are a number of keyframe animation questions relating to After Effects that you can take a look at for some general ideas.


DVD created with ffmpeg and dvdauthor doesn't start at the beginning

I've resorted to using mkisofs to create the ISO image, and this seems to fix the problem. Creating the ISO in another way (e.g. on a Mac with hdiutil, or directly burning it to disc with Finder) creates malfunctioning DVDs. Apparently there are some restrictions on the ISO format for DVDs. If these are not respected, the DVDs have incorrect chapters and might even start in the middle of the video. These restrictions are best explained in mkisofs' man page:

  -dvd-video
  Generate  DVD-Video compliant UDF file system. This is done by sorting the order of the content of the appropriate files and by
  adding padding between the files if needed.  Note that the sorting
  only works if the  DVD-Video filenames include upper case characters
  only.


Reducing the size of content within a composition in After Effects

You can scale down everything in your composition by pre-comping everything and then shrinking the size of that pre-comp. I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "when I adjust the comp size the footage stays the same". If you mean that when you change the composition size, the footage extends beyond the new border of the comp, then pre-comping and scaling down the pre-comp should fix this.


figured it out by the looks of it

{{{
   ./HandBrakeCLI -i DVD -o ~/Movies/movie.mp4 -e x264  -q 20.0 -a 1,1 -E faac,copy:ac3 -B 160,160 -6 dpl2,none -R Auto,Auto -D 0.0,0.0 --audio-copy-mask aac,ac3,dtshd,dts,mp3 --audio-fallback ffac3 -f mp4 -4  -4 -X 1280 -Y 720 --decomb --loose-anamorphic --modulus 2 -m --x264-preset medium --h264-profile high --h264-level 4.1
}}}

I was missing the {{{ }}} which there was nothing about in the manual unless I missed it


What are the outer dimensions of the GoPro 3+ lens holder?

I don't have the Hero 3+ but you can measure it with the help of a front picture of the cam and the dimensions of the camera.
Taking the dimensions from here: http://www.dpreview.com/articles/8137555963/hands-on-with-The-gopro-hero-3-black-edition
(5.8 x 3.9 x 2 cm)
And using this picture:

And measure how big the lens casing is compared to the size of the camera in pixels (for example with the Photoshop ruler tool)
We get 35.4 mm for the width for example. So I'd go with a solid 35mm (width).

I measured 537 for the camera and 327,5 for the black lens casing. So the Black Lens casing is 61% the size of the camera. 61% of 58mm is 35.38mm.
You can do the same with the other dimensions.


Echo duration of video in seconds without decimals

Ended up using a batch file to export the timings to a text file and then turncate the value as a set variable.

ffprobe -i {filepath$} -show_entries format=duration -v quiet -of csv="p=0" >> duration.txt
setlocal enabledelayedexpansion
for /f "tokens=1,2,3,8 delims=\ " %%a in (duration.txt) do (
  for /f "tokens=1 delims=." %%i in ("%%a") do set _stime=%%i
)


Blur effects on a transparent background leaves a black ghosting effect

To ensure you get 'pure' transparency, you'll have to ensure the transparent world is used, instead of your (coloured) sky.

When using Blender Internal, make sure you have in the Render settings, under Shading panel Alpha set to Transparent

When using Cycles renderer, make sure you have in the Render settings, under Film panel the Transparency box checked.

Without these settings your alpha will be pre-multiplied with the sky color, which will look like your example.


How to use MELT or FFMPEG for layering of a video (i.e. shifting an overlay of the same video by one frame to remove flicerking from LEDs)?

You would carry that out, like this:

ffmpeg -i in.mp4 -filter_complex \
  "[0]split=2[base][shifted]; \
   [shifted]setpts=PTS+1/TB/FRAME_RATE,format=yuva444p,colorchannelmixer=aa=0.50[shifted]; \
   [base][shifted]overlay"   out.mp4

setpts=PTS+1/TB/FRAME_RATE delays the overlay by 1 frame. Change the 1 to adjust delay.

format=yuva444p makes sure there's an alpha channel.

colorchannelmixer=aa=0.50 sets the alpha to 50%.

I haven't specified any encoding parameters, so the defaults will be used.


Y-adapter to record different levels and phantom power

As explained on another board (https://www.gearslutz.com/board/10509494-post13.html):

There are two reasons why phantom power mic inputs should never be connected directly together with a "Y" cable or adapter. (Such adapters or "Y" cables are fine for use with unpowered dynamic mic inputs, but not for phantom powered inputs. That includes inputs on the same device like (2) side by side channels on a mixer.)

Potential mic damage:

Modern phantom powered microphones use the phantom power to power the impedance converter and the output line driver stages, and to supply the capsule bias (on non-electret mics). By placing two powered inputs in parallel the source impedance of the phantom power source is halved. On a P-48 circuit, instead of have a single 6810 ohm resistor on each input line feeding the mic you now have an effective power source impedance of 3405 ohms on each line. The P-48 circuit can now supply twice the current. The lowered P-48 resistance changes the operating voltage at the mic. That can change the operating point of the output stage drivers and the intended impedance converter operating point, and possibly the capsule bias.

Some mics (not the majority), use a voltage regulator (usually a single Zener diode) to keep the mic active-electronics operating at a constant voltage. On those mics, using paralleled powered inputs will greatly increase the power dissipation in the Zener regulator. The Zener current can more than double.

A modern phantom powered mic is designed to work with a known source impedance for the phantom power current. Halving that impedance is risky. Additionally paralleling the inputs drops the load impedance the mic "sees" to half of a single input. That's not a mic safety issue like lower the P-48 current source impedance, but may affect the sound of some mics.

Incidentally, cutting the pin-1 return for one of the inputs may not change the current supplied from the input. There will be a good chance that there will be another ground path like a power line common connection or another audio cable between the two pieces of gear which will still provide a return path for the phantom power current.

Input circuit damage (not relevant to your case, but potentially interesting nonetheless):

If phantom powered inputs on different pieces of gear have their inputs paralleled using a simple direct "Y" cable it's possible to damage the mic input stage of one when it's operating power (not phantom Power) is off and the phantom power on the other input is switched on or off. Most modern op amp input can be damaged if either of the differential input terminals is allowed to reach a voltage that exceeds the power supply rail voltage. When one input amp is powered down, it's rails are at or very near "0" voltage. Even the application of a few volts coupled in from an external power source (the PP on the "other" mic input) may produce a input voltage transient that exceeds the (now "0" ) power rail voltage. Some input's have voltage "clamps" to prevent that but many do not. Remember, the designers did not design the inputs to withstand [externally-applied] phantom power when the device was switched "off".

That is not an issue if you are running (2) mixer inputs in parallel (same power supplies), but can be if you are using separately powered devices.

Bottom line: If you care about protecting your powered mics and your mic pre inputs, don't ever use a directly coupled parallel "Y" cable on a phantom powered input no matter what anyone tells you. An isolated transformer splitter, or capacitively-coupled "splitter" is the only wise solution.

Or, in your case, use the internal battery power and split the mic signals as if it were a self-powered dynamic mic.


Automatically split takes into individual files in Final Cut Pro

Select the clip you wish to work on in the browser, then in the top menu bar for FCP, select Mark > DV Start/Stop Detect. This will break the clip up by the start/stop metadata generated when you were shooting.

The options in the user preferences are for timecode breaks that occur during capture.

ps: I don't know when this DV Start/Stop Detect feature was first included, but it was in FCP3 in 2002...


Using ffmpeg to add height (as black bars) to video file without quality loss

You'll have to manually set encoding parameters.

ffmpeg -i input.mkv -filter:v "pad=3840:2160:0:280,setsar=1" -crf 18 -preset faster -c:a copy my_output_video.mkv

The CRF option sets the tradeoff for size/quality. Lower values produce better quality but larger files. The preset will increase speed, but for same quality, the file size will be larger.

The setsar filter has been added as a precaution in case your player reads the SAR stored in the file and stretches the video based on that value.


I'm not an AE user, but if it has the concept of an effect layer, you can add a track above your clip that has one frame of 'brighten' or blowout.

Alternatively, split your clip into three -- pre-glow, the hot frame, post-glow.


Color-correcting super 8 video from 1975

Play with color corrector controls. Use "High" control to adjust snow to the tint you prefer, use "Mid" and "Low" to adjust face and hat. As you see, I moved "High" and "Mid" to the green/blue zone to offset red tint, but I moved "Low" to the red/yellow zone because this way the face and the hat looks better to me.

Or you can convert it to black and white with the Black and White effect.


Hearthstone-style graphics with After Effects

Here's a few effects to take a look at, which may get you closer to the result you are looking for. These effects are based on your helpful thumbnails:

Effect > Stylize > Glow / Trapcode Shine (uSampler1)

Effect > Noise & Grain > Fractal Noise + Turbulent Displace (uSampler2)

Effect > Generate > 4-Color Gradient (uSampler3)

Effect > Noise & Grain > Fractal Noise w/ Default Settings (uSampler4)

Effect > Color Correction > Colorama (uSampler5)

These styles require heavy experimentation, so play around with Track Mattes, Blending Modes, and importing textures and other source imagery to help achieve these results. Good luck!


Why doesn't the duration of a Premiere Pro encoding scale linearly?

I doubt it is memory or page fault related.  Encoding is more of a stream operation, you load a frame, process the frame, hold the frame until you finish a group of pictures and then encode the group of pictures.  It is not a memory intensive process unless you are doing fancy effects that require memory to process.  It is a potentially HDD stream intensive process as it has to stream the video sources off the HDD and then record the output back to the HDD, which could involve lots of seeks potentially to move between reading and writing.

The two things I would try would be to try CUDA acceleration first and see if you can offload the processing to your GPU.  If that doesn't get sufficient speed I would try making sure your system is defraged and if that doesn't give sufficient speed, I might try SSDs for processing to and from for better random access of assets.

It is also possible that it is simply harder to encode later parts of your video though.  Depending on the exact settings you are using, changes in the content of the video can make a significant impact on how difficult it is to encode the video, so it may not even be unexpected that the encoding time changes between the first minute and the rest of the video.


The random number generator in AE seems to be linked to the layer index, but generates the same results for every composition. To demonstrate here's a comp with a shape layer where the vertices of the shape are generated by the wiggle() function:

Here's the expression:

var newPath = [];
for (var i=0; i<=160; i++){
    x = i*thisComp.width/160;
    y = transform.position.wiggle(1, 100, octaves = 1, amp_mult = .5, t = i)[1];
    newPath[i] = [x,y];
}
createPath(points = newPath, inTangents = [], outTangents = [], isClosed = false)

if I duplicate that layer in the same comp I get two different paths (I've given each a different colour, but the expression is the same):

If I add layers to the comp before the shape layer, so that the shape layer's index changes this also changes the shape of the path. You can also explicitly set the index of the layer generating the wiggle, e.g.:

var i = math.floor(effect("Slider Control")("Slider"));
var w = thisComp.layer(i).transform.position.wiggle(1,2);

So the index of the layer is used to generate random values for the wiggle() function. Quod erat demonstrandum.

This means that if I duplicate my comp, each duplicate comp produces the same result. Here I've duplicated the original comp three times and brought them into another comp. I've offset each layer a little on the Y axis so you can see them all:

So you can see that the wiggle() function is deterministic, and produces the same results for the same layer index across different comps. This is the problem you're experiencing.

Fortunately there is a way of overriding the seed for the random number generator. That's the seedRandom() function. It's more commonly used for the random() and gaussRandom() functions, but it works for wiggle() and noise() too. The seedRandom() function takes two arguments, the first being a number, which seeds the random number generator, and the second a boolean which set whether the random number generator changes with time or if it stays the same. If you use the same seed the generator will always produce the same results, so usually on a layer you use the layer's index to set the seed. Since that won't work we can seed it with a unique number, derived from the comp's name.

Here's the same comp with the three subcomps, only this time I've added the line

seedRandom(thisComp.name[thisComp.name.length -1], timeless =true);

before the wiggle() function. The term thisComp.name[thisComp.name.length -1] returns the last character of the comp name. And since my comps are called comp 1, comp 2 and comp 3 it returns the characters "1", "2", and "3". Since javascript is loosely typed, these characters get cast to ints for the seedRandom() first parameter, meaning that when I duplicate the comp I automatically get a unique random seed (I'd have to use regex or get the Ascii values of the letters or something if there were more than one digit, and it would break if I renamed the comps). Here's the final comp now

Interestingly adding the seedRandom() for the first layer also effected any other layers in that comp. So if the first layer has a random seed based on the comp name, other layers using wiggle() will now get identical results. So overriding the random number generator is global within the scope of each composition (I just learned this). Here's the second comp, but with seedRandom() on the first layer (red), but not on the second layer(green) offset 1 pixel for visibility:

to avoid this gotcha, you can add back the index to the random seed:

seedRandom(index + thisComp.name[thisComp.name.length-1],timeless = true);

TL;DR

if your comps are named comp 1, comp 2, comp 3, etc., adding this line to any layers with a wiggle expression will generate unique wiggles:

seedRandom(index + thisComp.name[thisComp.name.length-1],timeless = true);


If your cameras have a LANC port, you can build yourself a LANC controller using arduinos:

http://controlyourcamera.blogspot.de/2011/02/arduino-controlled-video-recording-over.html?m=1

Or alternatively get a cheap lanc controller.

http://pages.ebay.com/link/?nav=item.view&id=281983277383&alt=web

Depending on the camera you are going to use, like the other replies mentioned, there might be options to control your cameras as well through a regular remote control or control over USB.


I usually export as a ProRes Quicktime movie from After Effects directly, then convert my ProRes file to h264.  I keep the ProRes as a master file, and compress the h264 as needed.  Also sometimes restarting AE before rendering fixes any slowdowns.  If the particles are using large (greater than 200x200 pixel) layers for their textures, this will make things render very slowly.


How do I connect my Alesis iO2 Interface with video camera Nikon D3200?

Im unfamiliar with the iO2, but it sounds as though you're basically wanting to use it as a preamp; you almost certainly can set up it so the inputs are mirrored back to the outputs so you can use it this way, but you will may  need some sort of audio application 'in the middle' to do so.  You'll also need need the computer running for it to work.

Thing is, though, this doesnt really sound like a particularly great way of going about recording your audio, and its certainly not advantageous to have to cart around, and hook up, a computer, just so you can basically misuse a USB soundcard as a preamp.  You'd be better off with a separate preamp.

Plus, if you were utterly determined to use the computer for some reason, you'd probably be better off using it to record your audio, rather than the camera; you'd be opting out on two extra stages of conversion between analog and digital for a start.
I think you're going about this the wrong way, though, and a separate battery-powered preamp would  be a simpler, easier approach.


How to disable putting black frames between concatenated media with ffmpeg?

This can happen if the "streams do not have exactly the same length". You have to specify the range to include for the items in concat.txt. Try specifying the duration or outpoint or in point:

https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-formats.html#concat

  The duration of each file is used to adjust the timestamps of the next file: if the duration is incorrect (because it was computed using the bit-rate or because the file is truncated, for example), it can cause artifacts. The duration directive can be used to override the duration stored in each file.


What equipment is required to record game play and commentary and post to YouTube?

Assuming that you're looking for a low cost option, the key words you need to Google are "HDMI HD GAME Capture" which will result in hardware like this HD 1080P Video Capture HDMI Recorder with SD Card Slot for XBox 360 One PS3 PS4

The HDMI pass-through function guarantees smooth HD gaming
experience even while recording.
Record 1080P HD video into USB    disk or SD card directly, no PC required.
Supports all video sources input: HDMI, component, composite.
Pass through 1080P HDMI to display on big screen.
Record your voice with video together through microphone input.

£55 + shipping...bargain - and doesn't hog your PC whilst recording.

That should be all you need but, if further editing is required, google some free video editors to try out or you can perform basic trim and edits on YouTube...here's how.


Is there something like nvenc for free codecs (VP8/9)?

There is a hardware-accelerated VP8 encoder recently released by the University of Milan. Source and standalone binary for 64-bit Linux and  compute 3.5, 5.0 and 5.2 capable NVidia GPU cards available at https://github.com/Italtel-Unimi/libvpx

They say they have integrated the code into libav libs i.e. FFmpeg, but this hasn't been pushed into the FFmpeg master branch.


Encoding: Insert keyframes at certain positions

Is there a simpler option using -force_key_frames? Unfortunately, this option only seems to allow inserting key_frames using an interval

Not so. To force keyframes for frames 45, 99 and 154 where first frame has index 0, use

-force_key_frames expr:eq(n,45)+eq(n,99)+eq(n,154)

You may need to escape the commas, depending on your shell.


Which techniques/filters do improve sensation of speed on a motorcycle?

I agree with my fellow German dude. Lowering the framerate (until 24) can increase the feeling of uncontrolled speed and momentum. If you already did that and didn't get the effect you were looking for, here's how you can use some trickery to fake it:

Motion blur! It helps selling the effect big time. I recommend using a radial blur which is going outwards from a defined point. Put this point in the center of the screen and use a feathered mask to cut the effect from the center, so the blur only effects the edges of the screen. This way, it appears as if the road is flashing by way faster than it actually did.
Also, when it comes to filming vehicles, it's surprisingly easy to get away with simply speeding up the footage. Don't overdo it obviously, but 125%-135% should look just fine.

Combining all these effects, lowering the frame-rate to 24/25, adding a radial blur towards the edges of the screen and speeding up the footage slightly should give you a convincing effect.


Having trouble with an screen recording saved as AVI from Rylstim Screen Recorder

The video may look choppy because of the codec you're using. For fun, I recommend trying out your h.264 variant, x264vfw. I know that h.264 is almost ubiquitously used for internet content.

Playback in premiere is extremely variable when it comes to sequence settings, video preview settings, system preferences (such as scratch discs, and optimizing for memory consumption/performance) and also what type of hardware you have (Nvidia GPUs mercury playback v.s. AMDs OpenCL). I recommend checking out this guide on optimizing your premiere experience: http://blogs.adobe.com/aftereffects/2011/02/optimizing-for-performance-adobe-premiere-pro-and-after-effects.html


How to find video frame rate and resolution

The lines may come from the fact that you have exported the video with interlacing. You should generally avoid interlacing for any digital end-user medium.

To find out about certain technical aspects of a video, the program MediaInfo is a very handy tool that can tell you a lot about the specs of your video, including basics like video resolution and framerate. Though it's very unlikely that the root of your issue is the framerate or resolution. Medianinfo can also tell you if a video is using interlacing which is more likely the cause.


Advice on how to determine right camera equipment and set up for multi-sport court?

The GoPro would be a perfect candidate for what you want.
It's a so called "action camera" and is a very robust (water tight with case) wide-angle camera that can shoot in very high frame rates with HD resolution (even more at lower frame rates).

Suitable recording options for high speed sport events would 1080p @ 60FPS or 720p @ 120FPS.
The camera also has a live raw HDMI output, its very suitable for live monitoring and recording.

Also the camera has in-offical scripting capabilities which makes it very easy to set the camera up for un-manned opertation.

You will only need to get a DC battery pack adaptor because the GoPro cannot be used without a battery inserted. It's a dummy battery that connects the camera to a DC power supply.

The GoPro Hero3+ Black, their best model, is available for 400$ or a bit less depending on the shop. There is also the Silver Edition for 300$ which should be enough for what you need, it also has HDMI out and 1080p @ 60fps.

Regarding your question about Security Camera, most of them have a rather bad video quality (in comparison to film cameras) and usually low frame rates that aren't suitable for sport events. They are very specialized cameras that often directly record to files instead of giving you a live stream (atleast the cheaper ones).

The capturing on the other hand can get quite expensive, you can of course use a standard PC to capture a camera but you would one capture card per camera and capture cards that support 1080p @ 60 FPS are rather expensive in the 700-1500$ range.
There is also specialized studio equipment for these kind of things that handle multiple inputs but that again is also very expensive and will cost your around 10.000-15.000$

I'd say with a GoPro in wide-angle mode about 2 cameras are enough to cover the whole court when you put them in opposite corners. 4 would probably offer nicer perspectives but that depends on your budget.

If you are on a really tight budget I recommend you opt for 30FPS, not as cool for sports but then again most users don't even have the bandwidth for 1080p@30FPS.

Then you can opt for the even cheaper GoPro White Edition and use a lot cheaper capture card like a BlackMagic DeckLink for 145$ in combination with a standard PC.

When it comes to setting up streaming servers that handle the capture from the PCs and stream it to the web I recommend you hire a professional developer, this is not an easy task at all and can give you a lot of headaches if you have no experience with that matter.

Alternatively you can opt for one these things, they are rather in-expensive and are more compact and would spare you the hassle of a complicated server setup. It automatically streams to streaming services like ustream or YouTube, or have your own website integrate the RTMP stream that it produces.

It would definitely be the cheapest solution, though 1080p @ 60FPS is not possible with this solution, when opting for this device I would go with the GoPro White Edition aswell.

Though 720p@60FPS is possible with this solution, so that might be good alternative if resolution isn't as important as frame rate to you. I'd probably recommend the 720p@60FPS option, its the overall cheapest and high frame rates always win over high resolution when it comes to sport (in my opinion).

Hope that helps you.


What is the "state of the art" professional software for storyboards and animatics?

Technically most of the state of the art products of animatics are made from not only 1 but many software. It all starts from visualization to animation and rendering. But no matter how excellent the tools you use if the person who's operating it does not have the skills and talent, it will be a waste of time.


After Effect: How do I achieve the smoke effect?

It's difficult to tell from your question exactly what you're trying to do.  If you could link to a video of the effect you're trying to reproduce, or phrase your question more specifically, you will get more helpful information.

If you're looking for realistic smoke, fluid dynamics simulation isn't really something that After Effects can do on its own.  You'll need to get the physics right in another package, and probably render it elsewhere too, then maybe composite it in After Effects.  This is an extremely complicated topic, and there isn't one tutorial that covers it all.  But you might want to look into some other software like this.

But if you just want to "fake" it, you can just use different layers of fractal noise attached to particles.  For this type of effect, search videocopilot.net for tutorials on  Red Giant's Trapcode Particular.


Re-encoding Lossy formats with Lossless formats

When data “thrown away” by the encoder, the decoder must still render a full image. The image is just not faithful to the original image, but it is a full image. When you reencode with CRF 0 you are telling the encoder, “I want the output to be identical to the input” and the encoder doesn’t know information was lost on a previous encode. so it must spend bits to encode the “new” image losslessly.


Cropping the video and removing the black portion

Use

ffplay -i input.mp4 -vf "crop=in_w:in_h-25:0:0"

If you're watching this full screen, then the display will show black bars if the resized video is not the same aspect ratio as your monitor. To achieve that, you'll have to crop horizontally as well. If your crop X pixels vertically, you'll have to crop (16/9)*X pixels horizontally.

To do this, use

(left and right)

ffplay -i input.mp4 -vf "crop=in_w-25*16/9:in_h-25:(ow-iw)/2:0"

(right only)

ffplay -i input.mp4 -vf "crop=in_w-25*16/9:in_h-25:0:0"


What does it mean "This filter supports the following commands"?

Commands allow you to change the parameters during execution of the command. This is primarily useful when working with streaming media e.g. if the volume gets too loud during a broadcast, send a command to the volume filter to lower it.

To issue commands to filters which support it from outside, ffmpeg has to be compiled with libzmq support. See the docs for the zmq filter for details.

To issue commands from the terminal, press c

The 'command prompt' will be shown :

Enter command: <target>|all <time>|-1 <command>[ <argument>]

Enter a command as per the given format and press Enter.

e.g. overlay@logo -1 x 100


App to rotate .mp4 video for Windows or Android

If I've understood you correctly, your video appears upright when viewed in portrait orientation and rotated in landscape. This suggests the image is stored in a landscape matrix but with no rotation tag set. If so, there are two things you can try using ffmpeg, a free command line tool.

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c copy -metadata:s:v rotate=90 output.mp4

If your landscape devices don't understand or obey the rotation tag,

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c copy -vf transpose=2 -c:v libx264 -crf 20 output.mp4

The 2nd command will re-encode the video portion of your file. CRF controls the quality - lower is better but will produce bigger files.

In the commands, you may have to switch the 90 with -90 and 2 with 1 depending on how the video was stored.


How to Record Screen in 4K on 1920x1080 monitor? (OBS Studio)

The easiest way I think would be to set up a virtual machine. I use VMWare Workstation 12. However Virtualbox is free. Youd have to install your OS and screen capture software (such as Bandicam which I use and recommend) on the Virtual Machine.

But you could run the VM at 4K resolution and use it to record at 4K even on a 1920x1080 host machine without issue provided you have enough RAM and CPU power to do so. (Most machines should).

Another upside is you could minimze the virtual machine while its capturing and still use your computer without interfering with your screen capture.


Is 4K good enough to choose for special footage such as weddings?

Where are you planning on exhibiting the footage? In my experience, the average consumer has a low-quality TV they bought because of the price, and they have the factory settings that look awful because they don't even know that they would want to change them, let alone how that would happen. In my opinion you're wasting your time because your client probably won't be able to tell the difference.

On the creation side, you're multiplying the amount of data captured by 4. That increases the cost of filming (more memory cards to save it), storage (more hard drives to use while editing), and editing (need a better graphics card, more RAM, and likely more time).

If you have clients who will truly benefit from 4K, by all means, use it. But if you're doing typical videos for the web, corporate or home televisions, it's probably not worth it. If you're creating content for large outside displays that actually reach above HD, or for professional projection in a theater, then it could be worth it.

FWIW, most television shows are shot in HD, and even some feature films. I've never heard anyone complain about the quality because of the lower resolution. If I recall, parts of the first Captain America movie were shot on a Canon 7D, which only does HD. I know of nobody who said those parts were terrible or even noticed them. (Here's an article about it on Canon's web site.)


Subtitling is a horrible horrible thing, and there are loads of regulations and standards and other bull which can be found here.

As for the font, it really depends on your opinion - if I'm not mistaken Trebuchet Sans and Deja Vu Sans are as close as you can get to the standard DVD fonts.

But all I just said depend on your artistic point of view - if the subtitles makes part of the movie it shouldn't follow the general guidelines - I would strongly recommend using a font that makes sense with the movie (Example: Consolas would be great for a movie like Primer or Tron) and use free style subtitles - like the ones in classic adventure games.

If you're not aware about these games, check out Full Throttle Opening on youtube.

Then again, here's some ideas about people talking simultaneously:

If they are from opposite sexes you can use different colors for each character.
One character's lines could be on the right side of the screen while the other is on the left.
You can even use different fonts (not recommended)

But, according to the usual pattern you should identify the characters who are speaking with brackets and simply show both lines at the same time.

[John Doe] I love you Mary.
[Mary Doe] GTFO, I hate you.

But, as mentioned before, I strongly recommend creating a unique style for your movie, specially since it's only a few lines.


Fill a shape layer with a pattern (repeating image) in After Effects

Shape layers don't have the ability to use a bitmapped fill. What you need to do is use the shape layer as a matte for the fill pattern.

To make a repeating pattern from your image, bring it into the comp as an image layer. Now apply the CC RepeTile effect (it's an included effect with AE in the Stylize folder).

Increase the numbers in the expand right, expand lef, expand up, and expand down sliders until the pattern fills the space you want it to occupy. You don't have to worry if the original layer is too small, this effect will increase the bounds of the layer beyond its original size.

Make sure the image layer is below your shape layer and set its matte to alpha matte "Shape Layer 1" (or whatever your shape layer is called). If you can't see the matte column hit f4.

If you want the pattern to transform with the shape layer, set it as the parent of the fill layer (or vice versa), so that when you move, scale, or rotate one, the other will follow.


Import subtitles from spreadsheet into Aegisub?

I Couldn't find a way to import into Aegisub, but If the subtitles are in a standard spreadsheet such as Excel, I saved as other format and chose Tab delimited text. Copy all the data in this text file and paste into Subtitle Edit. Then adjust limits on times (Will not overlap the next start time). Then save in whatever format you'd like to use in Aegisub.

I suggest you to use Subtitle Edit because of it's VERY simple sync feature with the video as well as these other abilities. At least it works and you can use Aegisub for your more familiar uses.


How to Cut & Ripple Delete on a german laptop keyboard?

I figured it out. The commands you're looking for are:
End to Playhead - in Application/Trim/Ripple
Start to Playhead - in Application/Trim/Ripple
Put them on some shortcut that is actually working on the german keyboard.


What equipment should I get for starting out making professional quality films?

For videography, the best bang for your buck is, hands down, going to be an entry level DSLR and a decent lens.  For audio, if your budget can allow for it, I suggest getting a stand alone multi-track recorder.  The Zoom H4n is a particularly popular model with videographers for its low price and decent (though not superb) audio quality.  (Update: The H5 and H6 are now available offering significant upgrades over the H4n, but also at a slightly higher price point.)

There are far better options and values as you get more skill in the field, however for starting out, you probably don't want to invest too much until you get some experience under your belt.  It's easy to spend upwards of $10 to $15 grand on a nice videography setup as you get more and more professional, but a $1500-$1700 setup with something like a Canon T4i or Lumix G2 with a moderate level lens and an H4n or similar for recording audio (with some basic shotgun or lavaliere mics) is a decent start.

Also, be sure not to skimp on a tripod.  You'll want a solid, sturdy tripod (probably aluminum) with a good fluid tripod head to make sure you can get steady shots.  Just a solid tripod alone can run you in to the $350 to $500 range.

If you'll be shooting indoors, you may also need a light kit.  A cheap 3 point lighting kit can be had for a couple hundred dollars, though depending on what you intend to shoot, you may be able to get by without this initially.

So overall breakdown I'd recommend starting out is around $500 to $600 on an entry level DSLR, $150 to $300 on a lens (if your DSLR body supports video auto focus, such as the Canon T4i, a stepper motor lens is needed), about $280 for an audio recorder, about $100 to $200 on mics, about $400 on a tripod and optionally about $150-$250 on lights.  Altogether, that's about $1600 or $1850 and you should be able to make some pretty solid professional looking stuff.

It does add up quickly, but the good news is that you can improve on the gear incrementally over time once you have the basics.  If you do have more than 2 grand to start out with, I'd spend a little bit extra on the lens or the camera body to get better low light performance and better background blur.  Better mics or mic boom arms also couldn't hurt and if you do go with lights, light modifiers or more powerful lights is also never a bad investment, though the best place to spend any extra money is going to depend on the kind of shooting you are planning on doing.


What is the proper notation for a frame rate that is less than 1FPS?

Frame per minute is totally fine. Frame per hour, frame per day. But I am not sure you can keep going using an acronym indefinitely.

But when talking about timelapse, you normally do not talk about FP(add letter here) but intervals. So the term is actually different than FPS.

The Interval is 1 second, 30 s or whatever.

When reproducing a "video" with this frame rate, I would not think of it as actual video, but more like a slideshow, so again the concept is a bit different.

20 slides per minute, or a slide every 3 seconds.

This is a nice question actually.


Change the timecode with ffmpeg in the middle of the track?

Depending on your final use case, a non-standard way to deal with that would be to keep the original TC as LTC (audio TC) on an additional track. Concatenating clips would then preserve the original TCs on that separate track.


How to Differentiate Subtitle Track Language Between Simplified and Traditional Chinese?

You should be able to define you own 3 character long language code for imported media using the option :lang=LAN when specifying your media file for import. LAN being your own language code. So you could use something like SCN and TCN.


No experience with AE, I want to create a Kinetic Typographic video. Am I being too ambitious?

This is pretty funny, literally the first thing I ever did in After Effects...Was this

I was able to achieve it pretty easily and if I remember correctly I did it after watching a few of the VideoCoPilot.net beginner tutorials from Andrew Kramer.  And as you get more advanced do some of his harder tutorials, I found it probably to be the number one source in terms of learning the basis to After Effects


Can anybody please explain what camera settings (aparture, iso, wb, ss) have to do with visual/film grammar?

I'm not able to state a conclusive definition for "visual grammar", but I'd say camera settings have a quite relevant role on building it. Depth of field (aperture) is crucial for focusing on a subject; ISO may be used for obtaining a noisy image which can be used to say something (to look like an amateur, or a security camera, for instance); WB might be used for creating a specific environment (to look like morning, or some 70's tv imagery).
All these settings may have, therefore, a role on the way you tell a story. A good exercise would be to watch scenes you like and try to imagine the settings used, and why these were chosen.


I do not know of and couldn't find a script that does this already but it would be certainly possible to write one. After Effects doesn't have a functionality built-in for that.

With the help of ExtendScript you can write very powerful extensions for After Effects and its very easy to get going with it. Just open up the "Adobe ExtenScript Toolkit" that gets installed with every CS suite and load up an example for After Effects and have a look at the JavaScript documentation. While you can also script with AppleScript and Batch Script the documentation for the JavaScript version is a lot better.
You can access it under the "Help" menu. Most importantly look at the After Effects Scripting guide. It can be found for different CS/CC versions here.

What I would do is start to iterate through all your compositions, grab the current composition in your iteration, get an array of all the layer names in that composition and then iterate with that array through all compositions and compare the array with the array of all the other compositions. Best to not sort the arrays in case you used generic names for layers and unique layer ordering is important.

Unless you have micro changes in your duplicate comps like changed property values and keyframes this approach would be effective.
If you do have micro changes you would, after having fetched all comps with duplicate layers, also have to access every layer in your array and compare every property with the corresponding layer in the other comp.

You then delete all true duplicates of a comp and while doing that replace them with a link of your now unique comp in all occurrences in other comps.

Shouldn't be much code but it could take some time to write if you have never used Adobe ExtendScript.

On another note, a very helpful plugin to keep the composition import madness at a minimum is BAO Dynamic Comp.


Yes, do it as one effect and use the graph editor to use a non-linear curve.  You can alter the curve to respond however you'd like then.

Simply click on the graph looking icon next to your parameter that you are keying on so that it will appear in the graph editor.  Then open the graph editor (icon closest to the timeline on the top (looks like a graph).  Select an option such as Auto Bezier or Auto Ease In or Auto Ease Out as you desire.  Auto Bezier will give you more control over how the curve responds by dragging the bezier anchors (the ones that appear off to the side of the end points.)

Also, don't use a transition effect, use a scale with keyframes.


openload.cc How can I extract encoding settings of videos?

Assuming it has been encoded with x264, download the file and run:

strings input | grep x264

It may output encoding information such as:

x264 - core 148 - H.264/MPEG-4 AVC codec - Copyleft 2003-2016 -
http://www.videolan.org/x264.html - options: cabac=1 ref=3 deblock=1:0:0
analyse=0x3:0x113 me=hex subme=7 psy=1 psy_rd=1.00:0.00 mixed_ref=1 me_range=16
chroma_me=1 trellis=1 8x8dct=1 cqm=0 deadzone=21,11 fast_pskip=1 chroma_qp_offset=4
threads=6 lookahead_threads=1 sliced_threads=0 nr=0 decimate=1 interlaced=0
bluray_compat=0 constrained_intra=0 bframes=3 b_pyramid=2 b_adapt=1 b_bias=0
direct=1 weightb=1 open_gop=0 weightp=2 keyint=250 keyint_min=25 scenecut=40
intra_refresh=0 rc_lookahead=40 rc=crf mbtree=1 crf=23.0 qcomp=0.60 qpmin=0
qpmax=69 qpstep=4 ip_ratio=1.40 aq=1:1.00

Do not copy and paste the displayed options and values–instead use the appropriate preset. Using the info above it is safe to assume the default settings were used (equivalent of using -preset medium -crf 23).

I'm assuming you're running Linux since you did not specify. If you're using Windows then mediainfo will likely also provide the same info if it is there.


How to connect a camera to a computer 100ft away?

Do you have a component out.  An R/G/B or R/G/B/V/U feed should be stable over a 100 ft run as long as you can separate the components on different wires.  We do this for the Excel and Break Out youth conferences with Youth For Christ and our runs are significantly longer than 100 feet.  If you don't, you could probably get a reasonably cheap firewire to component breakout.  There are also wireless HDMI options available if you have HDMI output.  The analog HDMI output is the same signal as DVI which is an RGB component type signal.


Will 1080p content on 4K display look as crisp

Obviously, it depends a lot on the quality of the displays. A high-quality 720p display may actually give better result than a bad 1080p one, and likewise a bad 4k display isn't that much use!

But assuming the quality is "the same" (though I'm not sure there is a good way to compare this objectively), 1080p footage will look at least as good on 4k display as it does on the 1080p one. In doubt, it can just upsample the footage, that's a lossless operation (in theory) and may in fact already improve the picture, since it's doesn't have the 1080p's pixel grainyness. Likely, it will also do some clever sharpening, which actually gives a "crisper" result, though that may well seem unnatural.

Remember that high-definition TV sets were on the market well before much HD material was actually widely obtainable, and even then it was a substantial quality improvement over the old standards.


merge audio and video(having audio) using ffmpeg command

Drop the vorbis audio

ffmpeg -i EnergyVideo.mp4 -i EnergyAudio.mp3 -filter_complex \
"[1:a]volume=enable='between(t,27,33)+between(t,38,42)'[1a];[0:a][1a]amerge=inputs=2[a]" \
-map 0:v -map "[a]" -c:v copy -c:a aac -ac 2 -shortest energyvideooutput2.mp4


How can I automatically remove pauses from a video?

This can be accomplished with the mpdecimate filter in the free program ffmpeg:

ffmpeg -i "in.mp4" -vf "mpdecimate" "out.mp4"


What ffmpeg/avconv format and container will Adobe Premiere Pro accept, out-of-box?

Premiere Pro CS5 should be able to import H.264 video, IIRC, however it may be having trouble with the audio and/or container format. With ffmpeg try re-muxing the video stream without the audio:

ffmpeg -i input -an -codec:v copy output.mp4 -an -codec:v copy output.avi

If both output.mp4 and output.avi work then we know that the issue lies with the audio (although H.264 with b-frames in AVI probably isn't a great idea). You can re-encode the audio and keep the video:

ffmpeg -i input -codec:v copy -codec:a pcm_s16le output.avi

If the first command does not work with Premiere, then you may need to re-encode. This is a good use case for an editor friendly, lossless intermediate file:

ffmpeg -i input -codec:v utvideo -codec:a pcm_s16le output.avi

Close Premiere, install Ut Video (scroll to the bottom of the page), open Premiere, and import your video. You can do your editing, and then export to your final format using the crappy Adobe Media Encoder, or export to another lossless file, and then use ffmpeg to provide whatever you need. Alternatively, if you're using Windows you can use Debugmode FrameServer and encode directly with ffmpeg from Premiere. See How to encode with ffmpeg from Adobe Premiere Pro for instructions.

If you need a recent ffmpeg for Windows see Zeranoe FFmpeg builds.


Not sure about Windows, but for Ubuntu, you could always check out Rivendell.
http://www.rivendellaudio.org/


Does any software have the capability to create a mask/alpha value based on the volume of an audio channel

You could certainly do it in After Effects. If you convert the audio levels to keyframes you can then use expressions / the pickwhip to drive the opacity of the layers. After Effects is not free. I wouldn't be surprised if it was possible in Fusion (freemium) and certainly other compositing tools like Nuke or Apple Motion. Natron, (free) may have the capability. There was an audio to ascii plugin, I don't think it still works though.

You could do it in Blender, because of course you could do it in Blender. Blender is free.

For a more programmatic approach you could use something like Processing or OpenFrameworks (free). You need Java or C++ knowledge to use these.

It is definitely possible in all of these programs, though in none of them is it a beginner-level operation. The simplest workflow would probably be After Effects, though that might be my bias because it's the one I know best.


I'm not sure you need a better camera for this. since you are downgrading the images to a pretty low quality anyway. The secret to good green screen photography is in the lighting more than in the camera. You need to light the background as evenly as possible, and use a background color that is not present in the subject's clothing. In your example blue would not work due to the shirt, but green might. You can also use a white sheet if you make sure no part of your subject gets blown specular highlights. You need to make sure your subject is not too close to the background, as it may catch reflected light from it. This is particularly important if you go with blue or green background, maybe less with white.

The camera on a tripod is a good idea, but don't expect you'll get images that will be perfectly registered. I expect you will still need to align them, but the job will be easier when the camera was fixed on a tripod.

The camera should be in manual. If you don't want to mess much with the settings just take a few test pictures in auto mode (no on-camera flash, try to use other light sources from the sides, to not create shadows on the background) and once you find one that you like switch to manual and copy the exposure settings.

I think you want to mark a spot on the floor that your subject can use to position himself for the pictures. A line does not seem too useful, since your friend isn't really walking.

My final advice (the one that might be off-topic for this site) is that you grab a good book on animation and learn the animated walk cycle. You just need to have your friend pose in those proven positions that make up natural walks in cartoons. My recommendation is the Preston Blair book, Cartoon Animation.

Good luck with your game.


I never tried this myself, but I believe attaching a camera firmly to a tripod with wheels or putting the Glidecam Smooth Shooter onto a car or something sturdy with wheels might work for you.


I'm not perfectly clear on your process, but it seems you could approach this in the same way you would captioning (subtitling). The thing that ties the two together is time code: in your text file, each phrase is preceded by an "appear" time code, set apart (in brackets, etc) to indicate that it's not part of the spoken text.

[01:02:03:04] These words are being spoken now.
   [01:02:09:10] And this is the next spoken phrase

There are established formats for this, some very elaborate, using XML for example (see Universal Subtitle Format), and very simple ones as laid out above. Since it's for your eyes and not a machine's, simpler is better.

There are utilities (sorry, no links) that can capture the current running time in a readable form and insert it into the text, making the process reasonably efficient for the Chinese translator to accomplish.


vhs to digital conversion flickers only when captured

So once captured the file plays without these issues it's only during recording ?

Or are you saying that while the video is playing from the recorder but the computer is not recording it's okay & then when you try to record it has those issues ?

It could be an incorrect field setting in the software or buffering during recording.

Have a look at the software recorders settings & see if there's something for fields "upper" or "lower" or possible even deinterlace.

Are you recording to an external drive or straight to your hard drive ? If you have the option try recording to a different drive.

And like Michael said if you upload a sample we can better see the issue


There are a number of different options.  Some production companies use their own proprietary, in house systems for rendering.  There are a large number of companies that use existing commercial products however.  Maya, SoftImage, 3D Studio Max and Cinema4D are some of the big ones.  I have not personally worked with Cinema4D, but I know that physics simulation is possible in all of the first 3.  Cinema4D also supports physics simulation according to comments, though I have not personally used it.

It is also worth noting that a combination of both physics simulation and physical modeling can be used.  For complex systems like particle effects and such, simulation is pretty much the only option, but for some larger actions, they may actually film a movement and then animate it to match what they record.  This can either be automated (using motion capture where they tracks dots on an object from multiple angles and computers reconstruct the motion) or by an animator manually watching the video and reproducing it.

These models and scenes are then rendered using a process called ray tracing.  Ray tracing works by having a simulated view point and a simulated screen.  The image is formed at the simulated screen by sending a ray from the view point, through the pixel on the simulated screen and then allowing the reflections to be traced back until they reach light sources.  This produces highly accurate reflections and lighting effects but is much more time consuming than the kind of rendering used in 3d games.

The output of the ray tracing is then combined with other information (such as depth and transparency) that comes out of the 3d rendering engine.  This information is all fed in to a compositing program such as Adobe After Effects or Autodesk (formerly Discreet) Inferno.  These programs combine the 3d elements back with the actual video elements and allows for filters and effects to be applied to help blend the layers together smoothly.


AfterEffects: How to make audio sine waves like this?

Try using the analog lines, but turn up the number of frequency bands, a LOT. Like to a thousand or so. To get single lines use side a or side b in the side options. You can also change the upper and lower frequencies to focus more on parts of the audio that are interesting. Then repeat with different settings to achieve multiple lines.


Upon export in Premiere Pro, colors lose saturation when previewing in QuickTime

This is a well-known bug when exporting to H.264. Unfortunately, I'm not clever enough to understand why this happens, but it's a side effect of using the codec. I'll keep looking for an explanation I understand, however I wanted to get this answer out there.
As a workaround for now, I suggest making a quick little eyeball adjustment to the comp's colour correction to compensate. DO NOT DO THIS - SEE BELOW

Update 1:
I did some more digging, and found this on Pro Video Coalition:

QuickTime movies re-exported from applications such has QuickTime Player Pro using the H.264 codec (a common format for web content) appear brighter than the original in some contexts - such as inside QuickTime Player on the Mac, or on a web page viewed by Safari - but not in other contexts such as QuickTime Player on Windows, or the stripped-down QT Player inside After Effects.
Many attribute this to a bug introduced by use of a hidden, optional "gamma" tag (which is different than a full-blown color profile tag) inside QuickTime movies that is supposed to aid in cross-platform compatibility. Unfortunately, this tag is not exposed for the user to edit, and may be interpreted differently by different programs. It has been the cause of much grief among After Effects users employing color management, and has spread into the realm of web video.
- Brightness Issues with H.264 QuickTime Movies, Pro Video Coalition

(Bolding is my doing)
The article also lists a couple of suggestions:

Installing a semi-custom H.264 codec, that allows control of the gamma tag
Do not compensate by darking the image. For players that ignore the gamma tag, suddenly your video is far too dark.

Update 2:
Fuel VFX, an Australian company (whoo!), provided a tool called  QT Gamma Stripper. When they were bought out by Animal Logic, that tool all but disappeared, but it's still able to be found on the web. Here's one site that reputedly is hosting a copy of this free tool.


How to overlay SRT or ASS on a video and output the pre-render captioned video?

Adobe Premiere Pro allows you to create caption files (including SRT) and export them individually (as SRT files) or embedded with the actual video. This link gives a pretty good overview of how it's done in Premiere.


OK, found out the problem: the sequence's interlacing option was turned on, while I was exporting without interlacing.


Are the voice and background tracks merged together when filming hollwood movies?

To answer only the first part, film sound is often split into three parts: music, effects, and dialog. This allows dialog to be replaced for dubbing. This isn't a hard-and-fast rule but it's the general way it's been done for a long time.

This is not how the sound is released, though. For release these are combined into a theatrical mix of two or more (for surround) channels, so the original three-track mix is no longer in play.


Browse the Creative Commons repository on Vimeo for a start. Except for the two non-commercial categories, videos from the other categories can be used for a credit, at most.

  Here’s where you can browse all the videos on Vimeo that have a Creative Commons license applied to them. Creative Commons licenses enable members to grant copyright permissions on their videos so others can copy, distribute, edit, remix, and build upon them while giving credit to the original video’s creator.


Final Cut Pro X clip still showing past its duration

It’s a bit hard to see, is there more clips above your X clips? If so, you should check what is there. In general, videos should be stacked on top of the main timeline. Sound clips go mostly below.

FCPX will show the most on top video clip (if you don’t change transparency or add other effects). You can think of a video clip gets covered with the above clip. Like a stack of papers you can see the top paper but none underneath, however, there are there. If you fan out the stack, other papers will appear underneath the edges of above papers.

In your case I assume something is above what you want to show.


Regarding the standard procedure, the short version is:

get the colour looking correct but neutral, which is when you do corrections for white balance and exposure problems. The footage will look "natural" at this point.
match the colour between shots (this is really part of step 1).
apply a creative colour grade, to achieve the look that you want. You can do this on a scene by scene basis, rather than shot-by-shot.

Usually getting the colour looking natural is the best place to start when applying a "look". It's very hard to get a consistent look between shots that are not corrected to match each other.


Repair MP4 Video with broken header (but with 2 video and 1 audio stream)

Have you recorded the video with a GoPro camera?

If yes, then the two video streams may be a low-res preview video followed by the regular video stream. To repair such file, you would have to filter out the low-res stream.

So far as I know, the new version of the recover_mp4 has an algorithm of filtering out low-res streams of the GoPro cameras. The tool is now called Restore.Media. You can try repairing your MP4 with this tool and watch a full-time preview for free just to see if it works. Also, here is their article about repairing GoPro video files.


You can probably do it directly through the EOS software.  It is possible to get a live video stream from the camera over the USB connection.  Note that USB2 is not going to be able to carry a full quality HDMI stream though.  This is why the Intensity is USB3.  It requires USB3 because the bandwidth requirements for the quality level it is working at require USB3 data rates.  If you have a firewire port on both, that would be an alternate option.

There are systems that have HDMI capture, but they are due to having an encoder card like the internal version of the Intensity.  If it is a desktop that doesn't have USB3, it may be possible to get a USB3 card for that system.  I personally have used an addin card for USB3 support on my desktop (a first gen i7) and it works great.

No matter what you do, there is a good chance you are going to have to hack your way to getting it to show up as a webcam.  It would likely show up as a capture device though, which should work with EasyWorship or ProPresenter.  (Personally I'm an old MediaShout fan that is looking at swapping to ProPresenter since Media Shout went pretty awful with version 4, but I've used all 3.)

One other option you haven't considered is that there may be a way to use the USB connection to pull the LiveView feed that EOS Utility uses, but it still wouldn't be as good of quality as something like an Intensity, but free is good and it would likely support USB2.


How to force Adobe Media Encoder to use 100% CPU and memory?

There might not be a way.  Based on your description of the problem, it sounds like the processing is the slow part.  While the video encoder itself is able to do multi-threaded processing, the image processing you are doing may not be able to.  By default, Premiere has always done as much parallel processing as possible for me and I frequently see it hit 99% CPU usage on my hyper-threaded quad core desktop.

The problem is most likely that some of your effects require the result of the previous frame to begin processing on the next frame.  If this is the case, there isn't an easy way to break it down across multiple threads and that would make it impossible to hit 100% CPU usage on a multi-core computer.

Similarly, RAM wouldn't be expected to cap on encoding as it is a stream operation.  There are some things that may need to be tracked over time, but for the most part, it is a stream operation with data going out as fast as it comes in, so there isn't much accumulation of data.

There are two main things that can improve the performance.  The first is GPU processing.  General purpose CPUs aren't really ideal for many audio/video processing tasks.  They are designed for doing a wide variety of general purpose operations, but aren't super efficient at basic operations.  GPUs, on the other hand, are designed for doing simple operations very quickly.  They can often reduce video processing tasks quite a bit.

A further improvement can be found in purpose built hardware.  There are professional cards designed specifically for processing video and provide real time processing and encoding of video.  These are often included in high end professional video editing workstations, but the price can be quite high.  It isn't unheard of for a professional video editing workstation to be able to get up in the $15,000 to $20,000 range or even higher, just for hardware.  They can go for a lot less if you don't mind waiting for renders (I work on a $2,350 system for my video work) but they can also get very high.


I'm looking to make a Nuke expression: I want the maximum value of an animation curve of another node

There's not a built in method for that, but this Python expression will return the highest keyframe in an animation curve:

max((key.y for key in nuke.toNode('Blur1')['size'].animation(0).keys()))

where Blur1 is the node and size is the knob.

Paste this into your expression editor, being sure to select the Py toggle.

This won't interpolate or extrapolate keys. It only iterates over every keyframe.

No guarantees on the speed of this either. It might bog down the node if you have a keyframe on every frame or something.


I actually was able to find the answer to my question in point 2. here

Simple add the sequence to the After Effects Render Queue:

And from there open it in AME, where the preview will work perfectly fine.


Assuming you want digital channel 3, you can use an HDMI to QAM modulator, like this one or this one. You will need appropriate multiplexers, amplifiers, and splitters to combine your feed with your CATV provider and then distribute to the TVs.

If you need analog channel 3, then it is more complicated. You will probably first need to convert to SDI, then convert to analog video and audio, and finally feed an analog modulator.


How to display static image if the input stream ends using ffmpeg?

TL;DR : Nothing simple. Both solutions use a relay, and it's not suitable for real production.

Actually, you only have two possibilities, and both are ugly.

There is absolutely no open-source software capable to handle a non-permanent stream (GStreamer+forks, FFmpeg, VLC, MPlayer). Every single one of them have the same behavior: last frame still visible, and everything is stopped until data come again.

Option 1 — Tunneling + cache

You need two FFmpeg running, and a script using FFplay.

The first FFmpeg pull the RTMP stream. The output is a local port and the protocol need to be based on MPEG-TS. It's better if the input is tuned for the lowest latency.

Also, you need to optimize how FFmpeg start: no analysis of the stream (set the fps in the command line), early start, etc.

The second FFmpeg pull the local MPEG-TS stream, and transcode the stream to a new RTMP. You need to reencode it with x264, because the video packets will broke at the first switch (so you need a better quality for your original stream).
You need to increase the input latency : default is 3s for FFmpeg, but you need something like 8s. It can be lowered, but only after you really understand what is going on and where is your margin.

The magic is with FFplay.
You have a script running, where FFmpeg read the original RTMP stream. When the stream as no more data, FFplay send an error and stop.
Then, the script kill the first FFmpeg instance, and launch a new one.
That FFmpeg is the “offline” stream. Whatever input you want, you need to encode it in x264 MPEG-TS, to the local port. And with the same fps/size than your normal stream.

During this time, the second FFmpeg is still playing his input cache. So the 4 or 5 seconds for the “offline” FFmpeg to launch is not a problem.

In the actual loop of the script, you need a new FFplay. When your stream is back, it kills the offline FFmpeg, and relaunch the normal one.

The input cache do the job, and the reencoding clean the broken video packets.

It works, but it's not a proper solution, like an overlay on FFmpeg, and FFmpeg not stopping when an input is unresponsive/missing/empty.

Option 2 - OpenBroadcaster Software

If I don't have a full script to post here, it's because I found a new solution :
Use OBS on the server, capture the original stream, put your offline image behind, and send the stream to your distribution server.

But, there is a catch, OBS need OpenGL 3.1 (2?), and a desktop. So you need a real PC & GPU, or virtualize the desktop with ESXI (I don't know if VirtualBox make a virtual GPU compatible with OpenGL 3.1).

The logic is the same, but more friendly.

The only Good Solution

FFmpeg is capable to handle everything on a single instance. If you use overlays, you can have the offline layer and the original stream on the top of it. FFmpeg even know how to restart a stream when it's republished.

But, actually, FFmpeg stop everything when one input is offline/missing/empty.

An option to change the behavior of FFmpeg on an input is the only thing missing.

I tried the dev mailing list, no response. Same thing for my predecessors. The dev “community” of FFmpeg is not friendly, based on old tools (you better not criticize the use of a mailing list!), and conservative.

If someone has a better solution, a magical program to do a simple offline switcher, it's really needed ;)


Just remove -c:v copy. So it should look like this:

ffmpeg -loop 1 -i image.jpg -i audio.m4a -c:a copy -shortest -y video.mp4

ffmpeg will select H.264 encoder to encode your image. You could also try -c:v libx264 -tune stillimage option. But probably the result will be similar.


How do I move (rearrange) the orientation of a video? Using ffmpeg

This should do it:

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 \
-filter_complex "[0:v] crop=iw/3:ih:0:0,pad=iw:2*ih [left]; \
 [0:v] crop=iw/3:ih:(iw/3)+1:0 [middle]; \
 [0:v] crop=iw/3:ih:(2*iw/3)+1:0 [right]; \
 [left][middle] overlay=0:main_h/2,pad=iw:(3*ih/2) [out1]; \
 [out1][right] overlay=0:(2*main_h/3) [fout] " \
  -c:v libx264 -an -map "[fout]" trisected-vertical-overlay.mp4

I haven't supplied any specific video or audio encoding parameters. This just shows the overlay filter to use. You'll have to encode and map the audio, as needed.


Export Frames of 10 BPC Video File with ffmpeg

Try using:

ffmpeg -i "testinput.mxf" -vf scale=in_range=limited:out_range=full -pix_fmt rgba64 path/to/output/out%05d.tiff

instead.

For a reason that is slightly beyond my comprehension of color science (or maybe just something odd with ffmpeg), the output of the initial command was creating .tiff files in the "limited" (15-235) rather than "full" (0-255) RGB color range. I used the scopes in Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve to A-B between the first frame of the created .tiff sequence and the original .mxf and the differences became clear.

If you aren't dead set on using ffmpeg, I was also able to achieve a comparable result by importing the .mxf into a Resolve (version 15 in my case) timeline and then using the "Deliver" workspace, selecting the 16 Bit, RGB and .tiff options as the output and using either the 'Auto' or 'Full' range setting. If you go the Resolve route, you can queue up each .mxf file and just let them export until everything is complete.

There are slight variations between the ffmpeg .tiff, the Resolve .tiff and the original .mxf but to my understanding the process of converting YUV (the original .mxf) to RGB (the .tiff sequence) generally isn't mathematically perfect. The files pass the "eyeball" test, however, and should work well unless the people you are working for have really strict delivery requirements.

If you really want to go deep into it, the nice (and smart!) folks over at Doom9 forums can get you into AVISynth (which is really cool and powerful but also quite complicated) for very advanced conversions.

Hope this helps!


Compare an original video with a transferred video?

There are quite a few programs that do so-called "full reference" measurement, i.e. comparing an original against a degraded signal:

http://www.acceptv.com/en/products_vqa.php
http://compression.ru/video/quality_measure/index_en.html (commercial)
http://www.its.bldrdoc.gov/resources/video-quality-research/guides-and-tutorials/description-of-vqm-tools.aspx (free to use, gives results on a 0-1 scale)
http://mmspg.epfl.ch/vqmt (free to use, calculates various metrics)

These are all outputting some value that you can use to objectively compare different systems.

However, keep in mind that the results you get from such a software may not correspond exactly to what humans would rate. These metrics have been trained on natural images and movie sequences and the results may not be valid for medical purposes.

I would suggest you try VQM (it is standardized by the ITU) and image metrics like SSIM. They perform very good, in principle. Then check whether the results are what you would expect when looking at the videos yourself. You could do a small test with a few experts and let them rate a few sequences, then compare the results with the objective values you obtained from the software.


How can I move an Adobe Prelude CS6 project

Found a way to do this 10 minutes later and I thought I'd share it in case it helps someone.

There might be a "proper" way to do this within the program, but this way has just worked for me. The Prelude project file is just an XML document so easy to edit and this method should be bulletproof ( make a copy of the project file first though )

Close Prelude
Open the Prelude project file in a text editor, eg notepad but you'll need Sublime Text unless you want it to take ages or if it's a very small project
Replace all the FilePaths with the new file path ( if you use sublime then it's easy to use ctrl-D to multi-select them all in one go but if you're not a Sublime user you'll need to do them one by one - only change the file paths fo each clip not anything else at all
Save the file and open in prelude

Eg, for each clip you'll have something like

<MasterClip AssetName="back-head" AssetType="AssetTypeMasterClip" ClassID="9091c12c-9d39-43b7-b55e-4de81592552c" CreatedDate="11/27/15, 12:54:25" DropFrame="false" Duration="2542700160000" FilePath="C:\old\path\tozfootage\DSCF4661.MOV" FrameRate="8475667200" ImportDate="2015-12-18 03:04:59" ParentClassID="18e728c6-1583-44f4-96da-2a830cded31a" StartTime="0"/>

change the part where it says FilePath="C:\old\path\tozfootage\DSCF4661.MOV" to your new\path\to\footage

so you'll end up with FilePath="C:\new\path\tozfootage\DSCF4661.MOV" - and so on for the other clips
in my windows 7 machine I can find the path easily by right clicking the address bar in explorer and selecting "copy address as text"


What video formats/codecs should a video editing software aimed at beginners/semi-pros definitely support

To be frank, beginners and semi-pros will be capturing their videos on smartphones or consumer-level camcorders. And contemporary ones all record their videos as H264 in MP4 or MOV. The only other candidate is MJPEG in AVI for videos taken with older devices

If it's legally possible, I'd suggest bundling Avisynth along with your software and coding AVS/AVI import into your tool. There are plugins for Avisynth which handle many other formats. To make it somewhat transparent and simple for users, your menu should contain two entries: 'Open MP4' which handles native import of MP4, as it presumably does right now, and something like 'Open other formats', which when presented with a heterogeneous format, constructs a simple Avisynth script on the fly and executes it, without the knowledge of the user. This way your users don't need to know scripting and your app now accepts many other formats.


Why I can't check the bit rate on some videos?

For mkv files, you can use mkvpropedit —add-track-statistics-tags to add stream level data.


With FCE I think your best option would be a plugin or something. I know you can make them with Apple Motion and After Effects though, or a really simple one with good ol' iMovie HD.

Good luck in your search for the force.


Convert Horizontal 1920x1080 mp4 video to Vertical 1080x1920 mp4 with Actual content size of 1080x608

FFmpeg does it through the video filter - transpose; clockwise or counter-clockwise option is available.


Is Blue screen a better choice than Green when shooting outdoor to reserve shadows?

With a good keyer it doesn't matter as much as it may have in the past, but in most cases green is the better choice. Which you choose depends more on where and with what content you do your keying. If you're using equal-band capture, recording and processing -- 4:4:4 for instance -- then it can be a tossup. But any encoding that limits chroma bandwidth -- 4:2:0, 4:1:1 etc, will favor green because there's more green in the highest bandwidth channel (luma consists of more than 50% green). More resolution + less noise = better keying.

I think using blue outdoors might be favored because natural light is much bluer than typical studio lighting, which reduces the noise in the blue signal. But I doubt there's a significant advantage, because noise is only one factor.


AAF is the newer and more complete framework.  It is the successor to OMF, which still lives on but mostly because of legacy applications.

Note that Automatic Duck makes a line of highly-regarded tools that help with import and export of these interchange formats and have recently been made available for free.


How can I create or where can I download (royalty free) sound that goes well with a "bad TV"-effect?

AM radio samples would probably be a good starting point:

http://www.freesound.org/tagsViewSingle.php?id=142


How to convert video to NTSC (so it can be burned to a DVD) without losing quality?

DVD does not support 720p. It’s only supports 480p/i.
HD DVD was a failed competitor to Blu-ray. Standard DVD players are not forward compatible.


As far as I know the Canon 650D is the only Canon DLSR that has full auto focus during video recording. Not sure about the face recognition though.

Do some research on it. If you really like the DSLR look then I think this is the camera for you... especially as you'll be able to use your 85mm and 35mm lenses.

I don't know too much about other camcorders but I doubt you'll be able to find any that can give you that DSLR depth of field for the price of the 650D.


What makes iMovie 11 crash when exporting a project?

You can try to convert the defunct video to a different codec. Use something Lossless like ProRes, if you can, or Motion JPEG. Then put the clip back into your project.

I had this problem once in FCP7 for about a week. It didn't go away until I re-recorded that video (which was painful, but in my case, doable). I wouldn't suggest such a radical solution in your case though. There's a lot you can still try. Read the linked post. Basically what I did was: "circumvent or force media conversion at different production stages".

You can also open Console and take a look at the log when the app is crashing. That normally gives hints what is going on in the background.


Black halo / ghosting on transparent layered PSD file imported into FCPX

As Final Cut Pro is not made by Adobe, it does not have the same exact processing engine for dealing with the effects in a PSD.  This appears to be an artifact of the difference in processing between the systems.

To work around this, I would recommend exporting the components as TGA or some similar file format that has alpha support.  Simple alpha blending is far more likely to blend in a predictable manner between applications.


How to create a blinking effect in After Effects CC?

Create your keyframes
Select them by holding down Shift, via box select or simply click the Flare Brightness Property
Then hold Alt and click the stopwatch icon, this will create an expression
Then click the Expression Arrow > and select Property >  loopoutduration this will cause that the keyframes to repeat themselves


FFMpeg concat demuxer corrupted output (freezed video on some concatenated parts)

Glad you fixed your problem. For anyone else coming across the question...

The problem is that concat demuxer only works when multimedia streams are the same.

As described here, all files must have the same streams (same codecs, same time base, etc.).

So you have to use a filter, forcing a re-encode. See this reference.


Why when I overlay a logo on top of the video, the white color part of the logo is transparent?

There is no white color. That's the background color of the page showing through. Your input PNG is palettized 8-bit image where black color indicates transparency.

Apply the following filter to the image to convert black pixels to white and set a uniform transparency.

geq=r='if(p(X,Y),p(X,Y),255)':g='if(p(X,Y),p(X,Y),255)':b='if(p(X,Y),p(X,Y),255)':a=0.1


As long as your audio is coming over HDMI/SDI with your video stream there is nothing you have to do to record audio aswell. If audio is coming in separately you will want to use an HDMI audio injector or a more expensive SDI audio injector depending on what you use.

And no, there is nothing holding you back of using the hardware in the way you intend to. Though with every new hardware you take to live events, do a dry run before actually using it live and before driving to the event, or you can end up with a nasty surprise.


How can I increase the bass in audio (documentary narration, people speaking)?

An article by Larry Jordan gives the following idea for using the Equalizer effect in FCPX:

  To warm a voice, here are the settings I recommend you start with:
  Men: Add 3-5 dB around 180 – 200 Hz.

There's more info in the article.  Based on this, I was able to make several improvements to the audio in Resolve.


Video fails to play in QT browser plugin. Encoding problem?

Well the program that encoded the file that works was Apple QuickTime so not much of a suprise that it's working. QuickTime can be a little picky when it comes to mpeg4/h264 encoded files.
I looked at the files and possible factors are the encoding profile and maybe the GOP setting. Basline Profile Level 3.0 for the broken one and Main Profile Level 3.1 for the working one. GOP setting of M=1, N=120 and N=1 for the broken one. Could be that the Quicktime Plugin wasn't made to handle that.

An easy fix would be to re-encode it with Quicktime Pro or the free and open source tool Handbrake http://handbrake.fr/ and choose one of the Mobile presets for apple devices or simply the "Normal" preset.


There are several ways of achieving this.

Use a hardware solution. They are available from Datavideo or on most video switchers. Obviously, these cost money and the results are dependant on how well you've lit your setup.
For a software solution you will, like you've mentioned, need to connect your camera's video output to your computer. (It seems you have an HDMI output) Therefor you will need an HDMI input on your laptop. If your laptop supports USB3 or Thunderbolt you can look at solutions from Blackmagic Design (among others) to capture the HDMI feed over USB3 or Thunderbolt. The Thunderbolt solution is really affordable, the USB3 solution, less so.
Some of the BMD models allow you to do Live-Chromakeying in the Blackmagic software.
For Windows I came across this software, http://vidstudio.com/ it seems free and allows for live-chromakeying.
For the Apple filmmakers among us. A quick search on Live-Chroma Keying OSx will result in a large selection of affordable software.

Especially when you are going to do the actual keying in the post process, you don't need the highest quality live killer. These are often times very expensive and give moderate results at best.


Combine video and audio TS segments coming from HLS stream

You can use tsMuxer to add the audio stream from one .ts file into the .ts file containing the video or vice versa. This is called muxing and doesn't affect the quality of the audio or video in any way.


How can I move a floating text or image with the video?

This is called Motion Tracking. You define a part on the head that will be tracked, and then have another object move relative to this position.

I'm not sure this can be easily done with Premiere, as I've never done that, but it's a fairly standard procedure in After Effects. After Effects has a built-in tracking system, but there are also plugins like Mocha which offer the same features (and possibly a bit more).

There are hundreds of Motion Tracking tutorials online that explain how to do this, but looking for the term "Tracking" should get you started easily. For example, here's a tutorial for Premiere:


If the image you posted is the file that the camera generated: No, you cannot restore the missing data. It has not been recorded and so you'd have to generate some where none was. Not possible, at least not if you don't want to paint each frame by hand.


After Effects : shortcut for next keyframe on current layer?

I don't believe there is a shortcut for this.

Here are a couple of 'near alternatives' that might help:
1. The keyframe navigator arrows on the property will jump you from one keyframe to the next on that property alone.
2. Drag the playhead while holding shift to snap to keyframes.


How can I create proxy videos from Ursa Mini CinemaDNG sequences?

Apparently I was just missing the setting.  While Optimize Media has been changed in such a way it will not work, there is now a Media Management function that will handle this perfectly.  It is available under the File menu I believe it was.

Media Management allows moving, copying and transcoding of all footage in the project, all footage in a timeline or particular clips.  You can also choose to work on only the footage in the project that is actually used (useful for discarding unused clips after final editing is done).  You also have the option to relink or not to the newly created files.

Scaling it to another resolution is also an option.

In my case, I through all new clips that needed to be transcoded in a timeline, selected to export all clips from that timeline and setup the output settings and ran the transcode.  It pushed through 2.5 TB of footage in about 4-5 hours and produced 130GB or so of proxies.


How to modify audio level of video according to replaygain info?

FFmpeg, a free command-line tool, has a volume filter that should do this.

Syntax would be

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c:v copy -af volume=replaygain=track output.mp4

The af invokes the volume filter with the option set to adjust the volume using the track replaygain value (if present). Video is set to passthrough into the output.


Making the camera travel through a hole in a letter

Here's one idea for the effect, which you can even do in Premiere:

Get a live-action camera shot where the camera is slowly trucking forward.
In post-production, create a title that has at least one letter with a hole in it (A, B, D, O, P, Q, etc.).
Lay the title over the top of the trucking-in shot.
Animate the scale and position of the title over several seconds, so that the title gets larger and larger, and the hole stretches towards the edges of the screen. Since this is happening while the camera in the live-action scene is trucking forward, it will appear that the title is hovering in the air within the live-action scene.
When the hole in the letter is larger than the screen (because of the increasing scale), the animation is done.  At that point, it will appear as though the camera has traveled "through" the hole in the title, and is continuing to move forward.  (You can cut the title from the timeline at that point.)


Any nice tool for replacing all black frames in a video with another frame

You could do this in After Effects.  There are lots of examples online where people use Expressions to examine the average brightness of each frame, then act upon it.  For example, you could add a marker to each frame that fell below a certain threshold level. Or make the frame's opacity go to 0%, to allow another track to show through from behind.

Tutorial examples here:
http://markos.co.nz/2012/05/after-effects-expression-use-the-luminance-of-one-layer-to-drive-another-layer/

http://blogs.adobe.com/aftereffects/2009/07/color-sampler-using-sampleimag.html

Here's an example expression I wrote based on the blog posts above -

threshold = 0.01;  // this is the threshold below which the track becomes transparent - black = 0.
driverLayer = thisComp.layer("Pre-comp 1");
samplePoint = [0,0]; // examine from the top left pixel
sampleSize = [640,360]; // examine the full comp size (in this case 640x360)
lightnessSample = driverLayer.sampleImage(samplePoint,sampleSize);  // this samples the image as rgb
driverLightness = rgbToHsl(lightnessSample)[2]; // converts to hue, saturation and lightness, then only takes lightness
if (driverLightness >=threshold) transform.opacity = 100 else 0; // tell opacity to be either 100 or zero depending upon the threshold point chosen in line 1

I applied this to the opacity layer.  You would need to adjust the threshold value, and the size of your comp ( in my case 640x360). (the red solid below was to see whether the opacity change was working.  I guess you would put a copy of your video showing the previous frame here?  Will look as though the video got stuck though...


Cheap or diy lighting for video production

LED's especially strip LED strands may give you flicker problems, especially if your shutter isn't locked to the same Hz of the AC the LEDs are running off of.

Best bet, cheap shop lights from a Home Depot type store. Buy tungsten oldschool bulbs, highest wattage the lamps support, and bounce the light off of sheets of foam core board.

This will give you nice white soft light provided you white balance to 4300K.


I've never heard the terms On-line and Off-line editing used for audio.  In the video world, off-line editing is a term used for the editing process, whereby you edit your footage (often compressed) and then export and EDl for the On-line editor to do the final assembly with higher quality picture, maybe adding titles and some transitions and color correction.


FFMPEG add image at beginning of MP4 as first frame

I am not sure I understand your question correctly but you can extract the video and audio stream, format them the way you want and then re-multiplex them all with ffmpeg.

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c:v copy -an video_only.mp4

The -an option is disabling the audio -c:v copy is copying your video stream to video_only.mp4.

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c:a copy -vn audio_only.mp4

Here you do the same but for the audio.

Please note that 1 frame is different than 1 millisecond. The duration of your frame depends on the frame rate but usually is between 16,(6)ms for 60fps (1/60) content and 41,(6)ms for 24fps (1/24) You can have 1ms frame only if your video is 1000fps which I really doubt it is. The audio, on the other hand, has a normally 44100Hz or 48000Hz sampling rate, which means that the minimum sample duration with 48KHz is 2.08(3)E-5 seconds.

When you are done you can multiplex the new video and new audio together by:

ffmpeg -i new_video.mp4 -i new_audio.mp4 -c copy audio_and_video.mp4

In order for this to work you need to have the same duration of both input streams though.

You can also concatenate a static picture to the video file. You can create your image.mp4 file with:

ffmpeg -i <static_picture.jpg> -c:v libx264 -s 1920x1080 -r 50 -t 0.02 -pix_fmt yuv420p image.mp4

This will create an image.mp4 video with a duration of 20 ms (1-frame) with a frame rate of 50, encoded with libx264 and resolution 1920x1080 using pixel format YUV420p which you most likely need.

Then you can concatenate both files by:

ffmpeg -i "concat:image.mp4|original_video.mp4" -c copy output.mp4

Make sure that the frame rate, resolution and pixel format of the image.mp4 and original_video.mp4 match otherwise it won't work.

[EDIT 17.11.2019] Apparently in your case you need to use the concat filter which also will require re-encoding of the audio and video. So the commands are the following:

ffmpeg -i <static_picture.jpg> -f lavfi -i anullsrc -c:v libx264 -s 256x144 -r 25 -t 0.04 -pix_fmt yuv420p -c:a aac -ac 2 -ar 44100 -shortest <image.mp4>

This command will create one frame long video with an empty audio stream, presuming that the second video is having 25fps. Please note that in your question the ffmpeg output of your input file is 25fps (tbr) and not 30fps, as you have presumed. I am also setting the number of channels to two: -ac 2 and the sample rate to 44.1KHz. The number of channels and the sample rate should match between both videos. More information about the anullsrc can be found here: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Null
Then you can concatenate and encode the video with the following command:

ffmpeg -i <image.mp4> -i <second_video.mp4> -filter_complex "[0:v:0][0:a:0][1:v:0][1:a:0]concat=2:v=1:a=1[v][a]" -c:v libx264 -b:v 100k -map "[v]" -map "[a]" <output.mp4>

Here I am taking both the video and audio streams from both video files and I am merging them to the output file and setting the video encoding bitrate to 100Kbps, the bitrate of your original video is 96Kbps and I have let ffmpeg decide how to encode the audio. You can change that if you want by defining codec, number of channels, sample rate. More information about the concat filter could be found here: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Concatenate


What to make: a film, short film, series, web series?

One advantage to a web series is the absence of a gatekeeper. That is, you can upload (pretty much) anything you want to YouTube. You don't need to convince the website owner to include your work; you don't need to convince a TV station or movie studio to invest. In addition, sites like YouTube and Vimeo have built-in audiences.

To get a significant number of views, you would still need to do a lot of online promotion of your work by contacting bloggers, contacting "aggregation" sites that feature work like yours, posting on Twitter / Facebook / Reddit, and so forth.


How can I replicate Google's "Glamour" effect in Premiere Pro?

There are a few things going on here:

The image is enlarged, slightly blurred and scaling up in the background
Another copy of the image has a white border added to it, and both fades in and scales down in front of the background. Some of these copies are at a slight angle.
Once the foreground image has reached its final position, a bloom filter is applied to the entire image with the amount of bloom increasing over time. It's used as a transition, so that the outgoing clip gets more and more bloom, and also fades into the incoming clip, which starts out with a lot of bloom and gets less and less over time.

So you'll need 2 layers - one for the foreground and one for the background. You'll need to blur, scale, and animate the scale of the background layer. Then you'll need to add a border to the foreground layer, animate its scale over time, and possibly rotate it. You may need to precompose that into a single layer and apply the bloom filter as a transition as described above.


Remove files from a folder not used in Premiere Pro

Do you want to delete footages, which you didn't use in Premiere or you even didn't import them in Premiere?

In first case I don't know how to delete them.

In second case I think that you can look at the names of cache files, which premiere have created, then open program like “Beyond Compare”, compare “video folder” with “cache folder” by names. And then you should get, which names don't have in cache folder.

This names will be not used. If your cache are full, you will have full list.

Maybe this idea will be useful for you, but I am not sure.


What is the most basic standard raw video format?

The reason there is no widely used uncompressed video format, as there is for audio is that the data rate for uncompressed video is so colossal that uncompressed video is kinda useless. While a relatively cheap device has been able to deal with a stream of PCM audio since the eighties, even today you need fast storage and a decent system to play a stream of uncompressed video. I'll illustrate by giving an example of the size of an uncompressed stream of video.

First it might be worth noting the difference between RAW and uncompressed codecs, and uncompressed and losslessly compressed codecs. Matt provided a good description of RAW codecs, but they are not prevalent in video, other than as camera codecs that get transcoded before use. But there are also uncompressed and lossless codecs that store the raster in a mathematically lossless way, so that each pixel in the decoded video will have the same colour information as the encoded video.

The difference between uncompressed and lossless is that uncompressed just store the colour channels as a stream of bytes, similar to a PCM stream in audio. At say, 10 bits per colour channel, each pixel will take 30 bits. Given that a single frame of 1080p video has around 2.1 million pixels, each frame is going to require a about 7.8mB, and at 24 fps thats ~187mB per second, or 671gB per hour. Even though storage is cheap, that's still going to pose a problem; just playing it back will be taxing. An example of an uncompressed codec is V210, developed by Apple, back when dinosaurs ruled the earth. It's a bit like wav, except that almost nobody uses it.

A solution to the storage and transport problem is to compress the data mathematically — as you would compress other files that you need to restore perfectly. An old lossless codec, Apple's Animation codec uses RLE encoding, which given the highly redundant nature of video streams gives fairly significant size reduction, at the overhead of more processing.

Other lossless encoding use more efficient algorithms, and the more efficient they are the more processing they generally require. So lossless codecs will allow you to retrieve the pixel data as it was originally, with no generation loss, but do not store the pixels as a simple stream of bytes. An example of an open source, mathematically lossless compressed codec is FFV1, developed by the makers of the ffmpeg software.

Something else worth noting is that many video streams are not full resolution. Almost all of the video you see on the web is encoded as YUV-420. This is what is know as chroma subsampling. YUV refers to the way colours are encoded: rather than use the RGB values of the pixels it stores the colour as luma (≈brightness), and two difference components called U and V (≈red - brightness and ≈ blue - brightness, the green component is ≈ the difference between the Y and the sum of the UV channels. There are perceptual weightings given to each component, hence the ≈s but the idea is the same).

Almost all video codecs use YUV encoding, and many sample the colour components at a lower resolution than the luma component. In the case of 420, or 4:2:0 as it is commonly written, for every 4 pixels of luma information there will be 2 pixels of colour information. Some codecs only allow one sort of subsampling (e.g. Apple's Prores 422, which is, not surprisingly 4:2:2 or DVCPro which was weirdly 4:1:1), others let you encode in a variety of subsampling pattern (h.264 has variants that let you encode 4:2:0, 4:2:2 or 4:4:4).

If you wanted a codec that was similar in ubiquity to wav, then probably Apple's  ProRes might fit the bill. While not lossless, it manages a good tradeoff between file size and quality, and was one of the first lossy codecs to allow 10-bit sampling. Avid also make a similar codec called DNxHR, and there is an originally proprietary, but now open source codec called Cineform that fills a similar niche — these codecs are often called intermediate codecs, they're good for moving video from one stage of the post-production chain with minimal generation loss.

However the most commonly used video codec by far today is MPEGLA's h.264. This is a delivery codec, as it is suitable for the final delivery of content, especially via the web, and usually lossy, though it can be used to encode losslessly. The main reason that this is so common is that it does an excellent job of maintaining perceived quality at far, far lower data rates than uncompressed video.