After effects: Moving text along 3D path

to accomplish this, we need to cheat something. I assume you are trying to do something like this in the following image:

First, create a camera in your comp (i see you already have one)
Then create a text layer and make it 3D (you have this as well)
Select your layer and select Ellipse tool (Q) but do not apply
anything.
While your text layer selected, double click the Ellipse tool in
your toolbar. This will create a circular mask on your text layer.
Rotate your Text layer -90 degrees on X Axis.
Twirl down the controls of the Text layer and under Text controls
you will see Path Options. In these options select your mask. And
change your settings as you wish.
Now expand all the controls of that layer. There you will see a text
label Animate: with a small circled arrow.
Select Enable Per-character 3D.
Then in the same menu, select Rotation.
There will be an Animator 1 section, expand it and change the X
 Rotation to 90 degrees.

Now check with your camera, orbit around, you should see your text bends through your mask.

To animate this text along that path, get back to the Path Options. Keyframe the First Margin option or add an expression by Alt+Left Click, and add this value and edit as you like:

time * 500

This will get the current frame and multiply it with 500 and give this value to First Margin property.

I am also adding the link for the project, but you need at least CS5.5 to open: http://www.mediafire.com/?13dl3x67w4v5yod


How do I add an effect on certain length of the original clip in Premiere Pro CS6 using Keyframes?

The easiest way to do this would be to cut your clip where you want the blurring effect to start/end.


How to change value when passing marker with certain comment

You need to check how expressions work. An expression sets the value of a property with the first line that returns a value. So for example an expression could just be:
40

since that line returns the value 40. The second line in your expression value = 40 does not return a value, it attempts to set the value property to 40, which doesn't work, because value is read-only.
What you need to do is return 40 if the time is after the marker, and if not return the current value, thus:
if (marker.comment("R1 L1").time > time){
  40;
} else {
  value;
}

Or more tersely, using ternary notation, which uses the form (condition)? <value if true> : <value if false>, thus:
(marker.comment("R1 L1").time > time)? 40 : value


Some MP4s have keyframes on scene changes. Others seem to have random keyframes, or keyframes every X seconds. What causes this discrepancy?

Putting keyframes on scene changes is more efficient encoding wise on average, but it can cause trouble for decoders with very small buffers. Constant keyframe intervals (GOP Length) and CBR were more necessary when people were viewing videos on iPods with very little memory, as opposed to phones with a gigabyte or more of RAM.

This is an answer explaining how to configure it in FFMPEG: https://stackoverflow.com/a/41735741/8599496


RG6 vs RG59 HD-SDI cables for live stream

Unfortunately there is no perfect or exact answer. Your question topic mentions HD-SDI, which is a digital signal. Those tends to degrade 'cliff-wise', unlike analog signals where degradation is gradual. It will partly depend on the quality of the receiving device -- whether or not, or how well, it can capture the signal as the eye pattern turns to mush.

Having said that, 900 feet over RG59 is bound to be trouble, even over the premium shielded variants like Belden 1505a. For 720p, that's rated for maybe 200 feet. Your footage may vary (-:

RG6 will be better, but again, shielding matters so you're better off with 1694a or equivalent. Even then, I wouldn't gamble on 900' without testing it in place.


How to make a film in black and white and add color to some objects?

As you suggest, the scenes are shot in color. There isn't much of a special task for the director, it's almost completely a post-production challenge. In some cases a high contrast take can be made to assist in masking. This would be unusual for scenes involving actors, since the high-con pass wouldn't be well registered. It may also be possible in some scenes to shoot green screen (chroma key) to aid in separating some objects or actors.

The color portions are selectively revealed through masking, and possibly using some green screen and high-con elements. Using a combination of a full color layer and a mono layer derived from it, an artist paints masks that hide or reveal the appropriate layer(s) on a per-object basis. Computerized tracking and tracing can be a great help in this, but in the end it's up to the artist.


Sony Vegas: Make timeline "line" follow event trimming?

I don't think it's possible in Vegas to move the "timeline" line (cursor) along with your edit.

You can, however, set the cursor directly to where you want your event to end by just clicking to that position. Then drag your event to the cursor and let it snap magnetically to it.

This way you dont have to manually set and delete any markers.


H.264, 1 FPS, 640x480 Resolution - What bit rate should I be using?

That's something thats going to differ a fair bit based on picture complexity, implementation quality, profile used, etc. But going to low shouldn't cause the picture to stop, just fill with compression artifacts.

Often, video completely stopping means you've had transfer issues. If you remove the satellite link, does the video freeze still occur? Cheap satellite links (i.e., those costing less than $1000/mbit/mo) are notorious for dropping, reordering, and delaying packets. If the freezes occur without the satellite link, I'd guess your cameras have a deficient H.264 implementation, or at least one not designed for 1FPS.

Your camera's H.264 implementation may be taking 192kbps as 192kbps average, with a buffer of X bytes. So on the first frame it may generate a lot more than 192kbit, expecting to make it up later (buffer size may be assumed to be 1 megabyte or even larger). And then, the satellite link is pegged for a few seconds as it transmits that "buffered" amount.

Lowering framerate on H.264 doesn't save nearly as much bandwidth as you'd expect, due to there being large differences between each frame. But it degrades visual quality at least as much as you expect. So its often a bad trade-off. Also, various H.264 options can increase compression, but result in multi-frame decode delays. At 1FPS, that is really noticeable.

At 1FPS, who knows how often your camera is generating keyframes.

I'd suggest sending some data encoded with X264 (or ffmpeg, which uses it). See if that works. Its probably a better implementation than your cameras feature. It also lets you tweak buffer sizes (you probably want a low one, unless you're buffering on the receiving end).


That is motion graphics.  A program like Adobe After Effects in combination with Photoshop or Illustrator is ideal for producing such a video.  Something like Flash could also be used.

Note that it is very complicated to make something that good on your own.  There are however templates available for After Effects that you may be able to use.  Alternately, you could look for someone who knows how to do motion graphics and hire them to do something.


Easily make loudness more uniform in Premiere Pro

This is a copy and paste from a similar previous question which I answered:

In order to even out the audio of a single stream; you will want to either mix by hand as noted above; or you can use dynamics; specifically Compression.

Within the PPro audio mixer, apply dynamics to the audio tracks, or master track.

You can then use the compressor within the dynamics filter, which you can use on all your tracks, to get your dynamic range all in line.

The simplest way to learn this is just trial and error; but looking at your waveform; you will want to:

Adjust the gain up- it's a pot/knob center column bottom. Use a ratio of about 2:1 to 6:1.

Last, click the checkbox on the bottom right of the dynamics filter for each track to enable the limiter. The limiter; a good setting is -2 db.

Then you want to adjust your threshhold in terms of attack and release, what you want to see on your audio (do your setup/testing on the loud sections and soft sections to find the sweet spot); is your compressor VU meter should just barely be jumping... when say someone is speaking. If it's spiking to high; gain down. If it's not jumping at all; gain up.

This will balance out your audio so the soft sounds are adjusted up and can be heard, and the loud sections are not adjusted up; resulting in overmodulation. Its a much better way to smooth out your audio, decrease the dynamic range, and end up with audio that sounds far more balance.

Once you learn how to effectively use the dynamics filter on tracks, I think you will find you will be far more effecient in mixing your audio on the fly. It really does a decent job to just get everything in balance. Then; after you've done that, you can do back and sweeten the audio with a full mix; using a control surface or the pots, recording the pot movements via Touch Setting.


How to add a time stamp using ffmpeg to a screenshot capture of a video

Use

ffmpeg -start_at_zero -copyts -ss 00:00:14.435 -i input.mp4
    -vf "drawtext=fontfile=/path/to/Arial.ttf:
          fontsize=45:fontcolor=yellow:box=1:boxcolor=black:x=(W-tw)/2:y=H-th-10:
          text='Time\: %{pts\:hms}'"
    -vframes 1 output.png


Method of pasting "smoothly-typed" text for demo videos?

Allmost any video editing software has a "typewriter"-effect or similar called. This one should do exactly what you want and you have the control of several parameters as smoothiness and speed.


After Effects: Images on whole pixel still blurry edges

So, I figured it out by myself. The problem was the anchorpoint. My images were on even pixels but the anchorpoint was odd.

So the solution is to use following expressions:

// Position
newX = Math.round(transform.position[0]);
newY = Math.round(transform.position[1]);
[newX, newY]

// Anchorpoint
newX = Math.round(transform.anchorpoint[0]);
newY = Math.round(transform.anchorpoint[1]);
[newX, newY]

UPDATE 2

Since I use this expression everytime now I am animating motion graphics, I thought it would be cool to make an actual after effects script of it. You can purchase it here:
FIXL -Snap Layers to Pixel

UPDATE

When you try to animate layers with these expressions, it comes to rough animations. That's why I wrote a new expression that only applies if a keyframe is set. So its safe that whenever an image or layer is resting on the same position for a longer time, it will stay on even pixels.

Add this Expression to the position property of your layer:

n = transform.position.numKeys
t = time;
timeOfKeyframe = null;

for(i=1; i <= n; i++){
    if ( t == transform.position.key(i).time ){
        timeOfKeyframe = transform.position.key(i).time;
    }
    else{
        value;
    }
}

if (t == timeOfKeyframe) {
    keyValue = transform.position.valueAtTime(timeOfKeyframe);
    roundedValue = [Math.round(keyValue[0]),Math.round(keyValue[1])];
}
else{
    value;
}


Camera configuration - Should I select an AVCHD interlaced format over MP4?

I will answer only to the 'interlaced' part.
Yes, it's a thing from the past. Deinterlaced video always will be looking worse than progressive. It's like shooting through the cracked lens and then trying to fix the footage on post. In any circumstances don't shoot a scene with chromakey in interlaced mode. I won't go into details but the results will be terrible.
Advantages of 60p: you will always be able to make slow motion; due to less motion blur, it'll be easier to key the footage.


How would describe this editing technique

It is a jump cut (creating a short video loop) followed by a match cut.


This is just a result of the compression that Youtube chooses to apply.  Your initial data rate for the video (3.5 megabits for an SD video) is exceptionally high and not really designed for streaming.  Youtube probably sees that it is only an SD stream and then drops the bit-rate accordingly.

It may not be possible to get better quality since Youtube's system decides what compression settings to apply for their transcode, however you could try submitting videos which match with Youtube's suggested transcode settings and that might help.


How to automatedly synchronize video recording with pre-recorded music track?

Music videos are often the easiest type of video to sync because they rarely (but sometimes) contain any live sound from the set. Usually, the people in the video are lip-syncing to a recording of their own music, which they’ve rehearsed many times, and have no problem repeating.
In postproduction, all an editor needs to do is replace the camera scratch audio with the original recording.  This is easy when camera scratch audio records the on-set playback to which the talent is lip-syncing, because the editor can either align the audio waveforms visually, or use software to sync the audio waveforms, automatically.  All of the major NLEs are capable of waveform synchronization, but third-party alternatives are also available.
In cases where there is no camera scratch audio, aligning visual cues to the music manually is also straightforward and effective.
But in cases where audio is recorded on set, with second system sound (an audio recording device other than the camera), usually the camera and audio are synced by “jam syncing” their internal timecode clocks together. Usually, also the camera slate (aka “clapperboard”) serves as a visual+audio sync cue.  Low budget sets will often only use a slate, and zero budget shoots will use a simple hand clap. Of these methods, only jam-syncing timecode provides an automated way to re-assemble the files.
In a nutshell, jam-syncing tells all synced devices to set their internal clocks to the same time exactly once, and then trusts that the devices are capable of keeping time accurately.  For a short music video, you are unlikely to experience significant drift between clocks, but for longer recordings, the inaccuracies between clocks can introduce sync errors.  In these cases, highly accurate timecode generators are often used to broadcast timecode continuously to all cameras and audio recording devices.  Ambient Recording’s Lockit box and Timecode Systems’ Timecode buddy are two names in this field.  For Jam-syncing, Tentacle Sync devices are also popular.


How much to charge for a re-posting of a video?

That is completely up to you, how much is it worth to you, etc.  Keeping in mind you have to do zero additional work on it to give it to him, and if he were to put it up on his site without your knowledge you would loose nothing.


How to automatically enrich a video stream with dynamic overlay (text, images, ...)

Have a look at CasparCG. It should be able to do what you want.

An alternative would be to create something using MLT and, say, Python, but that requires some programming, though it should be mostly assembling modules together.


/D is for processing directories, not contents of directories.

for /r D:\Video\TEST %%a in (*.mkv) do (
  if "%%~nxa" neq "trailer.mkv" ffprobe.exe -i "%%a" -hide_banner 2>> results.txt )


positioning Trapcode Particular Obscuration Layer correctly

To see in wireframe objects, which is parts of effects (like emitter), just put in the scene Null Object and parent your effect point (emitter, etc) to it. After that, to adjust your point, adjust Null Object position.

Null Objects are visible in wireframe.


How can I find duplicate videos from a large set of videos of varying formats?

I'd recommend a hybrid approach using both computers and people.

Bucket the videos by their length (round to the nearest second)
For each bucket, use ffmpeg to generate thumbnails at a predictable and uniform point in the videos (ex: a frame from 10 seconds into the video)
Look at the generated thumbnails in a grid (most OS's provide a nice thumbnail view) and scan for duplicates to remove.

You shouldn't have to do any programming to perform these steps, though creating the thumbnails on the command line with ffmpeg may take some finesse.  Good luck!


Scroll text up (like in credits) then reverse and scroll text down?

After Effects or just about any titling software should allow this easily.  You just need to make a layer with all the text on it (or even an image) then you simply need to apply a motion effect to scroll from the top to bottom, put a keyframe in the middle and then the keyframe at the end should bring it back.  This should produce exactly what you are looking for.


How to manage exports when editing lots of videos?

I would suggest you take a look at DaVinci Resolve 14 and see if it can cover what you need.  It depends on what editing you need to do as there aren't much in the way of filters available in the free version of Resolve, but it has a reasonable basic NLE and supports a batch renderer.

Virtually any decent professional software offers batch render support, but many of them have costs associated with them.  Resolve is the best free option I have personally used (though I have the paid studio version.)


How is possible for YouTube and Vimeo transcode so fast?

A common method is split-and-stitch where the file is cut into pieces and sent to multiple servers for transcode. That way you can transcode a file of any length in a fixed amount of time.

Telestreams Episode Engine can do this, but I'm sure Google uses something custom coded.


What benefit would I get from using Apple Compressor instead of just exporting from Final Cut Pro X?

The export settings you are using in Final Cut Pro X are preset Compressor settings and the export itself is actually using the Compressor engine (but with no user control). Compressor allows you control over those settings and to save your own custom presets.

For instance, you may want to export an MPEG2 file with a particular bitrate, letterbox 16:9 footage in a 4:3 file, export to Vimeo with custom settings, or any other number of possibilities. If you wanted all of these outputs, you could batch process them. These, and other, codec/compression options can be configured in Compressor and saved as custom presets. Those saved custom presets then appear as available Share options in FCPX.

Compressor allows for encoding without requiring FCPX to be open, or for converting files that don't originate from a FCPX project among other benefits. It also provides a preview window that allows you to compare your source video to processed video before committing.

I still sometimes use Handbrake for h.264 files. It's very fast, clean, and free. In those cases, I will export a ProRes "master file" out of FCPX to bring into Handbrake.

Compressor is not a perfect program, but it is very useful. A lot of it depends on your workflow needs. If you like exporting directly from FCPX, but need custom share options, then Compressor is probably worth it  for you. If you are content with the presets or a workflow with other software, then perhaps not


You can use ffmpeg with the compand audio filter (a port of sox effect filter of same name) to "compress or expand the audio's dynamic range", but admittedly this is one of the more complicated audio filters.
Example from the documentation
Make music with both quiet and loud passages suitable for listening to in a noisy environment (whatever that means):
ffmpeg -i input -filter_complex \
"[0:a]compand=.3|.3:1|1:-90/-60|-60/-40|-40/-30|-20/-20:6:0:-90:0.2[audio]" \
-map 0:v -map "[audio]" -codec:v copy output

The video is stream copied (re-muxed) in this example since you probably don't want to touch the video.


Easy way to create a simple animation and trace path of a point?

Easy is subjective, but using Solvespace may allow you to accomplish your objective. The included link has a section about three-quarters of the way down referencing the trace point feature of the program.
Solvespace is a multi-platform, free program that allows for parametric designs in 3D but will function fine for 2D projects such as this.

This image from the linked site shows a 4 bar linkage with length parameters applied.


Leaving white balance for post-processing. Is it a bad idea?

Don't do white balance in post, you will regret it. The problem is that the footage your camera records is compressed. That means the sensor information is not stored in RAW, but encoded using lossy compression. The encoding algorithm uses the White Balance setting to determine the encoded color values. The problem is, the original luminosity values that are measured by the CMOS sensor aren't stored in the compressed video, only the rendered color values.

Your camcorder uses the H.264 codec, which means the encoding uses spatial (intra-frame) and depending on your recording settings temporal (inter-frame) compression. This means that some information on pixel-level is dropped as well to achieve a smaller file-size.

To be able to set the White Balance in post without losing any quality, you will need a camera with RAW-capturing capabilities. Unfortunately, for video cameras, those are still very expensive and are pretty much exclusive to professional/commercial movie making.

So yeah, set the White Balance before you start shooting. I would also recommend you set the White Balance manually instead of using the automatic white balance adjustment, especially if you are just starting out. This has a couple of benefits:

The white balance will remain consistent for the entirety of each shot and between shots (if you don't change it too often). AWB will adjust your white balance even while shooting, so if you have some warm or cold light source moving through your image, you might get some unwanted color shifts in your recordings.
In time you will learn to recognize how warm/cold a given lighting situation is, which is a valuable skill to have for a videographer. This will also in turn allow you to estimate what White Balance setting you need in every situation.
You will become more conscious of the light sources illuminating your shots, as well as their temperatures. This will be helpful for your video making in general.
Finally, you will naturally transition to using warmer/colder lightsources and White Balance settings for dramatic effect. The AWB will always try to achieve a neutral grey, which doesn't always work, but even if it does, it's still only neutral grey. Depending on what scene you're shooting, you may want to go for a warmer or colder look to convey different emotions. You can achieve those looks using different lightsources or White Balance.


How do I set up an RTMP stream server and URL endpoint?

If you have a Windows server, Windows Streaming Media Services works nicely and is included with most versions of Windows Server.  You just need to install the role and then configure a publishing point for the URL.  Their is a GUI provided for doing the configuration.


After Effects preview with decreased image quality

You're probably using "Fast Draft" as your preview. This is a new preview mode which uses the GPU to provide "fast"* rendering for previews. This mode will generally look pretty bad, with less or no antialising, lower resolution textures, and less accurate colour.

You can go back to the old adaptive resolution rendering for previews, or use final quality (it actually works faster sometimes, go figure) using the little widget at the bottom of the comp window:

*Adobe's words, not mine, IMHO the latest versions of AE are the slowest yet


Which software application did they use to create LHC data processing animation?

This can be achieved with almost any 3D suites out there.
Your options are 3Ds Studio Max, Cinema 4D, Blender (free and open source), Maya, Lightwave etc. etc.
These are all software suites that enable you to model, animate and render videos like this one.
Ontop of that they used a 2D animation software like After Effects for scenes like the earth overview animation at second 251.
Though the 3D scenes are very likely one single render without much post processing (except for the text overlay).

The style is simple, you have a rather flat shading without much reflections with Ambient Occlusion turned up a notch to get these shadows in the corners.

Going by these particle effects I'm rather convinced that they used Cinema 4D for the 3D animations, though they could have also made those with After Effects and a plugin called Particular from RedGiant Software, a very popular tool for particle animations.
Though Cinema 4D is very popular for motion graphic animations like this one, so it's likely they used that.


Here is a good guide to help you understand the compression.

Go Digital, scrap analog. You won't need a computer to handle the cameras or a video encoder.

Buy a cheap Axis camera and download Axis Companion software, then the camera just needs access to the internet and you can view it from anywhere in your smartphone.

You could also buy any other IP camera and get their dedicated software.

I work at Axis, so I do recommend our product line for stability, availability and quality.


Can Sony Vegas Pro be used or compared to the output produced by Final Cut Pro for professional use?

Vegas is a mature, full-featured NLE. I use it regularly for professional work from spots, to corporate video to feature films. I've also used it for semi-professional things like editing a video of my stepdaughter's choir concert for a Christmas DVD.

Here's where I run into problems. My producing partner is all about FCP. There's no clean way to export an EDL between our two systems so that we can BOTH edit. We work around it. If there's something with Sony's proprietary HD format that's somewhere between HDV and XDCAM, or DSLR footage from a Nikon, I edit because Vegas imports those clips easily. When FCP imports those formats, it ranges from not recognizing the file to displaying interlace artifacts. On the other hand, my Vegas setup chokes on Canon HDV, so that gets edited on FCP.

Whether using FCP or Vegas, the output is comparable, I'm not saying identical because of inherent differences in how MacOS/FCP and Windows/Vegas implement the various output codecs. Needless to say, though, our material from FCP and Vegas has been used in every media from Broadcast to family videos.

The tool, in and of itself, it not the issue. Professionalism comes from a.) the footage and b.) the skill of the editor. Shoot a corporate video with the onboard mic, no tripod and no lights and Eisenstein himself couldn't make that a professional looking edit. Conversely, light and mic a two year old's dance recital, shoot it with three Steadicams for proper coverage, and you'll get something worthy of a broadcast dance show.

It's just that for some projects, I need a phillips head and for some I need a flathead. It doesn't matter if Vegas in the flathead or the phillips and FCP the other. Which one is the best for the job? No one's comparing MSPaint to Vegas...it's just a tool, and if you use it right, you'll be very pleased wit the results.


How to center and align things in Premiere Pro?

Something like this is usually not done in Premiere, since it involves motion-graphics that are way easier done in After-Effects.
If you have to do this in Premiere though, the only way to make sure that - the two smaller pictures for example - align perfectly on their vertical axis is to take a look at their position and put in the same value for the x-axis (the first value).


FFMpeg's vid.stab filter works well.  You have to run it as a 2-pass process: detect, and then stabilize.  If you're going to do more with the video later, after stabilizing, output to a lossless format and then point your other tools at that.


How does graphics card's memory affect video rendering performance?

1) Everytime the GPU has to process something, it will load the necessary data (in that case your video frames) into the VRAM. Simple as that, the GPU cannot work with your system memory.
Though the GPU gets it's data from the system memory, so your system memory will act as a buffer and you don't need to load that much data at once into the VRAM.

Though programs which offer a real-time workflow will want to load as much data into the VRAM as possible. That's the reason why you can allocate a specific amount of VRAM in Adobe After Effects (not 100% sure if you can do the same in Premiere).
So every time you apply an effect in Premiere that is GPU accelerated, the GPU will have to request data into the VRAM to process the frames.

New versions of OpenCL and CUDA are improving the way of how the GPU will get its data and reducing the overhead caused by the CPU which will reduce the amount of VRAM needed at a time but VRAM will always be a very important factor with the current PC architecture.
Current GPUs use GDDR5 which is A LOT faster than DDR3 system memory. This is needed as the memory speed is a very important performance factor in GPU computing. Overclocking your VRAM can give you quite a performance boost in memory intensive 3D rendering applications (though probably not in Premiere).
Current GDDR5 based GPUs like the GTX 780 Ti are capable of more than 300 GB/s (336 GB/s in this case). DDR3-2133 is substantially slower with a peak bandwidth of 16,66 GB/s per module. Also 2133 is rather uncommon in OEM PCs, DDR3-1600 and 1300 is more common.

2) So you will benefit from a large amount of VRAM everytime you work with very high resolution images or many videos at once aswell as with high-frame rate footage. Premieres rendering engine is utilizing the GPU for both the preview aswell as the final rendering if you chose so.

In practice I'd say it's nonsense to have more than 2GB of VRAM for Premiere unless you work with other applications at the same time that utilize the GPU. Processing bitmaps doesn't require all that much data at once unless you work with crazy resolutions like 8k or 16k, the processing capability of your GPU will be the bottleneck before your VRAM.

Thats my opinion based on what I know about the Premiere video engine and GP-GPU. Premiere might do some other stuff in the background that requires more VRAM. So if you have a very specific use case I'd rather make a benchmark or search for one before making a purchase decision. If you just want to make a general guess this information should help you quite well to make a decision.


Biggest possible resolution or go for common denominator?

Assuming the player can rescale the video to Full HD fast enough, I would output to the highest resolution acceptable.


"Canon RGB" color space *shift* to broadcast range with FFMPEG

You can use the geq filter to remap the pixel value ranges.

ffmpeg
 -i input
 -vf "geq=lum='(p(X,Y)-16)/(255-16)*(235-16)+16':cb='(p(X,Y)-16)/(255-16)*(240-16)+16'"
 -c:v libx264 -c:a copy out.mp4

The geq filter rescales the input luma from 16-255 to 16-235, and both the input chroma from 16-255 to 16-240, which is  the legal range for broadcast 8-bit signals.


From the perceptual front (in the user point of view):

Quality:
Here we are evaluating quality of video and audio being streamed. Usually, higher the bit rate better the quality - but it also means more cost. The basic quality measure for Video is PSNR. However, more relevant matrices from the perceptual quality is blockiness and there are many other approaches like this.
Usually, choosing the codec and bit rate fixes the quality primarily, so network doesn't effect that much in that case.
Consistency (or lack of jerkiness):
This is a rough measure of times when the continually running stream got interrupted. Usually this is a measure of length and pauses that are caused due to unavailability or reduction of bandwidth during some time and player needs to wait for the data to arrive.
Usually, buffering is done to the optimal level in the receiver to minimize the effect on this.
Errors in pictures:
This is the indication of errors occurred during the transmission due to which patchy or blank screens. There are cases, where transmission could be error free, in which case, this won't be a problem.
Latency:
This refer to amount of time the service needs to begin the deliver and time the system gets reflected to screen. There are various elements of the system that contributes to this. Usually, for VoD type systems, some reasonable but it is a reasonable concern for the two systems.
End-to-end delay or so called guarantee:
The end-to-end delay is essentially same as round trip delay between two systems. For two way communications like telephony, end-to-end delay is of great importance.
Service guarantee:
Usually, this refers to probability with which the given service will be surely available to the end users. This is equivalent to probability of call drops or network blocking of calls.

Intrinsic parameters:
Here we can think of QoS metrics from the point of view of basic measures of the network which is reflects the QoS as perceived by user.

Bit rate guarantees:
This includes the maximum and minimum of available bandwidth during the entire session. Guarantees available for the network bandwidth is usually the single most
Error rate or Loss runs:
Usually, unlike satellite paths, in the internet there are no bit errors (above transport layer) - the errors get reflected in the form of packet losses. Basic metrics is hence packet error rate on the networks. More research has concluded that these can be modeled as loss lengths where typically, errors occur in some bursts. The packet loss and the length of the losses has a significant effect in terms of perceptions. This paper describes this metric in depth.
Latencies or Various delays:
This involves the delay between the path, setup delay, resource reservation delays and buffer delay that all contributes to initialization of display and latency. Many a times, efficient codecs collects various pictures together before encoding to optimize bit rates this allows more efficient compression (higher quality) but increases the latency.
System uptime and usage factor:
If either the systems is dysfunctional (down) or it is fully utilized (blocked) it will have

The paper below shows good relationship between various taxonomies.
Survey of QoS specifications : http://eia.udg.es/~marzo/doctorat/aur98.pdf


Custom formula for keyframe automation - Adobe Premiere Pro

Not from within premiere. You would need to do that in AfterEffects.

AfterEffects is better suited to do animation regardless. Once you've set up your compositions, you can then import them directly into premiere and lay them into a sequence using Bridge.

This way you can easily jump back and forth between AE and PPro and any changes made to your AE Comp will immediately update in PPro provided you have Bridge and the Dynamic Link Option enabled.


There is a third option which is to stretch the 16:9 event to be taller so that it matches the 4:3 ratio. This must be done at the Track level. Open up Track Motion and disable Lock Aspect Ratio and resize the 16:9 media to fill the 4:3 frame. Everything will be tall and thin but there will be no black bars from letterboxing and no loss of picture data from cropping. (i think it looks bad but some people watch TV like this all the time)

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/24/976641#976651


Why Doesn't Compound Clip With Effect in One Project Still Have Effect When Placed in Another Project?

It looks like you duplicated your project as a snapshot. Taking a snapshot of a project will duplicate the whole project but also a separate copy of the compound clips within a project. This way you can change anything on a compound clip in Project A, and it won't effect project B.

Here is a quote from the docs:

  When you duplicate a project as a snapshot, Final Cut Pro embeds copies of compound or multicam “parent” clips in the snapshot, so any changes to other instances of those clips do not affect the snapshot.


Multi-source, picture-in-picture live stream

Investigate some of the software switcher products such as "V-Mix". Or some of the computer-based integrated products like NewTek "TriCaster". They will handle many more inputs than even the large (and expensive) hardware switchers like BMD ATEM, etc.  The more expensive models likely handle quite a large number of PIP images to be combined. Of course, you must have enough compatible video input ports on the computer to capture all those cameras (or whatever). But they can typically handle live inputs from many computers directly over the LAN, so that would be a big advantage for your requirement.

And many (most?) of those products also handle concurrent recording and streaming all in one solution.

Ref:

http://www.newtek.com/
http://www.vmix.com/
http://livestream.com/producer


How to skip/minimize encoding workload in OBS?

If you're streaming, OBS will re-encode the output each time.
You can stream and record to disk at the same time,
However, there's no way to "replay" that data directly to YouTube, it must be re-encoded.
I notice that you have your stream encoder set to Software x264 which is CPU based.
I also noticed that your recording encoder is set to NVENC which is GPU based.
If you use NVENC as your stream encoder, it can offload encoding from the CPU to the GPU, which could drastically reduce your CPU load.
However, the CPU load maybe coming from the decoding of the video file your trying to playback so you may not be able to reduce it massively but NVENC will definitely help.


How do I build a circle which serves as a particle attracter using After Effects Trapcode Particular?

I would recommend you use a different plugin, use the shatter plugin.

Follow the steps in this tutorial

http://www.macprovideo.com/hub/after-effects/after-effects-text-that-blows-away-like-sand

This will let you break apart your circle into particles. Then when done the composition, simply pre-comp the layer and use the time/time-reverse layer to let the particles come into a circle.

While it seems a little backwards(literally) to do it this way, I think this is the best way to accomplish what you are trying to do.

You won't be able to get a particle attractor or other advanced functions like that unless you are working in cinema 4d or other 3 rendering software.


Export to wide screen (16:9) from Final Cut pro X

This answer assumes that the video that you're editing is already in a 16:9 ratio, otherwise when you export there will be black bars on the sides or above and below your video.

A 16:9 ratio is the standard for HDTV and Full HD. You're probably familiar with the Youtube video qualities - 360p, 480p, 720p, 1080p, etc. These are all 16:9. Therefore, all you have to do is export in one of these resolutions - 1080p is Full HD and 720p is HD.

For more reading on common aspect ratios, reference this Wikipedia page.


ffmpeg command to convert mpeg2 with ac3 audio codec to audible H264/ ProResHQ?

Use

ffmpeg -i 1.mpg -c:v libx264 -c:a ac3 -b:a 192k 1.mov

in order to convert to a MOV file containing H.264 video and AC3 audio. I've used 192kb/s as bitrate for the audio and the H.264 encoding will use the defaults of CRF 23 and preset 'medium'.

To convert only video, and strip out audio, use

ffmpeg -i 1.mpg -c:v libx264 -an 1.mov


I want to have multiple streams (up to 4) on one YouTube Live broadcast, Is that possible?

you can use something like a M/E switcher with a multiviewer to do this. Just feed the program out into the computer you are streaming from using an input card.

I have not used youtube streaming, but I know that justin.tv or other streaming services can use something like OBS to switch between scenes which you can setup with different video inputs in different configurations on the stream.

As these all rely on having external gear to get the camera feeds to the streaming location, the google hangout solution would be the best, as I am assuming you are on a low budget


how to Order layers by name in after effects

To sort layers by name, you either have to name them using a numerical prefix of some sort or use a script to do it.
Ordering by name using numbers: https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/131728/in-after-effects-sort-project-layers-by-name-numerical-order
Here is a script: https://github.com/ff6347/after-effects-script-snippets/blob/master/automagically-sort-layers-by-name.jsx


Trying to reproduce a slow shutter speed effect using a gopro

Try the Echo effect. To avoid echoing the darker portions, duplicate the source and apply the echo to it; experiment with the compositing modes and also layer opacity.


Display multiple clips in DaVinci Resolve 12

You are on The right track! There is not a specific effect to accomplish what you want to achieve.

The only way (unless there is a 3rd party plugin, I don't know about) is to stack the 4 clips on separate tracks in the edit tab. Select one of them open the inspector (panel on the top right of the edit page) scale down and adjust the placement.  The video clip on the video track below should become visible.

[Added by Michael Tiemann as a friendly amendment: In the panel where the scaling information is displayed, there are also parameters for the anchor point.  By default, images are scaled from the center, which means you have to add in X and Y offsets to get each clip going to each corner.  Instead, you can set the upper left anchor point to be the upper left corner of the video, the upper right to be the upper right, etc.  Then, when you scale, each video clip will retreat to its own corner.  If you want to animate this effect, you can have one clip expand from its corner and go fullscreen by scaling back to 100%, and you can return it to its corner by scaling down to 50%.]

Good luck.


How do I record video on my computer using a (mirrorless) camera as the video source?

There are some options, but I am not sure what would work on your specific camera.

If your camera has an HDMI direct output you could use one HDMI to USB converter, one I know that works well is ElGato.

But here is the issue, you need to test if your camera sends a clean HDMI signal, this is without any menu, timestamp, configuration, etc. Test this connecting the camera to any TV.

Another thing to consider is the time the camera remains transmitting, for example, if it is not recording. It could just turn off in the middle of the transmission.

You can also try a tethered software that can use live view mode. The problem here is that the camera will transmit a Still Image size, for example, an 6000x4000, so the the result could be at an extremely low frame rate.


Which bitrate is needed for dvd quality?

Of course it depends on the used codec as well, it is not all about bitrate. But it is possible to have a reasonable quality @3,5 Mbit/s. But using the maximum range of ~9Mbit/s. usually looks much better, but the space of a DVD is limited, so that it is not enough for a 90 minute movie. The best thing is to try different settings for your mpeg4. Remember that this video must obey DVD restriction in order to be played in a DVD player.


Does ffmpeg always produce the same YUV file when decode a video file?

A search didn't produce any indication of non-deterministic video decoding for a digital --> digital signal flow.

In any case, you can first run :

ffmpeg -i in.mp4 -flags +bitexact out1.y4m

ffmpeg -i in.mp4 -flags +bitexact out2.y4m

And then run

ffmpeg -i out1.y4m -v 0 -f md5 -

ffmpeg -i out2.y4m -v 0 -f md5 -

Compare the MD5 values. Same here for H.264 input.


Since drawbox doesn't support time reference, you need to use a workaround

ffmpeg -y -loop 1 -t 5 -i img001.jpg
  -filter_complex "color=red@0.5:s=Wx100[c];
                   [0][c]overlay='-W+300*t':0"
  -y out.mp4

A color source is created equal to the final size of the box you wanted to draw i.e. image width (W) x 100. Then it is overlaid on the image and animated so that it starts revealing at the rate of 300*t.


That is a very simple perspective shift or 3d transform of a video layer.  It can be fairly easily accomplished in any decent non-linear video editor or trivially in After Effects.

You simply have to scale the video to fill the frame and then apply a perspective distortion to it to make it appear to be off angle from the "camera".

Alternately, a 3d layer can be used in After Effects and the plane the video is being played back on can actually be moved closer to the camera and rotated.


How to use Creative Commons licensed videos on YouTube?

As Dr Mayhem mentioned, if you can see it and it has an appropriate license, you are allowed to reuse it.

I would recommend also as they suggested to ask the author first if they can send you a copy somehow. Alternately, I think youtube-dl should have you covered for downloading directly. It's a command-line tool so you will have to use the shell of your OS (e.g. Command Prompt in Windows) to use it, but it's fairly easy to use and has a plethora of options for getting the exact quality you require. Generally you can probably get by with just calling it without any parameters e.g.:

  youtube-dl www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxxxxx


Do I really need to keep CPI file from AVCHD container?

None of the editing tools I know of uses any files other than MTS/M2TS. Supposedly, these CPI files can be used by a Blu-ray player when it plays the content of a card - which is why the structure of AVCHD media resembles the structure of Blu-ray media - but I never play raw videos from my cards.

I preserve MTS/M2TS files only and throw away everything else. Not once in twelve years I needed them.


Square edges after rotating video in DaVinci Resolve?

You can crop the timeline, click on it in the media bin and choose Zi eline settings or something in tht way.


What is this 5 second interval cut technique called?

It's referred to as a jump cut.  I would guess that perhaps the Apple ads that used it might have made it popular again, but that's just a guess.  The idea behind it is to visually show a change in direction of thought since typically it matches up with the start of another phrase.  It jumps the viewer forward in time and makes them aware of a subtle change in action.

A similar technique is often used in interviews where clips are cross dissolved to produce a smooth flow where silence is eliminated.  The approach of replacing these dissolves with jumps gives more of a feel of rapid movement through time and has made appearances in recent culture as more "edgy."


How to make a whiteboard/flanelboard style promotional video for a mobile app?

I don't know exactly what kind of animations you're looking for, but Adobe After Effects is very popular for animation. You can even get a free 30-day trial of the software. That being said, if you're not familiar with After Effects, there is quite a bit of a learning curve, but the good news is that there are a ton of online resources (videos/tutorials/etc.) to show you what you need to do to get great results.


There are 2 solutions:

Create a sequence with all assets that have not been used so far, but which you would like to keep. Next, use the Project Manager to export all relevant files to a new location (your archive) and have "Exclude unused Clips" checked. You may choose to do 2 exports: one with all the sequences for the main video except the extra sequence and another with only the extra assets sequence. When done, delete the original project folder.

Use a metadata attribute to mark which assets you do not want to keep. In the project panel, select list view and sort by that metadata column. Or you may move all the extra assets in other bins. For each bin select all the assets marked as unwanted and right click on Make Offline and select the delete option.

I think the first approach will be faster in most cases.


Video file is inverted. Can it be fixed?

Use ffmpeg. It's the swiss army knife for video converting/editing.  Once it's installed, enter the following command on the command line:

ffmpeg -i input.mov -vf "vflip" output.mov

Look at following answer: https://superuser.com/questions/578321/how-to-flip-a-video-180-vertical-upside-down-with-ffmpeg


Which low budget video camera would be appropriate for making travel/advenutre short films?

For your budget and situation, GoPro is probably the best bet as it is exceptionally light and a good value for the money.  It doesn't have a variable length lens, so it can be a little limiting in shot composition, but you won't get the same video quality, weight and durability in any other camera for the same price.  That's why they are the market leader in that segment.

Most other cameras that are that cheap sacrifice either quality and durability or size for more versatility and consumer friendly features, but at that low of a price point, there isn't enough budget for making the device to keep much of any quality with any kind of versatility.  (As an example, an optical zoom lens of decent quality would probably take 1/4 to 1/3 of the budget of a camera in the price range you are looking for.  That doesn't leave much for sensor and processing electronics.)


How to do overlays/masking like in this video? (Pasting clouds/rainbow/fireworks over sky while camera moves around)

It's tricky but it looks like it was shot in a Studio (Green Screen) and that they had a bit of red straw and tiny piles of red sand on the floor.

That's why most of it looks like one Shot, because it is - they neither sang and danced then teleported nor did they dance twice and get that many people in perfect sync and switch from one to the other - they sang and danced the whole thing in a Studio and occasionally a foot would shift the red straw or sand.

The result of the Take in the Studio (with green everywhere, except the aforementioned straw and sand) is them singing and dancing with a floor and background that can be electronically (digitally) removed.

A separate Take is done both at the Beach and the Grass Field without any people present.

Proof is sometimes they kick up the Grass (move the straw underfoot) and sometimes they don't when you'd think that they might have had more occasion to do so - but the straw in the Studio is infrequent and you really need to kick to launch it - plus it's difficult to see.

Final proof is that they don't leave footprints on the sand - that's the clincher that 'wrecks' it.

So you have the Clips of them dancing in the Studio, the Clips of the Beach and Field. Draw Rainbows over the 'Field Clips' and drop the girls on top of that.

Masking is only on the bottom of the Frame, to have Sand or Grass to kick, appear in their respective backgrounds, combined with different takes where the 'kicking up the ground' is more or less pronounced (another thing that 'wrecks' it but harder to notice).

It was neither done cheaply (simply) nor did they spend a fortune (make it complicated). If you knew a dozen chicks you could do this on your Home Computer (assuming reasonable CPU power) using a handheld Video Camera and a bucket of Green Paint (plus some red for the ground effect, or double the number of Takes).

I think they used red as well as green because they don't kick up the ground correctly, much like the background doesn't move properly in relation to them. It was better than moderately well done, but not expertly executed.


Selecting all clips on the right of the playhead

There's something close to it. If you press 't' you will be using the Select Track Forward Tool which selects every visual OR audio track after and including the track you click on. If you press 'tttt' you will be using the Select All Tracks Forward Tool which selects everything including audio and audio transitions after and including the track you click on.


Is it possible 3D Transform a video clip in Final Cut Pro X?

Apple Motion will let you create "motion templates" which are usable in FCPX.  You can apply 3D transforms with Motion, and publish to Final Cut.  This approach is easy to learn, but limited in scope.


How can I put a PowerPoint presentation with a recording of the presenter?

Any timeline-based multi-track video editor with crop and scale features will allow you to do this. Basic idea is to import all three assets viz. video, logo and Powerpoint (see below) on different tracks in the editor and resize/crop each of them so that the composition looks like the DEFCON videos.

The time-consuming part is syncing the slides with the presentation. That may be simple but not quick.

For Powerpoint, one has to export individual images of all slides, if there's no animation or transition in the PPT that you want to preserve, or export a video if you do. For video export, you need 2007 or later version of Powerpoint, I believe.

All professional video editors (Premiere, FCP, Avid, Vegas, Edius..etc) can do this. Here's a list. I'm not aware which of the free or lite video editors are best suited for your task, sorry.


How to capture documentary quality footage of tiny subjects

Up until the high-frame rate (HFR) section of the video I would have said that all you need is a Canon MP-E 65mm Macro Lens, a nice LED light (so as not to fry the poor bugs with all the IR radiation that comes from tungsten halogen sources), and a camera with a reasonable video codec that accepts Canon lenses.  However, the HFR section is clearly in the specialized territory of a Phantom camera, which is very expensive.


Is 8 Bit 4:2:0 chroma subsampling "good enough" for chroma key?

"Good enough"? Sure. I wouldn't love to work with subsampled footage for keying, though. You want to maximise resolution, minimise or avoid subsampling and avoid spill. If your screen is well lit, you got the best circumstances.
So yeah, on paper, a chromatically subsampled file will give you more artefacts and jagged edges in your matte compared to a prores4444 or raw-recording. It is still a workable compression, though. Just try to optimise everything else I mentioned.


Make the object stay at the centre of the video

You can make it with tracking. Find static point on person, and track from it. Better to use chest (not face), because it is more stable, when person moving.

But you need to understand, that you will have some empty space on the edges of the screen after that. If it is not recorded on green/blue screen, you may need to zoom your video. Because of that you will lose some quality.


audio jumps to next frame rate - premiere pro

I think you should try aligning only the audio when you do this.  The video tracks have to be aligned to the nearest frame, because video is either showing frame 1 or frame 2 (assuming your sequence frame rate is the same as your footage frame rate).

Audio is sampled at a much higher rate than video.  e.g. your video could be 25 frames per second, but your audio could often be 48kHz, so sampled 48,000 times per seconds.

Your ears can detect very small variations in delay between audio files (of a few milliseconds), and your ear/brain/eye combo can detect very small discrepancies between audio and video lip sync (22ms according to this).


Apply effects to multiple video channels in Sony Vegas

Say, you have a video that has indoor and outdoor scenes, and also some other tracks. And you notice that indoor parts require brightness/saturation adjustment.

You cut your video into a sequence of scenes (Video Events), and you find it boring to apply FX to all/several indoor events, especially if they are cut into many places across your video.

I use a pretty simple technique to automate it.

Make sure all Video Events that need to have an FX stay on a separate Video Track, so that the track contains only events that do need the FX. Call it, say, "Indoor with brightness".
Let's complicate things and assume you also need some scenes to be pixelated. Place them into yet another track, call it "Indoor with brightness and pixelate". Apply Pixelate FX to this track.
Make a new Video Track, and call it, say, "Brightness FX Master"
Make both "Indoor with brightness" and "Indoor with brightness and pixelate" tracks to be children of "Brightness FX Master" track
Apply the Brightness FX to "Brightness FX Master" track

Pros: You set all FX only once. Modify it freely and you don't need to re-apply it.

Cons: Usually, you will have to cut through the tracks carefully because it's impossible to add a non-FX track in between two child tracks. Also, managing cross-track crossfades is often a difficult to accomplish.

Also, You can't partially apply an FX this way, e.g., Brightness +10 is always Brightness +10, there's no way to set its opacity=50% (effectively to Brightness +5). In this case, use Animate feature to dynamically change parameters of applied FX ("Brightness Amount", in this case).


FFmpeg's loudnorm filter can be used. Basic syntax is

ffmpeg -i in.mp4 -c:v copy -af loudnorm=I=-23:LRA=1 -ar 48000 out.mp4

The loudness range (LRA) should be 2 x max deviation.

Also see the ebur128 filter for measuring loudness.


If you have Premiere, why not simply use Adobe Media Encoder?  I believe it should handle your needs.  There will always be some quality loss though as you will have to change codecs and the compression is going to differ.  You can use high quality formats to minimize the loss, but there is going to be loss.


It's possible that with certain Panasonic or MTS-specific software, the associated files are useful. I've heard of situations where Premiere won't import the footage correctly without the full folder structure. I don't have any MTS folders here at the moment to verify for sure, but it's most likely just metadata that the camera recorded.

That being said, I've never had an issue importing an MTS file disassociated from its associated files (and I do this for a living). Fortunately, the associated files and folders are relatively small and don't take much space, so it's usually more trouble to weed them out than it is to remove them.

I'm assuming you're editing in Final Cut, as the rest of the major NLE's can handle the AVCHD codec, and an MTS wrapper, natively. Final Cut's Log and Transfer does a fine job with the transcode and you won't lose anything significant.

If you're using another NLE, the best transcode codec you can use is ProRes, as it's fairly universal and a very high-quality codec. I've also seen guys use DNxHD for visually lossless transcodes, but it's a heavy codec and some machines may have trouble playing it at full speed. Unfortunately, on Windows you're out of luck with ProRes altogether as it's Mac-only.


After Effects Blur Effect with Mask Doesn't Go to the Edge

If you applied the blur to an adjustment layer (as you should), check to make sure the layer is positioned in the center of the composition. Hit 'P' on the adjustment layer and right click on the 'Position' name and Reset it.

Check the mask expansion to see if maybe you have it set to a number less than or greater than 0. I doubt this is the issue as when you recreate a mask the problem doesn't persist.

If you haven't applied the blur to an adjustment layer you should do that and see if it fixes your issue.


Hello ffmpeg heroes - please help me with ffmpeg/ffprobe commands to decode a video for me?

It is all about the proprietary codec, i.e. IMM5. The VLC and FFMPEG can't deal with it except patching the avcodec manually using https://patchwork.ffmpeg.org/project/ffmpeg/patch/20190716170703.10960-1-onemda@gmail.com/. Of course, you need to re-compile the ffmpeg using the IMM5 supported avcodec lib.
Good luck.


Raising volume of one mic in an audio track to meet others' mics volumes

For it to sound good, you would certainly have to raise and lower the volume by hand using keyframes. If you want a quick and dirty solution, you can use a limiter or compressor. A limiter sets a ceiling of volume that cannot be surpassed. This way, you can turn up the volume significantly, which would make your voice touch this ceiling while others would be crashing through that ceiling. The limiter than lowers the volume of the parts that would crash through the ceiling, effectively putting loud and quiet parts closer together in volume.
However, you will also hear an extreme limiter / compression like this. Quiet sounds when nobody talks will be awkwardly loud, breaths sound like from an asmr video and you will most likely have a problem with background noise, which will be more audible aswell.
To avoid this problem in the first place, I would recommend you use microphones for each person that's speaking, so you can adjust the volume easily in post-production.


Please tell me if i can use this song and it's title in my promotional film?

For this, you'll really need to see a lawyer to determine if the original re-mix has sufficient rights to the song to place their remix under Creative Commons in the first place.

If they do, then it depends what Creative Commons license they used.  As long as it allows commercial usage (not a NC license) then you would be ok as long as you followed the rest of the terms of the applicable Creative Commons license.  (For example, you would need to post the video under the same type of Creative Common's license.)


Video with inconsistent exposed / rendered image sizes

HDV camera, right? It's not untypical for cameras to claim higher resolution than they actually scan. In such cases you have to look at the different aspect ratios involved: pixel, frame, display, sample. Here's a post that discusses this, or google "HDV aspect ratio". And here's a link to the spec from the HDV consortium.

It's essentially anamorphic. The ffmpeg or avconv docs should show how to extract and expand to 1920 in one step.


How to compile FFmpeg with libfdkaac into a single static binary?

Thanks for stib's suggestion. I leave my answer here.

FFmepg build process take higher priority to use dynamic library even if static libraries are ready. Therefore, I first removed some external libraries support from build configuration and make sure all external libraries are only static (remove *.dylib from prefix /usr/local/lib). Then rebuild it with the following command:

./configure --pkg-config-flags="--static" --libdir=/usr/local/lib --extra-version=ntd_20150128 --disable-shared --enable-static --enable-gpl --enable-pthreads --enable-nonfree  --enable-libass --enable-libfdk-aac  --enable-libmp3lame  --enable-libx264 --enable-filters --enable-runtime-cpudetect

Remember to define --pkg-config-flags="--static", asking build process to use static library. Then, we will get a single executable FFmpeg binary!

P.S.: I removed the libass support from the configuration, because libass depends on Fontconfig lib which I only have dynamic library available. I'll put the libass support back once I figured out how to make a static library of fontconfig.

Thanks.


Nested Sequence that plays fine alone shows up as entirely black in Master Sequence

Have you tried clearing all rendered caches? That would be my first guess.


If your audiobook is audio only, and there is only a single image associated with it, I would simply distribute it as audio with the image.

If you want to upload to YouTube or another streaming distribution site, use the preset meant for YouTube, or specify what site.

For a technical answer to your question assuming you're using H.264 or H.265; make the keyframe distance as long as possible, use 2 pass encoding, and use the native resolution and frame rate of your distribution medium.


LifeSize DVI Input from multiple devices with in-line scaler

I've found an answer to my specific problem that's a little ugly, but might be of some use.

The basic premise is to ensure that the first device in the chain does not support (or is capable of disabling support for) HDCP. Macs and iOS devices are opportunistic when it comes to HDCP; they'll always attempt to negotiate it, but will fall back to unencrypted when there's no protected content playing.

The Kramer VP-424 scaler has a setting "HDCP on input" that will, when disabled, prevent that negotiation. By putting one of these inline between the input and the switch, HDCP never starts and the whole chain is unencrypted:

Mac -> VP-424 (HDCP Disabled, 1080p output) ->VS-84H Switch -> VP-424 (HDCP Disabled, 720 Output) -> LifeSize Codec.

The scaling doesn't have any noticeable effect on image quality or unduly effect sync times, which is a bonus. I still get 1080p out to the local projector and downscaled 720p to the codec.

As I say, it's neither pretty, nor cheap; but it works.


How to import 2D position data into After Effects

Found the answer here.
Copying any positional keyframes out of After Effects generates a text file like this:

Adobe After Effects 8.0 Keyframe Data

    Units Per Second    25
    Source Width    100
    Source Height   100
    Source Pixel Aspect Ratio   1
    Comp Pixel Aspect Ratio 1

Transform   Scale
    Frame   X percent   Y percent   Z percent
        100 100 100

Transform   Position
    Frame   X pixels    Y pixels    Z pixels
    0   960 540 0
    1   980 540 0
    2   980 520 0
    3   1000    520 0
    4   1000    518 0
    5   630 498 0

End of Keyframe Data

To manipulate it, just modify the text, copy the text, and paste it back into AE.  Works like a charm


How to record a live video of yourself with a transparent background?

I really want to know how this gets automatically edited.

The technique is called chroma key and consists of considering as transparent all pixels of the colors within a specified range. This is usually used with a bluescreen or a green background. The image is then simply layered over another background.

As you have noticed, chroma key is not limited to postprocessing: a lot of software products can do this in real-time for live streaming.

By the way, if you have used Google Hangouts, one of the effects consists of replacing the background by an image. Don't be mislead by this, since this has nothing to do with a bluescreen and doesn't require any specific color for the background; I imagine that Hangouts' algorithm rather assumes that parts that don't move are the actual background.


What's the easiest way to cover up a seam in background paper behind video footage in Final Cut Pro?

For the parts you have nothing in the way I would duplicate the clip above, them mask out a part without the seam and move this over the seam.
When the product come over the seam I don’t see another solution then to track the mask frame by frame.


Trim the part of composition in After Effects along with its key frames

As Alex suggested, precomping is the answer to your question. There is no other way to have two separate compositions within one composition. Precomping is a normal part of the After Effects workflow, and is in fact necessary for many effects to work properly with nested elements.

It need not be messy – just organize your project well and label everything clearly. Learning to navigate between your comps with the Tab key will help you to use this workflow efficiently.


most efficient pipeline for rendering large documents in after effects

I believe that using pngs from the pdf is the best compromise between quality and speed. Your main concern being the render-time? If so, (I am sure you have, but just to be sure) have you checked if you're using Hardware-acceleration? You should also purge your cache frequently and have both the footage as well as your cache-directory as well as the project files on a fast medium, like an ssd.

I'm not certain with how familiar you are with those standard optimization techniques, so I'm just throwing this out there. If there's a different problem, please elaborate.


Separating and Mapping Audio Channels in Premiere CC Multi-Camera Sequence

Premiere Pro is definitely not a digital audio workstation.  Its treatment of audio is primitive at best.  I believe its paradigm (which I think is screwy, but that's my opinion) is that a multicam clip conveys one of two types of audio: the preview channel track (which you have selected as Channel 1) or audio-follows-video, which means each cut you make, the audio switches to the one channel allocated for that clip.

I know you don't want either, but I don't think there's a third way.

So, use Channel 1 as your reference clip, copy and align the audio tracks you want to deal with to the sequence containing the multicam clip, and do all your audio edit processing there, separately from your camera changes.  Good luck!


How do I cut out black space on a video?

If you are playing a portrait oriented game, as Jim Mack said, something has to be in the empty space, that's where the black pixels come from. Unless...

You can use After Effects here. Duplicate the video clip, take the video behind the front one, which you won't touch, then scale it up so that the sides meet the sides of the composition, and add a gausian blur, or any blur, really, to the back layer. Here is what I'm talking about:

Duplicate the first layer (press Ctrl+D or go to Layer > Duplicate):

Scale up the second layer (open up the layer properties by clicking on the arrow > left beside the layers name or select the layer and hit S to open up scale property only):

Add a Blur Effect to the second layer (Select the Layer and go to Effects > Blur and Sharpen > Gaussian Blur)

Note: In order to render faster, use a Fast Blur and enable repeat edge pixels to blur the entire image.


Hardware/software to project video wirelessly?

Wi-Fi enabled projectors have been around for several years, at least.

A cursory Google search for "wifi enabled projector" turns up that and several other articles, plus reviews and some product listings. The primary complaint seems to be bandwidth; however I did not find any reviews including more recent Wi-Fi standards like 802.11g/n.

That said, it was a cursory search. I saw lots of other results that I didn't have time to click on. Some of them looked a lot more current, and I did find something that looks like a present-day product listing of wireless projectors.

My advice would be to shop around, read reviews, and get a good return/exchange policy if you decide to buy one (so you can test it with relatively low risk).


Top left.

Pixels in a raw video stream are stored left to right, top to bottom. And all filters work on uncompressed frames, so that's the easiest way to setup the co-ordinate system as well.


Brightness and contrast ratio, inversely proportional?

On that particular specification page the *1 and *2 mean look further down the page at notes 1 and 2, which are as follows:

*1: Varies depending on conditions

*2: All brand names and product names are trademarks, registered trademarks or trade names of their respective holders. Lamp life specification is an estimate based on verification under proper conditions and is not the duration of the warranty. Lamp will shut-off automatically when usage reaches the specified estimated maximum lamp hours. Service life may vary widely depending on usage and operating environment and conditions, as well as users' adherence to the maintenance and cleaning procedures provided in the user manual.

In terms of which one is best - it will depend on your needs, but the second one has higher frame rate and better contrast, which for most applications will be what you need, however if you do need the extra brightness for displaying in brighter environments, the first one may be more appropriate for you.


10 times the length does sound pretty long, but isn't completely insane, particularly if you are running two pass.  The more compression you are trying to do while maintaining quality, the longer it is going to take to compress it down.

It's also possible that if you are using nested projects, it may still be trying to do some rendering at the native resolution of the output for it.  Are you running the MP4 or the project through encoder?  If you have a full res MP4, I would suggest trying to run it directly instead of running the project.  The quality will likely be lower, but it should run a lot faster.


They are a type of metadata specific to the QuickTime container.
They can contain all kinds of extra information for the video player to read out and use.

  QuickTime movie atoms have an atom type of 'moov'. These atoms act as
  a container for the information that describes a movie’s data. This
  information, or metadata, is stored in a number of different types of
  atoms. Generally speaking, only metadata is stored in a movie atom.
  Sample data for the movie, such as audio or video samples, are
  referenced in the movie atom, but are not contained in it.


Easisest way to convert whole DVD folder (all titles and chapters) to MKV file(s)?

If you wrote a small script (say in python) you could use the Command line client of the software convert all the videos sequentially. Python has good system calls functionality and make this quite easy.


Trying to help a west coast fan in an east coast world

"I have computers, recorders, att u-verse and an am radio"

Then there's nothing you can't accomplish! (-:

Google shows plenty of examples. This was the first hit for "audio delay software free": http://www.fountainware.com/Products/AudioDelay/index.htm


How to reproduce this rainbow color feedback effect in After Effects?

Sorry, I don't have keyable footage under my hand, so I tried to do it different. But it will better look with keying:

I duplicated my layer couple of times
Moved every layer couple of frames forward
Decreased Optically value for every layer with same step, so values distributed from 100 till 0 (last one can be skipped)
Added to them Hue/Saturation effect with distribution of Master Hue across them.

It is manual approach, but it is not so difficult or time-consuming.

I believe it also can be achieved with Particle system, when your footage serves as emitter. Some of particle systems effects have "color over life" value, which will create your "Rainbow effect".

Good luck!


Easy way to take 1s clips from video every 60s and join them all together?

ffmpeg, a command-line tool, can do this in one command.

Update: New template, first below, is easier to manipulate (and understand)

This is a generalized command template:

ffmpeg -i input -filter_complex "[0:v]select='gte(mod((t\-FS),I),0)*lt(mod((t\-FS),I),D)', setpts=N/TB/FRAME_RATE[v];  [0:a]aselect='gte(mod((t\-FS),I),0)*lt(mod((t\-FS),I),D)', asetpts=N/SR/TB[a]" -c:v libx264 -crf 23 -map "[v]" -map "[a]" -fflags +genpts output.mp4

Alternate method:

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -filter_complex "[0:v]select=isinf(t\/(mod(D*trunc(1+(t/D))\,Interval))),setpts=N/TB/FRAME_RATE[v];[0:a]aselect=isinf(t\/(mod(D*trunc(1+(t/D))\,Interval))),asetpts=N/SR/TB[a]" -c:v libx264 -crf 23 -map "[v]" -map "[a]" -fflags +genpts output.mp4

This is the first command formatted for full visibility

ffmpeg -i input -filter_complex \
"[0:v]select='gte(mod((t\-FS),I),0)*lt(mod((t\-FS),I),D)', \
setpts=N/TB/FRAME_RATE[v]; \
[0:a]aselect='gte(mod((t\-FS),I),0)*lt(mod((t\-FS),I),D)', \
asetpts=N/SR/TB[a]" \
-c:v libx264 -crf 23 -map "[v]" -map "[a]" -fflags +genpts output.mp4

Basically, replace input with your source video filename, output.mp4 with your intended output name.

Replace D with duration of segment, I for gap between the start of two segments and FS with start time of first segment . So, for 3-second segments every 45 seconds, starting at 36 seconds, from a file called fullfile.mp4, the command will be

ffmpeg -i fullfile.mp4 -filter_complex \
"[0:v]select='gte(mod((t\-36),45),0)*lt(mod((t\-36),45),3)', \
setpts=N/TB/FRAME_RATE[v]; \
[0:a]aselect='gte(mod((t\-36),45),0)*lt(mod((t\-36),45),3)', \
asetpts=N/SR/TB[a]" \
-c:v libx264 -crf 23 -map "[v]" -map "[a]" -fflags +genpts output.mp4

These segments will be extracts from seconds 36 to 39, 81 to 84..etc

Download ffmpeg for Windows (32-bit static build) from here.


Use the crop filter:
ffmpeg -i in.mp4 -filter:v "crop=out_w:out_h:x:y" out.mp4

Where the options are as follows:

out_w is the width of the output rectangle
out_h is the height of the output rectangle
x and y specify the top left corner of the output rectangle

Original image

Original 320x240 image
Example 1

To crop a 80×60 section, starting from position (200, 100):
ffmpeg -i in.mp4 -filter:v "crop=80:60:200:100" -c:a copy out.mp4

The audio is stream copied in this example, so re-encoding is avoided.

Example 2

To crop the bottom right quarter:
ffmpeg -i in.mp4 -filter:v "crop=in_w/2:in_h/2:in_w/2:in_h/2" -c:a copy out.mp4

This is the same as:
ffmpeg -i in.mp4 -filter:v "crop=320/2:240/2:320/2:240/2" -c:a copy out.mp4

Which is the same as:
ffmpeg -i in.mp4 -filter:v "crop=160:120:160:120" -c:a copy out.mp4

You can refer to the input image size with in_w and in_h as shown in this first example. The output width and height can also be used with out_w and out_h.

Example 3

Crop 20 pixels from the top, and 20 from the bottom:
 ffmpeg -i in.mp4 -filter:v "crop=in_w:in_h-40" -c:a copy out.mp4

The filter will automatically center the crop if x and y are omitted such as in this example.

Previewing
You can take a crop (heh heh) and preview it live with ffplay:
ffplay -i input -vf "crop=in_w:in_h-40"

This way you can experiment and adjust your cropping without the need to encode, view, repeat.
Notes

crop filter documentation

Default encoder for MP4 is libx264 (H.264 video) or mpeg4 (MPEG-4 Part 2 video) depending on your ffmpeg build. See FFmpeg Wiki: H.264 Video Encoding Guide for more info.

Instead of cropping and re-encoding, consider cropping upon playback. This is possible with any player worth using.

Ancient ffmpeg builds used -croptop, -cropbottom, -cropleft, -cropright options instead of the crop filter. If this is the case for you then get a modern ffmpeg. Development is very active and there is no reason to use an antique.


Shooting with a camera and then pausing while recording

It doesn't sound like thee is a cheap or easy way to do what you want to do.
I use premiere a lot and.  There are mutlicam features for Premiere that allow you to sync to tracks and edit them easily, not to do live recording and playback at the same time.
If you stop and start the recording on lulls in the game where nothing is happening you will generate files that can be played back while the computer is recording the next file.

Also
Most computers video cards have an HDMI out, and can output to two monitors.
wire one output through a PVR and use that to rewind etc.  I don't have any experience with a pvr but that might work.


Re-encoding will introduce generation loss and encoder specific artefacts. Of course you are not going to encode a file 100 times and you are trying to preserve as much quality as possible, but with such vage ctriteria as encoding 1 TB of unkown quality, noise, bitrate, picture size, framerate and so forth there is much that can go wrong. Best advice: don't re-encode at all, particularly if you are not encoding from sources e.g. disks but web formats or already re-encoded content. Save the money spent on energy to buy more hard drives and learn to manage them (hint: ZFS). If you cant wait for encoder improvements and the next generation of super high efficient video encoders, then H.265 one of the better solutions currently available, but you'd have to take a close look at each file and how it was encoded, if you find that a video was already encoded on an i7 equal or better than yours with H.264 and that already took a day or more than you know you are going to spen 2 to 4 times as much. And you'd still have a bit of generation loss even if you got everything right. Also don't expect that software always returns perfect results, you should check every re-encoded file to be sure. And you shouldn't overclock your hardware or swap version numbers of software components used.

Buy a bigger drive if you don't want to go down this route, you save valuable lifetime and electricity.


ffmpeg compress video in fast motion in high quality

I, finally, found the answer!

The problem was created from the mismatch of Video frames duration, and audio duration. So the video seems to be frozen after some moment, and it seems it continues to play frozen to last video frame. However, audio continued to play. It continue to paly until audio duration finish. Therefore, I decided to remove the audio track entirely while compressing the file. This resulted a video-only file with correct playing time using "-an" ffmpeg option.

ffmpeg -i video_out.avi  -r 16 -crf 18  -vcodec libx264 -vb 10M -vf "scale=1280:720,setpts=0.25*PTS"  -an  gp.avi


Removing horizontal scan lines from video?

If your video was shot indoors with fluorescent lamps illuminating the room, then the lines will be due to the frequency of the camera's shutter being similar to the frequency of the lights flickering on and off (usually 50Hz in UK, 60Hz in US).

It's not really possible to fix this in post production. You'd need to reshoot with different lighting or at a different shutter speed on the camera.

See link below for more info:

http://www.davidsatz.com/aboutflicker_en.html


How to stop horizontal scrolling lines caused by fluorescent light (USA and NTSC)?

These lines exist because the refresh-rate of the light is different and undividable by your framerate. One solution is to set the framerate to the Hertz of your light (which must be known for this case) or to use a light with a refresh-rate that is dividable by your framerate. If none of this is possible, you can still try to deflicker footage using deflicker gizmos for nuke, which work the best from my experience. This should always be your last option though, since the result will not look stunning.


ffmpeg trying to convert AVI to MP4 but not playing

You should specify the audio codec, e.g. -c:a libvo_aacenc.


Can you mask a parent null object in Adobe After effects?

Well, there a lot of ways to get result quicker, but each one depends on desirable result. =)

Here's one way:

Make desired null's mask
Make any mask for it's child (it doesn't matter what there)
Alt+click on child's mask path 'clock' icon (it'll open script settings)
Clear edit field or select all the contents
Drag 'link' icon (spiral) of mask path expression over Null's mask Path (it should add some kind of "thisComp.layer("Null 1").mask("Mask 1").maskPath" to expression field)
Copy this new mask to all childs

p.s.: this way is just a start, since it's not includes shifts of child and parent layers, but if pivots aligned it'll work


Generally no. Compression algorithms search for repetitive data and replace it with a shorter code and keep a dictionary with all codes. Compressing text works excellent because in longer texts a lot of words repeat.

With video this work has been done most of the time already. Usually the encoder is  performing a similar operation: looking for repeating patterns and replacing them with a shorter code. Most video files you see are already compressed, most repetitive patterns already encoded and therefore any further compression won't do much.

Sometimes re-encoding videos with a much newer encoder saves a lot of space, but this process is always a bit lossy and requires more work.

You could check if the files have any additional unwanted audio tracks and remove them, like tracks in languages you don't speak anyway.


How does HDR relate to color space and bit depth?

TV technology and video encoding is in principle outside the scope of this site.
Still, as photographers we are presumably interested in new display standards that promise both more dynamic range and wider color gamut. HDR computer monitors are coming, so it probably won't be long before photographers too will be interested in HDR displays.

HDR by itself just means High Dynamic Range. Dynamic range is the brightness ratio between the brightest and the darkest parts. "High" is relative to what the sensor can capture or to what a standard display can show.

HDR video is one of several standards for video encoding. They have names like HDR10, Dolby Vision, and Hybrid Log-Gamma. They all support higher bit depth (10-12 bits), wider color gamut (Rec. 2020 and/or DCI-P3), higher dynamic range, and 4k resolution. They are not compatible with each other, but some devices support more than one HDR standard.

"HDR TV" doesn't necessarily mean much, except that it will accept a HDR video signal and display an image. It does not necessarily mean that it can display the wider gamut and higher dynamic range, just that it can read the signals and show something, even if what it shows is plain sRGB with a mundane dynamic range.

"UHD Premium" is a certification standard for displays that can actually show HDR. Requirements include:

minimum 10 bit color
minimum 90% of the DCI-P3 color gamut
use a HDR transfer function (The transfer function for sRGB is called 'gamma', it translates bit value to brightness value. HDR uses a different function so it can cover a larger dynamic range with a small increase in the number of bits)
either: Minimum 1,000 nits brightness and max 0.05 nits black level, contrast ratio 20,000:1 or better (for LCD displays)
or: Minimum 540 nits brightness and max 0.0005 nits black level, contrast ratio 1,080,000:1 or better (for OLED displays, they can't go as bright but have better black levels)

Standard displays are 200-400 nits and rarely go beyond 1,000:1 contrast ratio. So a "Premium" HDR display has significantly higher peak brightness as well as an order of magnitude better contrast.

Brighter highlights, higher contrast ratios, and a different "bits to brightness" encoding/decoding all combine to enable the "high dynamic range" part of a HDR TV.

Color space and bit depth is only related to HDR in the sense that they are part of the same standards. Yes, you need more bits to represent a higher dynamic range without banding. But the larger color space is a different decision, it's more a matter of including enough improvements to make a new video standard worth the trouble. (4k is also part of the standard, and 4k is not related to HDR either.)

"The sun looks brighter on a HDR display" means that a) the display emits more light in the brightest parts of the scene, and b) it may look even brighter because the rest of the scene can be dimmer without losing detail.

So it's a real improvement; the wider color gamut and higher dynamic range can  contribute to more vivid photos and video.

The caveat is that TVs/monitors may be sold as "HDR compatible" without any actual HDR capability in the display. The content needs to be made specifically for HDR to make use of the new capabilities. And for computer monitors, you need a graphics card that supports HDR output.


Adobe Premiere - how do I find a clip using a removed plugin?

In premiere Pro CC 2015, you can use the find on timeline command by pressing (Cntrol+F) for windows and for mac (Command+F) the dialog box that opens up will help you find the clip.

Chose from the dropdown "effects" the chose "contains" and type "name_of_plugin".

replace the name_of_plugin with the name of the plugin you used and gave you errors. Mostly it should find it.

I tested this with an inbuilt plugin of premiere called "Calculations" within channel in video effects and it does find the clip. The only difference is that I did not delete the plugin itself while testing as its in built. You should give this method a try and hope that the metadata needed for the same will be there.

P.S.: you could also try starts with instead of contains in the second drop down for better results.

Good luck.


Advice on shooting 1st Person POV restaurant scene

A lot of it depends on your budget.  Are you a low budget film or do you have some money to work with.  Even renting can get expensive if it's a multi-day shoot.

A dolly shot or stedicam seems to be the most obvious because you don't want the up-and-down motion that comes with walking with a camera (unless you are going for the hand-held style).

A lot depends of the actor that you are trying to replicate.  Are they short, tall, hyper, depressed, drunk etc.?  Choose your lighting and lens to reflect the mood. There is no single answer for that.

As for getting the shot... if you don't have a budget then I can give you some suggestions for what has worked for us as far as getting great POV shots.

If filming the POV of a child, put your DP or cameraman into a wheelchair and have a PA push him.  If it's a medium size adult put an apple crate onto the wheelchair seat and have them sit on that.  Makes for a surprisingly smooth shot.

If you need more height, put your DP into a shopping cart.

We've even had the DP stand on a skateboard while he was carefully held and pushed when we needed a POV of a drug addict that was high.

Just keep in mind... Larger wheels like a wheelchair will give you a smoother shot than smaller wheels like a skateboard.


What's the ffmpeg command to extract PPM files from an existing video?

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 output_%04d.ppm

Output files will be named output_0001.ppm, output_0002.ppm, etc. See the image muxer documentation for more options and info.


I got less quality video when I uploaded it on Youtube

It's impossible to maintain the original quality when you upload a video to youtube since youtube reencodes all videos. For a detailed explanation of why it does that, check my answer here. To minimise quality loss, export your video with a high bitrate.


Why my objects are showing in this color?

The image from the tutorial has a white material applied to it. You can see it in the object manager, it’s the white sphere. By default, C4D uses a grey material.  To do the same, create a new material in the material manager (the empty area under the timeline) by using the "Create" menu ->New Material or ->New PBR Material, depending on your preference.  Both of those are white by default.  Then, drag the newly created material to your object, either by dragging to the object in the viewport, or in the object manager.


After Effects: Create an isometric/orthographic Camera

Use a camera with a long focal length.  The longer the focal length, the closer to isometric.  Just back the camera far enough away to frame the shot.


Use the vstack filter:

ffmpeg -i video.mp4 -i image.png -filter_complex vstack output.mp4

If the image is not the same width as the video then resize it with the scale filter:

ffmpeg -i video.mp4 -i image.png -filter_complex "[1:v]scale=320:-1[bottom];[0:v][bottom]vstack" output.mp4


AJ Henderson and Craig have excellent answers. I'd just like to add my own knowledge about making miniatures look full-size. As far as I can tell, there are 4 factors that make a miniature look, well, miniature.

1) Lighting. If the train is supposed to look like it's outside, shoot it outside or next to a window that sun is coming through. Sunlight looks way different than indoor light because of color and the fact that it's one really bright light and a bunch of "ambient" light from the rest of the bright sky.

2) "Thickness" of the air. If you look at faraway mountains or buildings or trees, they're always a little "hazy", a little less colorful, than things next to you. So if a real train is 1/2 mile away, it will also appear a little bit hazy. A model train, which is probably a foot away or less, won't be hazy at all. The artists who did special effects on movies used to up a scrim (a tranparent but hazy sheet) in between the camera and the model to add fake haziness. It looked more "real" on film.

3) Details. A real train has tiny, tiny details like bolts and screws. A model train won't have anything that tiny -- they would be nearly microscopic!! But the person watching the film / video will notice that they're missing, so the model will look more like a model.

4) "Depth of field". That's a photograph/film term that has to do with what is in focus: things that are close, things that are far away, or both. When you focus on something even 10 feet away, everything behind it is (usually) in focus. That's called having a big depth of field.  If you focus on something 1 foot away, everything behind it is (usually) out of focus. That means the depth of field is small. If you're focusing on the nearby model, and so you have a small depth of field, most people viewing the film/video will notice that and it will look like a miniature. One way around that is to have a fake background just a few feet away, behind the model, so it will still be in focus.


How old of a Mac? MPEG Streamclip is a great option.

  This free software requires at least Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) and QuickTime 6. It is also compatible with Mac OS X 10.3.x (Panther), Mac OS X 10.4.x (Tiger), Mac OS X 10.5.x (Leopard), Mac OS X 10.6.x (Snow Leopard), OS X Lion, and QuickTime 7. It works with PowerPC and Intel based Macs.

Unless you are living the the Stone Age and have a Mac running 10.1 or lower, you'll be fine.

You can batch convert files by going to List>Batch List:

You'll be presented with a screen like this:

You can add files from there and convert them.


How do I keep from losing the color when I "Convert Shapes from Vector Layer" in AfterEffects?

It could be another path within that layer in the Illustrator file. Check there first and make sure there isn't a mask of any kind.

You can also try looking in the layer within After Effects, click the Contents dropdown, and then the Group dropdown, and check for another Group under your paths. If you see another Group, change the visibility for the Group to see if your shape color returns.


Quote: "Since WebM is a Matroska subset, mkvtoolnix should let you demux the files. It's open source, cross platform, and the author provides binaries for Windows."

Source: https://superuser.com/questions/412890/lossless-extraction-of-streams-from-webm


Small profile camera for recording a lecture (from a student's seat)

Since your camera will have a fixed position and you will be filming under stable lighting conditions, you don't need a fancy camera. An iPhone will do fine, the results will be satisfactory. Since a lecture isn't really about beautiful pictures anyway, I wouldn't put to much thought into it.

However, if you want to invest some money in a fair camera, I would probably go for a Sony Camcorder, e.g. the Sony HDR-CX330. Those offer a good compromise between usability, recording quality and price.

However, what is really important is the micro. If you use the micro of the camera, the audio will completely suck, no matter which camera you chose. Make sure to get a decent micro, rather than an expansive camera!

And of course, although you are probably aware of that: You need to ask your professor for permission ;)


How can I draw my own textures for my 3D objects?

There are many ways this can be done.  Historically, the main way was to paint the area of each surface and then create a texture map in the 3d software that would take the portions of the image and project them on to the geometry.  You simply had to know the shapes of your surfaces.  (Sometimes the software could even output a template to fill in, but it depends on the 3d software you are using.)

Now, with modern versions of Photoshop, they've simplified the process a bit as long as your 3d software supports exporting and importing a compatible format.  Photoshop now actually supports loading a 3d geometry and will let you paint directly on to it.

While the specifics depend on file format and version of Photoshop, the relevant help documentation can be found here.  Basically you load the geometry in to Photoshop, go to 3D and 3D Paint Mode and then use Photoshop fairly normally to paint on to the geometry.


Title not updating after creation in premiere pro


Final Cut Pro X & Davinci Resolve workflow

What I'd do:

Duplicate the project for a backup.
"Collapse" the timeline from the bottom up:  Lasso all of the clips
immediately above the primary storyline (to make a Premiere
analogy, if the primary storyline is V1, then select all of the
clips on V2), right click, and select "overwrite to primary
storyline."
Repeat step 2 until there are no clips above the primary storyline.
File->Export XML
Import this xml file into Resolve
Color clips
Render individual source files
Replace FCPX clips with new ones

I don't have my DaVinci Dongle on me, or I'd elaborate on that side.


How to shoot a party scene with few people?

I agree with @DrMayhem, but I have a few things to add.

You only need one or two establishing shots that show the whole group.  The audience will continue believing that you're in a room full of people after you show it to them once.  For the establishing shot(s), you can shoot the same people, wearing different clothes & accessories, in front of a green screen.  Make sure the lighting and the height of the camera will match with the lighting and camera height in your party setting.  When shooting the group in front of the green screen, position them closer to the camera.  Then shoot the same people again in the actual party setting, farther from the camera.  In post-production, layer the green screen footage of the people over the actual party setting, and it will give the impression of twice as many people.  You can also do 2 "layers" of green screen footage, with the same actors 5-10 feet farther away from the camera, in front of the green screen (and wearing different clothes, hats, glasses, wigs, etc.).

For the rest of the scene, you can use medium and close-up shots.  Include people on the edges of the shot, and passing through the shot, and behind the main actors, to make the audience feel as though there's a whole party going on outside the frame they're looking at.

For the end of the scene, you may want to show the establishing shot (green-screened) again, to "bookend" the scene.

The scene's audio will help "sell" the illusion. Layer additional voices (not more than the number of party-goers!) and various party noises.

I did a cheaper version of the green screen trick in the middle of YouTube video, to make a conference room look full of people even though I only had 3 actors. The establishing shot only lasts for a second, and the action draws the viewer's eye away from the fact that the "people" in the chairs around the table are actually just still pictures I overlaid in post.  Here's the link if you want to see the vid.  The effect shot comes shortly after the 32-second mark, but it's more convincing if you start watching at 0:32 (or at the beginning).


How can I find specific PRO grade gear when CONSUMER grade dominates the search results.

I think your trouble is partly related to using the overloaded, usually inappropriate word "pro" instead of "broadcast".  Marketing departments love using the first word, but when you think about it, that word doesn't describe the type of work, nor the level of quality.

The rest of your trouble may just be unfamiliarity with this kind of hardware, which is rather esoteric and specialized.  For redundant playback with various control options, I think you're probably looking for "broadcast video playback systems", one example of which would be the Grass Valley K2 Dyno.