Why does this clip go green and how do I fix it?

This happens to me sometimes using Keylight.  I find that if I make a tiny adjustment to the settings (holding down CMD and dragging on one of the controls (eg Screen Gain or Screen Balance), it usually disappears.


Premiere Pro doesn't play AC3 audio stream from .MTS file

It sounds like there is a problem with your Dolby Decoder for the AC3 audio stream.  If you are on a trial or pirated copy then you may not have been able to activate the AC3 decoder that normally comes with Premiere. (Adobe has to pay Dolby for each copy used.)  If you are on a legit copy, something may have become corrupt with the Dolby decoder.  Try doing a deactivation of Premiere (Help...Deactivate) on your system and reactivate and see if it manages to activate the Dolby Decoder.


How can I do color grading that changes over time?

DaVinci Resolve seems to be an industry standard software for color grading that exists as a free version. Here is a tutorial on how to use keyframes to animate color grading that worked for me:


Near natural lighting with softbox wattage between 2400 to 2700?

Wattage has nothing to do with achieving natural lighting.  The amount of diffusion and placement does.  More light is ALWAYS better because it results in more signal to the camera and more options as far as ISO, aperture and shutter speed.

Nothing you setup with artificial lights (particularly on your budget) will come close to the level of the sun on even a cloudy day.  This doesn't matter though as long as you provide enough light for the camera to pick it up and spread it out through diffusers and light placement and reflectors such that you get a natural look.

I'd suggest reading some on 3 point lighting if you want more information on light placement and get the biggest diffusers you can, though on your budget, you will be hard pressed to get even a decent 3 point light kit, let alone any kind of diffusers.  (A decent large diffuser alone will run over $100.)  Your best bet is to put all the money in to the best light kit you can get and get diffusers later.  Proper three point lighting will still be fairly natural looking.


Can't Minimize Video Track Timeline Zoom Automation

The two white squares to the right of the clip name in your image - those will close the curve and keyframe viewers, respectively.


ffmpeg Cut a media preserving all streams but also all metadata, timecodes and everything else

This seems to work:

ffmpeg -ss N -i input.ts -c copy -copyts -muxdelay 0 -max_delay 0 output.ts

You can add a

-map_metadata 0

to preserve whatever metadata ffmpeg can. But this doesn't seem to carry over all the metadata.


I second using Resolve, but there are a few "hidden" color tools you can access if you have Motion, or know someone who does.

Motion allows you to publish effects for use in FCPX and can be transferred from one machine to another.

See this post from creativecow for a downloadable zip which includes
Brightness,
Channel Mixer,
Color Balance,
Colorize,
Contrast,
Gamma, and
Hue/Saturation.

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/344/14335


For time-lapse videos, what software should one use?

So I finally got time and dug around. I unearthed multiple options to do a timelapse video, but the one I found best is actually the following:

The answer is so simple, I just didn't know a time-lapse video could be created with VirtualDub.

Here is how you do it and you can install and use your very own and wanted codec: manual

You can then work on the time-lapse movie with a video editor of your choice.


Make a video look like it was taken from further away

When you shoot from further away you use a "longer" lens, in other words a lens with a longer focal length. This has a few effects, that you'll have to fake to make it look real.

First, the perspective tends to get flattened with long lenses. You've probably seen this in the classic cinema trope of a long shot of a crowd walking along a footpath, where everyone seems to be about to step on the heels of the person in front. This is because the angle of view is very shallow, so someone in the foreground is not going to be much bigger than someone in the background. Conversely a wide angle shot has exaggerated perspective. See just about any Public Enemy video where Chuck D and Flavour Flav pop their heads into the camera and get massively bigger than the people in the background, just by moving a few feet.

This perspective  compression is going to be very difficult to fake after the fact, unless you're really good at rotoscoping and compositing.

If you look at the long lens shot you'll also see that there's often a pretty shallow depth of field. This is often used by film makers, like Scorsese in this clip from Taxi Driver to highlight the central character, by racking the focus to follow them.

Now a wide angle lens and a phone lens (for different reasons) have very deep depth of field. So you'll have to selectively blur the foreground and background. However if you do this without matching the geometry of a telephoto lens (the compressed perspective discussed earlier) it's going to look like it's actually teeny-tiny, because it will look like another kind of lens with a shallow depth of field, a macro lens.

Another thing that telephoto lenses do is magnify any camera movement, where small movements are magnified by the narrow field of view. You could fake this by reframing, using a wiggle expression to drive the movement, however it might not necessarily achieve the look you want: If you're shooting telephoto you're unlikely to hand-hold the camera because it would look awful, so you'd lock it down on a tripod - see the shutterstock and Scorsese examples.

So depending on what the subject of your video is, this could be quite a challenge. Of course if your phone has a 4K sensor, you could actually make a telephoto shot out of a wide by just cropping. Of course this reduces your resolution, so it will look pretty ugly on most phones, and obviously you have to compose the shot with all the action in the center.


Changing suffix of template in after effects

The text labels are all controlled by a simple expression that takes the value of a slider, converts it to an integer and adds the letter "K" at the end. Even without programming skills you can see where the "k" part happens (but I put in some magic sparkles to give you a hint). Simply replace the letter "K" with "%" and you're golden.

I wrote a script that finds and replaces text in expressions. You can get it here. I'd suggest if you use it that you search and replace the whole line (x + "K"), as just replacing the letter k with % may ma%e other expressions stop wor%ing.
Also, I hope that the project you linked is just a dummy project. I doubt the client would be happy with you posting details of their presentation on the public internet without their approval. At the least it could get you fired.


How to edit my video with iMoviewithout losing original dimensions

iMovie does not support any aspect ratios besides 4:3 and 16:9.


How to use chroma key to replace design of complex object?

What you are thinking about is a very great way to save production costs and is used in many cases on many sets. Here is what your pipeline would look like:

Shoot the footage with green tables
Track the movement of the camera (using pfTrack preferably, but after effects can do the trick too)
Importing the tracked movement into any 3D-software such as blender
modeling the table so it fits the dimensions
moving the 3D-camera using the tracked data, so the 3d-camera matches the real camera.
rendering the sequence (preferably as an image sequence, such as .exr or .tiff)
importing the 3D-asset into the compositing-program (such as After Effects)
Keying out the green table and "replacing" it with the cgi table.

These steps are requiered only if you have a moving camera. If you don't, you can scrap points 2, 3 and 5. So if you want to save effort in the post-production, you can try to lock down your camera and put some artificial movement on your footage once it's composited.

Now, the tricky part is getting the shadows and the perspective right. Make sure to pack something like a grey-ball, or something matte and something shiny, so you can hold them in the frame to have a reference for later. You might need to fake the contact-shadows of the arms and hands when they are placed on the table. All of this is manageable from inside After-Effects though, no need to fire up heavy artillery like Nuke.


You can use MP4Box 0.6.2-DEV-rev453 (May 2016) or higher to do this:
mp4box -add alfa.mp4 -add bravo.srt:txtflags=0xC0000000 -new charlie.mp4

Example
This will mark the subtitle stream in the output file as forced.
However, this mark will only be recognized starting with these versions of
programs:

MPC-HC 1.7.10.207 (May 2016)

VLC media player 3.0.0-20161101 (Nov 2016)

I have seen mentions to this post on the FFmpeg mailing list about a
patch that implements disposition for FFmpeg:
ffmpeg -i alfa.mp4 -i bravo.srt -c copy -c:s mov_text -disposition:s forced charlie.mp4

However after having tried it with both "forced" and "default", the subtitles
marked by FFmpeg are not recognized as forced by either MPC-HC or VLC.


Put everything you are working on/with on the SSD, if it's full put it on the fastest HDD you have avilable.

You have a real beast there in terms of computing power. Your processor is quite powerful, your graphics card and RAM even more so. The thing that is most likely to become your performance bottleneck is the disk speed. And even with the best of HDDs, this will slow you down considerably, as HDDs disk speed is just not fast enough to read dozens of large video files simultaneously (for the Icon View of the Project Panel, for example). With a 500GB SSD, you have plenty of space. Windows 10 install size is about 11 GB. Premiere Pro, After Effects take up under 10GB in disk space. So even assuming you need to install some other software as well, you won't need more than 50~100GB for all that, which leaves you with 400GB~450GB for the video files. As you mentioned, put the scratch disks on it so that the preview files et c. can be loaded quickly. Then just fill your SSD with the files of your current project.

If you really need more space, put some files on the HDD and see how much it affects the loading speed. If the performance takes a big hit, you can still use proxies. And frankly, if you do have the budget for the kind of equipment you mentioned in your question, I find it reasonably to assume that you could even afford another large SSD if you really needed it.

Two quick tips regarding this: Buy the cheap SSDs, not the expensive ones, there's no noticable difference between them. And never use SSDs for permanent storage, always keep backups on external harddrives.


How can I convert a video to BPG format? BPG= Better portable graphics

It looks like BPG is at quite an early stage of development.

To use it, you would need to install an encoder, to convert your video to the BPG format.  At the moment, all of these encoders are command-line only.  You can find links to the encoders on the official site.

Note that the format doesn't include audio currently, so it may only be useful in some circumstances.

You might be better using a more conventional video format (h264, mp4, webm), but concentrating on encoding it with the most appropriate bandwidth and quality settings for your needs.


Relationship between bit depth and dynamic range?

More bits mean more possible values for each channel. So each channel in an 8 bit image has 256 possible values, from 0 to 255, while a 10 bit channel has 4 times as many: 0 to 1024.

Dynamic range however is the range between the brightest sample a sensor chip can encode and the darkest - it is a property of the sensor. So you could conceivably have an 8 bit sensor with a wider dynamic range than a 10 bit sensor if it could resolve very bright and dark images, it would just have fewer steps between these than a 10 bit sensor with the same dynamic range.


As a rough estimate, one page of a script equates to one minute of screen time. It is impossible to say exactly how long a page will last on screen because it relies on too many factors.

You shouldn't worry about trying to make each page go for exactly one minute. You'll find that some pages will go over a minute on screen and some will go under. So don't start a new page - that'd be incorrect script formatting and if you give an incorrectly formatted script to a producer you'll have no hope of getting it made.

I've found the best way to learn how to write screenplays (other than professional lessons) is to read screenplays. Here are a few websites that you can find scripts on:

Drew's Script-O-Rama

Screenplays for You

Simply Scripts

Daily Script

I haven't used Final Draft to write scripts before. I use Celtx and it's an amazing program. It's free and it formats the script for you as you go. I highly recommend it.


I think this could be to do with "color space". I've had similar issues with exporting videos from After Effects. Exporting using "REC 709" Color space usually gives me the colours I expect. You can read more about how Adobe handle different Color spaces here:

http://wwwimages.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/devnet/aftereffects/articles/color_management_workflow/ae_color_mgmt_wkflow.pdf

(PDF is offline, archived here: https://web.archive.org/web/20170830000622/http://wwwimages.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/devnet/aftereffects/articles/color_management_workflow/ae_color_mgmt_wkflow.pdf )


What are some free (or cheap) options for hosting home videos that have copyright music in them?

You can use a file storage service like:

DropBox
Google Drive
Microsoft SkyDrive
Apple iCloud

You can restrict access of your files there to a handful of persons.

For example on Google Drive, when you share a file with some people, it asks you for their email addresses. It then sends an email to all those people with a "secret" link. In theory, this link is still public. But in practice, it is next to impossible to guess the value of those links.

Personally, I use Google Drive. It offers an initial 15 Gb of space.


Why does quality degrade so much if just cutting video with ffmpeg?

Re-muxing only

Use stream copy mode to just re-mux instead of re-encode:

ffmpeg -ss 01:07:29 -i input -codec copy -map 0 -to 01:08:05 fight.avi

Using -ss as an input option can be faster than using it as an output option, but it may not be as accurate.
-codec copy will stream copy (no re-encoding). Default behavior, if -codec copy is omitted, is to re-encode, and as you've noticed the default encoding settings for most encoders are not optimal (they used to be a decade ago).
Default stream selection is to select only one stream per stream type (video, audio, subtitles, data, etc). -map 0 will ensure all streams are copied in case there are multiples of each type. That being said, your input only has two different streams, so it is actually not needed here.
Development of ffmpeg is very active, so it is important to use a recent build if possible. See the FFmpeg Download page for several options.

If you must re-encode

-crf

You can target a "visually lossless" quality level using the encoder libx264 with the -crf option. CRF is just about as close as you can get to a "constant quality" option: 0 is lossless (but usually results in huge files), ~18 is usually considered to be visually lossless or nearly so, 23 is the default, and 51 is worst.

-preset

The encoding speed to compression (quality per file size) ratio. Basically use the slowest preset you have patience for: ultrafast, superfast, veryfast, faster, fast, medium, slow, slower, veryslow.

ffmpeg -i input -codec:v libx264 -crf 23 -preset medium -ss 01:07:29 -to 01:08:05 output

Also see

FFmpeg H.264 Encoding Guide
Seeking with FFmpeg


Red bars, yellowing, and pixelated output from Premiere

This is extremely well documented in the Adobe Premiere forum.  Premiere Pro is not fully compatible with El Capitan (10.11).  The work-around is to disable the GPU by selecting "Mercury Software Render", which will remind you why so many people hated doing digital video before GPU cards existed.

The situation is a mess.  Adobe has apologized, is working on a fix, and has no idea when Premiere Pro, or an update to 10.11, or both, will result in a working system.

The other work-around is to back-out 10.11 and downgrade to Yosemite.


zoompan is a weirdly designed filter. It operates on individual frames, whereas most filters operate on a sequence of pictures, whether they are fed from a video file or an image sequence. pzoom should be used for a looped image, and frame sequence generation should be stopped by making d=1.

Change to

zoompan=z='min(pzoom+0.0015,1.5)':d=1:x='iw/2-(iw/zoom/2)':y='ih/2 (ih/zoom/2)':s=640x480

This will fix the zoompan.


How to Set the defaults for Render Queue in After Effects

I'm pretty sure it hasn't changed since CS3 (in fact It's been the same for as long as I can remember): in Edit > Templates > Render Settings >. Another way of getting to this dialogue is from the Render Settings drop-down in the render queue. At the bottom of the list of templates in the drop-down is Make Template…

Choosing that brings up the dialogue box pictured below. Up the top of the dialogue box you'll find Movie Default; set that to whatever template you want to be the default for renders. If you haven't got a template that has the settings you need then you can make one here - hit the New button, set all your settings and give it a name.  I find duplicating an existing one and modifying it a useful way to go.

Same goes for the output modules, which you get to from Edit > Templates > Output Modules, or from the Output Modules drop-down in the render queue.


What exactly is a voyeur shot in cinematography?

I've not heard of it referred to as a style.  The only thing I could imagine it would be is trying to emulate a style similar to the voyeuristic feel which would probably be made up of roughly shot and edited clips of what would normally be a private, intimate scene, but I am not familiar with a "voyeur shot" as a thing.


Aha! I found it. It's neither an audio nor a video device, but a Film Adapter Unit—a light source—for a CanoScan LiDE 700f. Misleading plug type.


Can you link an audio track to a video track in iMovie?

Nope! There's no simpler way. I'm running into the same problem right now, and it's very annoying! That's why I'm considering getting Premiere Pro or Final Cut X. It's silly to try to do any major editing in iMovie.


Can someone suggest a software for video format conversion for Mac?

Free: MPEG Streamclip

Paid: Movavi Converter


Final cut pro X takes hours to export a file with lots of images

I found in the end the easiest way was to leave the video to render everything as I hadnt done this, it took about six or seven hours to do but once done the actual sharing in h264 format only took about an hour to do, which isn't that bad.

I could change the share version to video and audio and then pick prores but the resultant file would have been nearly 40gb! I have no idea how long it'd take to spit that out, possibly shorter than the rendering and sharing time of the other filetype combined but then I'd have a file approximately 7-8 times the size and not suitable for uploading online/to youtube etc, and any resizing that I'd need to do would probably end up taking an extra chunk of time as well, in the end I'll just make sure I have my projects render overnight before I need to do stuff with them...


Encoding low bitrate video source file to a higher bitrate

Yes, the quality will be worse. But probably not perceptually. Encoding ALWAYS loses a little information, that’s why it is called lossy compression. Increasing the bitrate will only reduce the information loss. The best you can do is lossless compression, and it will look exactly like the source


How to change frame rate of MJPEG segments with/without re-encoding?

It's a warning, not an error (if it would be an error, FFmpeg would abort).

“Non-monotonous DTS” means that the DTS (Display Time Stamp) of some frame is less than the DTS of the previous frame.

This situation may cause many problems (with playback, seeking, etc.), so
FFmpeg fixes timestamps by rewriting some of them.

Here are your 3 warning messages:

[...] Non-monotonous DTS ... ; previous: 86, current: 73; changing to 87. This may ...
[...] Non-monotonous DTS ... ; previous: 87, current: 74; changing to 88. This may ...
[...] Non-monotonous DTS ... ; previous: 88, current: 75; changing to 89. This may ...

in a graphical form:


Most video editors support marks, and importantly "in" and "out" marks.  Generally, if you set your in and out marks for each of the 12-18 minute segments you want and render the sequence, what renders out is not the whole hour, but only the frames within the in and out marks.  If you do that 5 or 4 times, you'll get the segments you want.

There is essentially no way to remove white noise; you can duck it (meaning reduce the volume of the white noise) during times when there are no other interesting audio signals, but when there's a voice you want to hear, that voice is going to blend with the white noise and it will be heard.  Background noise is also very difficult to eliminate, which is why it is always best to pay attention to audio up front.


Mixing multiple streams into one, posible?

What you are looking for is a mixer, like the Black Magic ATEM. This type of gear is expensive though and usually only used by TV-studios and professional broadcasting services, so I would think twice before buying one.
An alternative is hard to come by, since you need HMDI or (preferably) SDI inputs that get mixed, which you cannot simply do on a PC or Mac.


Go Pro offers both headbands and helmet mounts for their cameras.  Once you learn how to position and aim your head-mounted camera based on what you want it to see, you then only need a mechanism to start/stop the camera.  WiFi support and an appropriate app can be helpful.


Making video content for 30' x 10' 3:1 Widescreen

Since the resulting projected image is 3240 px wide, that's the size you should create. Then output two "halves" -- the leftmost 1920 px, then the rightmost 1920 px. There will be 600 px that appear in both parts. That's the overlap.


Is there any command show file extensions supported by ffmpeg?

There's no single list which has all the extensions supported by muxers in ffmpeg. FFmpeg is modular so each muxer registers the extensions it supports. A utility function then traverses through all registered muxers and tries to match their extensions with that of the output filename specified.

At the command line, you can check the extensions registered to a particular muxer:

ffmpeg -h muxer=mpeg

whose output will have a line like the 2nd line here

Muxer mpeg [MPEG-1 Systems / MPEG program stream]:
    Common extensions: mpg,mpeg.
....

Note that extensions by themselves don't signify anything other than provide a basis to select a muxer. If you want a MPEG Program Stream to have the extension ps, then use

ffmpeg -i input.mpg -f mpeg output.ps

This -f option forces the output format.


How can I make pseudo 3D movements to static PNG in AE?

Use Puppet Tools.

⌘/ctrlp will switch to the puppet-pin tool. Click on the layer where you want to be able to drag it, say on the head, then click any other areas that you want to have control over - so, if you want the feet to stay still, put a pin on the three visible feet, and maybe the tail.

Now move the playhead down the timeline, and select one of the little yellow dots and drag it. This will deform the layer like it was stretchy. By default when you put a pin on a layer it is already animated, so if you wind the playhead back to the original point you'll see the pony moving. The other puppet tools let you adjust the stiffness of parts of the mesh, and control which parts overlap.

To get really hardcore you can rig the layer, as you would a 3D character. One of the best tools for rigging IMHO is DUIK, and not only because it's free.


Whenever you get such an error it does indeed mean the file is not supported and you cannot edit it without transcoding it to another format first using another tool.
Choose a compatible format and make sure the bitrate is set high enough to avoid noticeable compression artefacts. If possible, set the tool to copy the audio track because it probably doesn't need transcoding.


Is it possible to use 2-pass encoding to create vp9 / webm videos from an image sequence?

You would use

ffmpeg -framerate 30 -f image2 -i frames/%04d.png -pass 1 -c:v libvpx-vp9 -pix_fmt yuva420p -b:v 0 -tile-columns 2 -crf 18 -r 30 -g 300 -y -f null -

and then

ffmpeg -framerate 30 -f image2 -i frames/%04d.png -i my_audio.flac -pass 2 -c:v libvpx-vp9 -pix_fmt yuva420p -b:v 0 -tile-columns 2 -crf 18 -c:a libopus -b:a 128k -r 30 -g 300 -y my_video.webm

In FFmpeg the container format or encoding of the input is, in itself, irrelevant in terms of using encoder features like two-pass.


Writing one yourself is never a good idea. If you're willing to pay, why not hire a lawyer?

There are places on the net where you can find boilerplate, for example FilmContracts and FilmMakerIQ, but if there's real money involved your smartest move is to get local legal advice.


How to create a animated intro video in Adobe After-Effects? ( With particular animation, not in general)

There are not that many options. "In general" (Sorry) you have

Position
Rotation
Scale
Change the origin point
Opacity

So you simply combine them.

  Then some images appear with spiral type spin/rotation

Change the origin point so it is not a rotation but a spiral

  size change from small to normal

Scale

  from small size to normal size with constant rotation

Scale + rotation

  Then the those images shift to left side

Position

  the channel name appears on right of image

Opacity

  with smoke type or crackling type animation.

For this, you either create your own smoke or get a clip from an image bank.


How do i stretch an image like this in a video on sony vegas pro 13?

First off, welcome! I would like to state that in the future you should make you questions a bit more detailed.

From what I understand you either want to (1) stretch the image to remove the black bars, or to (2) scale the image.

Either can be done by dragging the clip on to the timeline and hitting the pan/crop button on the clip (it looks like a box, not the plus sign).

From there you will find a window where you can scale the clip according to the aspect ratio. If it does not conform to the 16:9 aspect ratio or the 4:3 ratio you want you can select one of those ratios from the drop down and scale the clip to remove the black bars. If you want, you can also disable the the current ratio with one of the buttons on the side of the window. From there you can adjust the image freely without an aspect ratio limitation. Bare in mind, This can cause undesired effects such as squeezing the image in either direction.


My export preview and video doesn't match the timeline in Adobe Premier Pro

Check your Sequence settings, you may set higher resolution that the most of the content is. Also your videos may to not fit well: right click - Set to Frame size.


There isn't really an alternative to x264vfw. Are you sure the error is with the codec and not your application? It's in wide use, such a major bug would definitely be found.

Also be aware that h264 doesn't work in a frame by frame basis unless you encode only intra frames.
VP80 is NOT h264, just a similar codec.

If you need to develop an app you probably want to turn to a commercial h264 implementation like MainConcepts Codec SDK: http://www.mainconcept.com/products/sdks/codec-sdk/video/h264avc.html
Should also come with a vfw codec.

Alternatively you can turn to GStreamer which offers C# bindings: http://cgit.freedesktop.org/gstreamer/gstreamer-sharp

Another option could may be ffdshow it adds quite a few codecs to VfW and I believe also x264.


Adding a sine generated audio track to a video stream with ffmepg

sine is a source filter, so the input format needs to be set as a filter using -f lavfi.

Use

ffmpeg -re -loop 1 -i smpte-color-bars-1080p.png -re -f lavfi -i sine=frequency=1000 -r 25 -vcodec libx264 -tune zerolatency -acodec aac -f mpegts udp://0.0.0.0:1234


Removing black frames with constant framerate

Retime the remaining frames.
ffmpeg -framerate 30 -i /home/pictures/%*.jpg -vf "blackframe=0,metadata=select:key=lavfi.blackframe.pblack:value=50:function=less,setpts=N/FR/TB,scale=640:-2,format=yuv420p" -c:v libx264 -crf 28 /home/out.mp4


How to quick select PNG image for masking in After Effects?

Found a solution. Maybe someone will need it.
Layer -> Auto-Trace


How to gradually colourize an object in after effects

I can't give you AE specifics, but one general method would be to have a mono layer and an otherwise identical color layer, keying the color over the mono using a matte layer that you draw on. As portions of the matte layer are turned white, or shades of white, the color layer is revealed.


Identifying source of audio drift between camcorder and recording PC

What you are experiencing is indeed clock drift between your camcorder and your PC. Whatever their quality, two independent clocks will drift eventually. If the drift ratio is small enough and your takes are short, it will not be noticeable.

Common way to solve this issue is to use a common clock on both devices, which requires a ref input on the camcorder and a ref or wordclock input on the sound recorder, as well as a master clock generator.

In your situation, I would suggest either

to edit at appropriate points to get back in sync. As your audio is shorter than video, it means finding places where you can cut a few video frames without it being noticeable. Not easy if the speaker is on frame all the time but it can be done if you use some other shots

or

find out why the audio recorded on the camcorder is not good enough
for your use. Camcorders audio inputs can be tricky and require an
appropriate adaptation of the audio signal in order to get best
results.


Is there some sort of macro facility for inserting repeated actions?

You want to transition from 2 video feeds in one video to full screen video and back?
(Took me a while, I thought you were talking about the viewers on your monitor while editing multicam)

You can do it one time and cmd+C it. Then where you want to use it again do Shift+Cmd+V and choose which effects (in this case transform) you would like to paste. Works for other effects too.

You can also use a generator that does it, if you can find one or modify or create one in Motion 5 for a more permanent solution. But you'd need to learn how to do that first.

I know it can be tedious work. With Keyframes, I start with the end and work myself backwards. So when you start out with 2 feeds side by side, keyframe them at the begin situation, go to the frame where you want it all to be one video, that's the end situation. There you adjust it to what it should look like.
Play it through and if not perfect yet, walk backwards with a few frames at a time (arrow key) to adjust what you need to.

If the transformations and crops are the same for multiple cuts, you can also screenshot the inspector values for them and just type those in for the next cut.. so you don't need to do it by eyes anymore.

Hope it helps.. good luck!


There are many different ways to accomplish this. You will have to pick an animation software like Adobe After Effects. There are many different 2D animation programs, all of which do certain things better and other things worse than the alternatives. Which you pick depends on your preferences and what you want to accomplish in detail. I would recommend After Effects, since it is very multilateral, however you should take a look at this list to get an overview and decide by yourself.

Another option is to start with 3D animation software, in this case you could start with Blender (freeware and relatively easy to learn), Cinema 4D (expensive and powerful) or Maya (free for students and used for professional works), or chose a program from this list.

I have to warn you though: 2D and 3D animation is very difficult. It will most likely take some time and effort for you to be able to create videos like the one you linked.


Is there a NLE that supports Variable frame rate?

You could render the scenes to single files and combine them in ffmpeg to one .mp4 container.
Allthough Indont know why you would want that.


Sorry this is a bit late but I just found your question while doing research on this topic.

If you have access to After Effects, I've developed a script that can import .srt subtitle files (I think you can export .srt from Aegisub). You can download a trial at http://aescripts.com/pt_importsubtitles/

It preserves the timings but not the font or position, although these are easy enough to set in AE. Once imported you can drag the composition straight into Premiere Pro using Dynamic Link for compositing onto your movie.

I've also developed a script that can import .ass files into AE. It's primarily meant for subtitles with karaoke timings, but it should be able to import plain subtitles too.
http://aescripts.com/pt_ssakaraokeanimator/


Cinema 4D may have lost the texture file in the crash.  Check whatever the equivalent of the hypershade is in Cinema to make sure the object is still textured.  Also be sure to check the lights and whether you have hardware texturing enabled.


Align multiple videos with the same static background

20 videos is not very many videos, and if the nudge happened between takes rather than during takes, the best approach is to align them manually, either by using the difference mode of a compositor or setting the opacity of each video to 50% and nudging them until all the backgrounds line up.

If you had 20,000 videos, I would suggest starting with Hugin, a tool for processing HDR and panoramic photos.  The HDR problem concerns aligning multiple images so that a tone-mapping can be applied.  The alignment heuristics for HDR would also align your videos (especially if you only compute the alignment parameters for the portion of your videos that are reliably background).  You could play around with parsing the output of the Hugin control point finder.


Try "Intervalometer" it works as an overlay app over your stock camera app. You can also try to do your own script with app like "Tasker".
BTW: Old version of Camera FV-5 worked too. Unfortunately they implemented a new UI, which doesn't work so well.


-preset

Use the slowest preset that is fast enough that it does not drop frames. You can see if ffmpeg is dropping frames in the console output (if I recall correctly). Presets are: ultrafast, superfast, veryfast, faster, fast, medium, slow, slower, veryslow.

-crf

Use the highest -crf value that still provides an acceptable quality level. Range is 0-51. 0 is lossless, 18 is generally considered to be visually lossless or nearly so, 23 is default, and 51 is worst quality. Using a value of 1 will likely result in a huge file.

Also see:

FFmpeg H.264 Video Encoding Guide


A direct option to resume encoding is not available.

And as for manually restarting encoding, that's also not possible. Two reasons:

1) when transcoding to a typical container like MP4, the index is written after encoding is completed. There will be no such index in a partial file if the process died unexpectedly, and so the existing file cannot be parsed.

2) If you cannot accurately identify the last uncorrupted frame encoded in the partial file, your join will not be seamless.

That said, there is a tedious way this can be done. The method hinges on using the segment muxer. You encode to MPEG-TS format but segment the output as it is being generated. Should the job fail, you examine a few attributes and resume encoding based on that data. Finally, you join all segments together.

Step 1: Encode and segment

For best results, audio and video should be done separately. In fact the audio can be done without segmenting since it will encode much faster

ffmpeg -i in.mp4 -c:a aac -vn job-audio.mp4

And for video

ffmpeg -copyts -start_at_zero -ss 0 -i in.mp4 -c:v libx264 -an
       -f segment -segment_time 0.01 -segment_time_delta 1
       -muxpreload 0 -muxdelay 0 -mpegts_copyts 1
       -segment_start_number 0 -segment_list files.ffcat
job-video%d.ts

Each segment above will contain one GOP, so no frames in a segment rely on frames in other segments for playback.

Step 2 Identify resume point

Suppose the job fails while creating segment #5.

First, you run

ffprobe "in.mp4" -show_entries stream=codec_type,start_time,duration -of compact

This will produce a readout like this

stream|codec_type=audio|start_time=0.000000|duration=356.309333
stream|codec_type=video|start_time=0.040000|duration=356.360000

Note the start time for the video stream.

Now, run it for the first and the last (incomplete) segment

ffprobe "job-video0.ts" -show_entries stream=codec_type,start_time,duration -of compact

stream|codec_type=video|start_time=0.080000|duration=10.000000

You see that there's a positive offset of 0.04 w.r.t the MP4 video stream. Let's call this the initial offset value

Now, for the last stream

ffprobe "job-video5.ts" -show_entries stream=codec_type,start_time,duration -of compact

stream|codec_type=video|start_time=20.080000|duration=4.320000

Step 3 Resume encoding

So, now you run

ffmpeg -copyts -start_at_zero -ss {start_time of last segment - initial offset} -i in.mp4 -c:v libx264 -an
       -f segment -segment_time 0.01 -segment_time_delta 1
       -muxpreload 0 -muxdelay 0 -mpegts_copyts 1 -initial_offset {initial offset}
       -segment_start_number {index number of last segment} -segment_list files-resume.ffcat
job-video%d.ts

Step 4 Join segments

You'll have multiple .ffcat files - from the first run and all resumed runs. Copy over the entries from all secondary runs and append them to the first file. Avoid duplication.

Run

ffmpeg -f concat -i files.ffcat -i job-audio.mp4 -c copy full.mp4


Is 0.0036% time inaccuracy on a consumer-grade camcorder expected?

IME, 0.0036% is rather better than average. Consumer gear operates on quite inexpensive crystal oscillators. These oscillators or crystals are not tuned precisely (or they would cost too much), and they don't have extraordinary stability over temperature ranges.

Professional gear uses special techniques to keep audio and video gear in synchronization.  They use premium-quality sync generators with oscillators that cost more than your whole camera. And even then, they must be re-synchronized several times per day.

And traditional broadcast gear would have a master sync generator, and all the cameras, switcher, etc. would "slave" to that central reference so that everything would be in lock-step.

It sounds like your gear is operating properly. Nothing is "broken". That is simply normal and expected performance.

If you need to sync video to your reference audio track, it is MUCH better to "stretch" or "shrink" the video to fit the audio than vice-versa. Slightly changing the length of the video track with simply insert (or remove) an extra frame every few minutes, which almost nobody will notice.  But slightly changing the length of an audio track is likely to create quite noticable and annoying artifacts.

It is simple enough to try it for yourself. Try slightly changing the length of a long video clip and watch the results.  And then try the same with an audio track. You may be lucky that you can get away with it. Only you can try the experiment with YOUR content and YOUR editing system, and YOUR expectations.


How to get a clip with the same aspect ratio and without losing quality

Check you pixel aspect ratio.  Its in the video settings in premiere.  My guess is its not matching the original file. Play around with the different settings.  Usually square pixels do it for me.

Adobe Premiere Pro CC aspect ratio streched


Error FFMPEG when convert video to MP4 with baseline presset

This looks to me like an actual issue with the scripts in the preset vs your build of FFMpeg.  It appears that the syntax of options being passed to the encoder are incorrect (particularly something related to "wpred" and a missing parens) and since they are not specified in your command line, I can only assume it is the preset that is the problem.  I would suggest trying either a different version, a different build or a different source for your copy of FFMPEG and see if you have better luck.


Is it still meaningful to have 29.97fps under ATSC standard?

The non-integer HD frame rates (interlaced 59.94 and progressive 29.97) exist to facilitate easy downconversion to Standard Definition (SD) that must operate at 29.97. There is no technical reason that the non-integer frame rates must be used in ATSC or other SMPTE 292 systems, just the compatibility reason.


ffmpeg: explicitly tag h.264 as bt.601, rather than leaving unspecified?

PAL and NTSC have different color primaries, so

NTSC = SMPTE 170M = BT 601 525

PAL = BT 470 BG = BT 601 625

See the rows for value 5 & 6 on the table on page 387 of the active H.264 standard.

So the right args for ffmpeg are:

NTSC:

# NTSC
ffmpeg -i input  \
 -colorspace smpte170m -color_primaries smpte170m -color_trc smpte170m

mediainfo:
Color primaries                          : BT.601 NTSC
Transfer characteristics                 : BT.601
Matrix coefficients                      : BT.601

PAL:

-color_trc doesn't accept bt470bg, but ffmpeg -h full shows that gamma28 means "BT.470 BG" for that option.

# PAL
ffmpeg -i input  \
 -colorspace bt470bg -color_primaries bt470bg -color_trc gamma28

mediainfo:
Color primaries                          : BT.601 PAL
Transfer characteristics                 : BT.470 System B, BT.470 System G
Matrix coefficients                      : BT.601

-colorspace is the most important option; the others don't make a visible difference for software players like mpv on Linux.


ffmpeg encoded videos are not playing on mobile browser

Unfortunately due to patent/licensing issues1, MP4 playback is not supported natively in all browsers. That's where file format redundancy comes into play; if one file format is not able to be natively loaded by a system a backup version may be able to work.

I have found that certain browsers will be able to run files encoded with the .webm container using VP8 plus Vorbis for audio and video, respectively, out of the box while using HTML5 players.2

Citations

1 https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Supported_media_formats#Browser_compatibility

2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video#Multiple_sources


What do I need to learn in order to repair an ogv or ogg video that is defective? Where to start?

It appears you do not have the necessary codec to play the video in mplayer. You will need to find a codec that can decode it. I can't tell from the posted information what codec it is.


I think you have answered your own question, but let me try to answer it from the perspective of a programmer (not one who wrote After Effects, but one who has written a lot of programs and seen a lot of source code).

After Effects (or any other compositing program) operates on layers.  Layers can be combined, masked, or used as inputs to transformations or operations.

The layer that contains your icon doesn't know about any processes or effects that come after it.  If you apply a particle emitter to that layer, particles will be emitted regardless of whatever masks come later.  Some particles may be masked by later layers/operations, but none of that affects what particles may be emitted due to the shape/color of your icon.

When you compose your icon with a mask, and then apply the emitter to that result, then of course the emitter is starting with the masked pattern.

Which is correct?  It depends what you want.  If you want to show lots of particles being obscured by a mask, the first is what you want.  If you want to show an alternative shape emitting particles, the second is what you want.


Playing back 1080p and 720p videos (same bitrate) on a 720p display

When you ask how something will 'look' you're in the realm of the subjective. Things 'look' different to experienced professionals than they might to the average viewer.

But still, the 1080p video will not be as good no matter what you view it on. When you encode at a low bit rate you aren't removing pixels, you're mostly removing high frequencies. Doing either will reduce the amount of information, but in different ways and with different visible effects and artifacts.

The information you lose with very lossy encoding doesn't lie in the spaces that inevitably are discarded when you downscale. You'd lose in both domains. But how that 'looks' depends to some degree on who's looking.


Has a realistic looking film ever been produced entirely virtually?

Well if you take a look at the mandalorian, almost every background is computer-generated. Sure, the actors are real, but almost nothing else. If you're looking for entire cgi-sequences, you can take a look at the marvel movies. Many of the fight-scenes are completely CG.
Asking what's important for photorealism is a hefty question. There's a bunch like:

Accurately ray-traced shadows
Accurate reflections
Accurate roughness on reflective surfaces
Sub-surface scattering (like light shining through a hand)
Accurate motion-blur, focus rack and rolling or global shutter, depending on which camera you're imitating.
Accurate physic simulations
Accurate fluid simulations
Accurate wrinkles and stress-maps for skin, cloth and other flexible solids
Proper animation of people and animals, preferrably motion-tracked
etc. etc.

I could go on for pages, but the point is that simulating all the jazz of the real world is very expensive and hard labor. That's why most films rely on CGI only when filming it for real would either be too expensive or too dangerous. No person in their right mind would try to make a whole film CGI with the goal of the viewers not noticing, when they could save around 75% of the budget by just filming it in real-life and getting a similar (often better) result.


Files stored in the MPG format are video files embedded with MPEG
  video data compression specifications and data encoding algorithms,
  and these MPG video files are appended with the .mpg extension.
  Specifically, MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 formatting standards are usually
  incorporated into MPG files, which are digital video data compression
  specifications and algorithms developed by the Moving Picture Experts
  Group. These MPG files are normally distributed on the Internet as
  video downloads, streamed videos and digital video content materials
  that are embedded unto Web pages. Windows Media Player is integrated
  with compatibility support and playback functionality for these MPG
  files, which means this media player can be used to open and view the
  video content of files stored in the .mpg format. Apple QuickTime
  Player is a cross platform digital multimedia player that is also
  embedded with compatibility support and playback functionality for
  these MPG files, which means Windows and Mac users can deploy this
  software to open and view the video content stored in files appended
  with the .mpg extension.

you should read this, it might help.

https://www.reviversoft.com/file-extensions/mpg


How to drastically reduce size of very simple video?

(This may not be considered a complete answer, no matter the Rigid policies. This may be better as a comment.)

You can try using:

H.265 video codec (very efficient — 100-second video of 1080p @60fps was just 6-7 MB even with audio, when recorded with Bandicam screen recorder, which is free).
Mono audio channel
Use a lower bit depth and bit rate for audio as well as color/video.
Take a look at how Khan Academy compresses their vids ohh, sorry, they drop the resolution
Explore the free software HandBrake. It offers variable frame rate compressions.


With a recent version of ffmpeg (requires the subtitles to be in a separate file, due to current libavfilter limitations):

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -filter:v subtitles=subtitle.srt -c:a copy -c:v libx264 -crf 22 -preset veryfast output.mp4

If your SRT subtitles are muxed into an MKV container, you can extract them like this:

ffmpeg -i input.mkv -map 0:s:0 subtitles.srt


Whiteboard animation: how to zoom and draw a motion?

Erase and redraw

If you play the first video frame by frame (by pausing the video and pressing the left or right key) you see that moving objects are erased and redrawn again and again. The line properties (thickness, straightness) change a little bit between frames, hinting that the line is redrawn each time (best seen at 0:45).

Camera motion

About the 2nd video you're correct that manually moving your camera will be not so smooth. If you have a jib you could achieve much smoother motion.
However, I don't think they used that in this video. The biggest output size is 720p meaning that the frame has a size of 1280x720 pixels. If you have a camera that can film 1920x1080 pixels you have quite some room left in which you can crop and move the frame.


How to zoom .psd with vector graphics in AE without losing quality?

Using Photoshop to create vector graphics is a bad idea, as it is just not built for that. Even if you don't use the more sophisticated features of Illustrator, the basic tools such as the pen work somewhat similar to the vector tools in Photoshop. So next time you want to create vector graphics, just work with Illustrator from the start.

For your existing vector graphics, as long as they are truly vector-based in the .psd-files, there should be several ways to export them to a vector format or copy them over to Illustrator (this doesn't directly answer your question, but it's a better approach than trying to make the .psd files work with vector graphics within After Effects anyway). Here are two options for you to try:

Export as svg [requires Photoshop CC]. In Photoshop, use File → Export → Export as.... Select SVG from the dropdown menu. SVG is an XML-based vector format. You should be able to import those into After Effects directly. Or you can open the exported SVG file in Illustrator and export it to another format.
Open your .psd file in Illustrator. Chose 'convert layers to objects' in the Photoshop import options. As long as your .psd contains only vector objects, this will work as intented. Once you have imported your vector graphic to Illustrator, save it as an .ai file. You should be able to import that into After Effects to work as intended. If that doesn't work for some reason, try saving it as an .eps file instead (File → Save a copy... → Select Illustrator EPS from the dropdown menu in the file saving options).


Collapse Transformation not working in Adobe After Effects CC

I get the feeling you think collapse transformation means something that it doesn't.

What Collapse Transforms does is to leave all the transformation properties in the subcomp intact and available to the comp that it's nested in. It's basically like you've got all the layers still in the outside comp, just grouped into one layer for ease of organisation.

Without collapse transforms on the subcomp is pre-rendered and treated like a single piece of footage. So, for example if any of the layers of the sub-comp extend off the edge of the sub-comp's boundaries they won't be cropped with collapse transforms on.

Here are two subcomps, both contain text that extends past their outside edges:

And here they are in the outer comp. Top one is collapsed, bottom aint.

If you scale down a raster layer in the subcomp and then scale it up to its original size in the outer comp, without collapse transforms on it will be pixelated, because it gets pre-rendered to the resolution of the subcomp, and then scaled up in the outer comp.

Here they are scaled down in the subcomp:

And here's the outer comp with both layers scaled back up:

Another effect of collapsing transforms is that you lose the ability to change the transfer mode of the subcomp in the outer comp. The layers in a collapsed transform-ed subcomp apply whatever transfer mode they have inside the subcomp, again, like they were actually in the outer comp, just grouped together.

What Collapse transforms doesn't do is automatically crop the subcomp to fit its components. Is that what you were expecting?


Different angles are used for many reasons. Wide and/or long shots are used to establish the setting where the video is being shot.  Medium shots are used to show the relationship between people and/or objects.  Close-ups are used to see the expression on people's faces, or details like hand movements or manual operations (using a wrench or a food processor, etc.)

In interview situations, it is a cliche that you need a medium close-up on the subject. And if the interviewer is on-camera, then a similar shot of the interviewer is used so that you can see one or the other more or less full-face without the camera whipping back and forth and giving many viewers motion sickness.

Sometimes we will use the camera shot of the subject while the interviewer is speaking just to see the subject's reaction to the question or statement, etc. Or, conversely, a shot of the interviewer while the subject is speaking. This is called a "reaction shot".  And similar to occasional shots of the audience to give the viewer more of a sense of being there with the live audience.  And to see their reaction. Especially applause, laughter, surprise, etc.


I'm not sure what the valueAtTime function is trying to achieve. That takes the value of the property at the given time. In the script you wrote it would sample the value of the opacity at a point a random number of seconds in the past, some time between the current time and maxOffset seconds ago. Unless the opacity changes during that time it won't do anything at all.

Expressions are Javascript, so you can use all the Javascript language elements, including if and else. Thus:

maxOffset = 20;
minOffset = 1;
seedRandom(index,timeless=true);
if (time>random(minOffset, maxOffset)){0}else{value}

This will turn off the layer at some time between 1 and 20 seconds for each layer. If the opacity channel is already animated it will use the animated value up until the time it turns off. To change this so that it is 100% on until it turns off, substitute {100} for {value} in the last line


See layers beneath the solid I'm editing in After Effects

Don't apply the brush tool to the solid - apply it to your photo instead.  There is an option in the tool to choose whether to apply the brush over the image, or to reveal the image.  When you're drawing your brush strokes, set it to apply over the image.  When you're ready to animate the strokes, set it to reveal the image.


ffmpeg Color Correction: Gamma, Brightness and Saturation

These settings helped me to lighten up a dark video using the filter eq, with some added saturation.
Syntax:

filtername=option1=value1:option2=value2:option3=value3... These can be in any order.

Filter ranges and all options:
https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-filters.html#eq
Preview:
ffplay -vf eq=brightness=0.06:saturation=2 INPUT.MOV
Render:
ffmpeg -i INPUT.MOV -vf eq=brightness=0.06:saturation=2 -c:a copy OUTPUT.MOV

Alternative filters: curves and pp.


What are the best codecs and encoding options for a image sequence video?

I occasionally make a video from slide images. I find I get the best quality and compression by putting the images in the timeline in your preferred video editor (I use Vegas Pro 13), saving as a motion jpeg*, then use ffmpeg to convert that to H264. I use -crf 28, which is probably called "constant quality" in Handbrake. At 1024x768 resolution I easily get bitrates under 100 kbps and they look great. You can increase the crf value to get more compression or decrease it to get better quality, so you can fine tune to your tastes.

With this method above, I would bet H264 and VP8 are comparable. VP9 will probably be better, but it doesn't work on everything and takes a lot longer to encode.

My theory why this works:

Motion jpeg is intra-frame compression only. Each individual frame is compressed as an image, then added to the stream; there is no inter-frame compression (compression between frames). It doesn't have I-frames or any of that complicated stuff. So for a full second in your video all the frames are identical, not just "look the same". They are technically identical.

H264 then has a lot of power to compress the motion jpeg. It sees a string of identical frames then does the equivalent of saving the first frame completely then uses nearly dataless "reference frames" for the rest.

*Motion jpeg will be a relatively big file. Coincidentally, when I record a slides presentation, I initially encode as motion jpeg because most of the presentation will be static slides.


Assume you have an audio file, which is named as "audio.mp3";
you have images file pattern as "Picture01.jpg", "Picture02.jpg", ... "Picture30.jpg"; and you want 4.5s image duration. Then the command is
ffmpeg -y -loop 1 -framerate 1/4.5 -i Picture%2d.jpg -i audio.mp3 -shortest -acodec copy -vcodec mjpeg result.mp4

Good luck!


Resolution for webcam for recording lectures when writing on paper?

For online delivery and viewing on laptops/tablets, 720P should be sufficient for capturing the entire sheet in a legible way, but resolution isn't the only factor to consider...

A 1080P camera would capture higher-resolution images, but a 1-hr lecture at that size would probably result in a file size around 1GB. Assuming the intended delivery is online, the resolution/quality should probably be reduced anyway for ease of viewing/upload/download - the benefits of a better camera would likely be lost.

I'd also suggest that proper lighting & contrast are greater concerns than camera resolution.

A webcam may have issues if the room is too dark, or if the paper is too brightly illuminated (or not illuminated enough). Similarly, a black marker would be much more legible than, say, a ballpoint pen, but you can't fit as much writing on the page.

Exposure/contrast would also vary depending on if you only intend to include the white paper/writing in the frame, or yourself lecturing as well. This would be the 1 area where  resolution might matter - how much of the screen is actual writing?

I'd recommend buying the (presumably cheaper) 720p one at a store with a 30-day return policy & do some test lessons in the actual environment. Play with lighting, camera position, etc. If students are happy viewing them, you're all set. If not, try 1080p :)


After Effects: Make beam effect go over end/beginning

You can't do it with the beam effect as it stands. But…
A workaround would be to move your start and end points further out along the line that they define. A bit of maths and an expression will do that for you. Don't worry, skip to the tl;dr section at the bottom if you are allergic to maths (Though if you do, note that that look on my face is pity, not scorn, really it is).
The maths
Two points can be thought about as defining a vector, i.e. a line with direction and magnitude. The cool thing is that you can multiply vectors by scalars (normal numbers with just a magnitude) very easily. So what you need to do is to take the vector defined by the two points, then multiply by magnitudes smaller than 0% or greater than 100% to extend the vector off to infinity and beyond.
To get the vector without the initial offset, simply subtract one point from the other. This leaves us with a single value that contains the magnitude and direction of the end point, as seen from the start point. This is basically our line. Any points on that line can be found by multiplying this vector.
Since this vector is from the starting point, once we've multiplied it we need to add back the position of the starting point, so that we're using the comp co-ordinates. So any point along the line is expressed as starting point + distance along the line * (end point - starting point)
Just to show this works, consider when the length along the line is zero. The point will be starting point + 0 * (end point - starting point) = starting point, and when the lenght along the line is 100% its co-ordinates will be starting point + 100/100 * (end point - starting point) = end point. Now any percentages smaller than 0 or greater than 100% will extend the line further.
the setup
to control this effect we need a slider that can go below 0 and above 100 for the start and the end point of the beam. Since the beam length slider won't let us do that, use an expression control slider to do the job. So apply the Effects>Expression Controls>Slider effect, and for the sake of your own sanity rename the effect to length. So that the beam will be initially visible as we set up the expression, set the slider to 100% or thereabouts.
Obviously you'll also need the Beam effect applied. Set up the position of the Starting Point and Ending point now, once we apply the expression you can still edit them using the value controls, but you have to turn the expression off to edit them visually in the comp window. Since we're using the expression to fake the length, set the Length property to 100%.

the expression
So this is where the maths rubber hits the javascript road. First we'll do the expression for the start point. alt-click the beam Starting Point stopwatch to set an expression for that property.
Start by creating variables linked to the original values (use the pick whip near the expressions editor to pick the Starting Point and Ending Point property to get the correct syntax. Your line should look like this (don't forget the ; at the end of every line. Expressions will sometimes work without them, but other times you'll get hard to trace errors):
var startPt = effect("Beam")("Starting Point");
var endPt = effect("Beam")("Ending Point");

We also need a variable linked to the length slider effect we made earlier.
var percentage = 1 - effect("length")("Slider") / 100;

We divide it by 100 because it's a percentage. You could omit this and just use a slider value of 1 to mean 100%, this just makes it a bit easier to use.
We subtract the percentage from 1 because we're applying it to the start point. When the length is 100% the starting point will be at 0 on the vector (and the end point will be at 1).
Note that the "length" bit relates to whatever you named it. If you were lazy it will just say effect("Slider Control")("Slider").

So we've got the beginning, end and percentage all defined. Now like we said, we subtract the beginning from the end, multiply that by the percentage and add it back to the beginning. In Javascript this looks like:
percentage * (endPt - startPt) + startPt

Wow, that was easy. Because you can add vectors to other vectors, and you can multiply vectors by scalars we never need to expand the components out into their individual dimensions (took me years to discover that, I'm embarrassed to say). Note that since it's the last line, where we return the value we don't need an = or var or anything—expressions just use the last line that evaluates as the value for the property.
Now for the end point we repeat the process, but we don't subtract the slider control from 1. So the line above looks like
var percentage = effect("length")("Slider") / 100;

I'll let you work out the rest of code for that yourself.
Oh, ok, stop sobbing, here's the expression for both, for your copy-pasting pleasure:
tl;dr
Starting Point property
var startPt = effect("Beam")("Starting Point");
var endPt = effect("Beam")("Ending Point");
var percentage = 1 - effect("length")("Slider") / 100;
percentage * (endPt - startPt) + startPt

Ending Point property
var startPt = effect("Beam")("Starting Point");
var endPt = effect("Beam")("Ending Point");
var percentage = effect("length")("Slider") / 100;
percentage * (endPt - startPt) + startPt

Now using the slider control you can set your length to whatever you like, and the beam will extend along the line described by the original points.


Yes, youtube re-encode videos. You can see more information here, and find, which codecs most fits for youtube upload (in case you will make new ones).

As a example of degradation, here is video, which was re-uploaded to youtube 1000 times in 2010 year:

And with different content you will see more degradation. You can see it here  at 2:33::

About "When": Re-encoding happens right after uploading in the save progress-bar will be written "Processing"


Video noise and harsh shadows on green screen caused by feet

To reduce or eliminate the greenish reflection on the front of the table, you can buy some dark gray or black construction paper, or something equally non-reflective, cut it to size, and tape it over the 2 dark rectangles on the front of the table.

I have 3 different solutions for the foot-shadows on the floor.

You could point a semi-dim spotlight directly on that section of the green screen. Make sure to mask it so it doesn't hit the dark rectangles on the front of the table too much.
If the camera is always stationary, you could lower the camera slightly so the talent's feet never extend past the dark rectangle on the front of the table and into the green (as the tip of her left shoe does in the pictures you included). Then you can mask out that part of the shot instead of relying on the Keylight effect.
You could just move the camera about a foot closer to the talent so you crop out the bottom of the table (and the green in front of it). You can also do this by cropping the shot during post production.

(Or, obviously, just get shorter talent.)


Keyboard shortcut for "Add clip to conversion list" in GoPro Studio?

If you google GoPro Keyboard Cover there is a skin with all the shortcuts on it - from GoCam Accessories I think it's called.

Edit: Just realised I could paste a link:

http://www.gocamaccessories.com/shop/gopro-studio-keyboard-cover-for-macs/


What do you call it when the footage has a rippling effect?

They call this the rolling shutter effect.

Also known as the jello or wobble effect and is caused by the side to side motion of cameras that have the CMOS sensor.

The rolling shutter effect can be caused by:
fast moving objects,
moving or panning the camera quickly, or
camera vibrations.

Why does this happen?
The CMOS sensor on the camera reads information a line at a time, from top to bottom. Thus different parts of the image is recorded at DIFFERENT times, thus creating the wobble effect.

Cameras with the CCD sensor do NOT have this problem. This sensor records the whole image at once. Thus avoiding the rolling shutter effect.

There are pros and cons for using different image sensors, however it looks like we are moving to a CMOS world.
This site below explains the differences between the sensors very nicely if you are curious.

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/find/newsLetter/Comparing-Image-Sensors.jsp

Hope that helps


stick an layer positon on another left up corner of a square layer in After Effects

The position of any point on a layer in terms of its location in the composition frame is given by the layer space transform function toComp(). Since the top left of a layer is the origin in After Effects, from the point of view of the solid its top left is going to be [0, 0]. So we find the position of the point [0, 0] on the layer in terms of the comp thus:

thisComp.layer('<name of the solid>').toComp([0,0])

Apply that to the position property of the layer you want to stick to the solid.


Remove (or reduce) background music, and emphasise the background voice

You already tried EQ unsuccessfully, but there is one more technique worth trying:
Add the original music again to the soundtrack, but with inverted samples. This will cancel out signals. For a bit more theory, check out Wikipedia and the graphics on the top right which illustrates what will happen. The success depends on the mix and applied effects in the video soundtrack.
The basic steps are as follows:

Import soundtrack and import the original music on a separate track (probably that are pairs of stereo tracks)
Sync/align the music track so it matches exactly the music soundstrack. Be aware that the music in the video could have been slowed down or sped up a little bit. Apply the change speed effect on the imported music in this case to make it match.
Try to match the levels of the music track to the music of the video track for best results. Not sure if this can be done automatically in Audacity. Look for a short section on the video track where nobody's talking and compare levels there.
Invert the audio. More on Audacity's invert here.
Mix the track with inverted music to the video soundtrack. (Since both will probably stereo you can try multiple combinations, either add the inverted left to soundtrack left and inverted right to soundtrack right. Or switch them.) I don't know Audacity well enough to tell you how the mixing works. I only ever used it sporadically many years ago.
Music will cancel out or be removed to some degree.

The problem is: if they have applied any effects on the music in the video soundtrack the cancellation may not work well.


How to move an (overlayed) image across a video in ffmpeg?

An image is treated by ffmpeg as video stream with one frame. For a crop animation to be effected, you need a stream of frames.
Add loop before the image input: -loop 1 -i $TST. Normally, you would be advised to limit the duration by also adding -t, but since you limit duration on the output, it is not necessary here.


Dark interview setup, what should the subject wear?

Here is a great tutorial about lighting ratios: http://wanderingdp.com/cinematography/cinematography-school-lighting-ratios-101/

Tl;DR?  Whatever skin tone your subject has, and whatever tattoos you might want to highlight, you need to know the key value and dynamic range of your subject, independent of the shirt.  Once you have established those, you can decide where in the range you want to place the shirt, and whether you want to add color (and all that color may symbolize) into the mix.

A white shirt might be so bright that when you adequately light your subject, the white shirt uses up too much of your available dynamic range.  Also the extreme contrast between the white shirt and the black background may compete against your subject for attention (since the vision system is always looking for contrast).  The reference shot you provide is a great example of a splash of white that balances with the white highlights of the forehead without trumping it.  A CU that just barely includes a white collar may do the same thing, but an MCU might show too much white.

But do look at the lighting tutorial to see how one properly gets the right key value and dynamic range for the face, and then you'll see how to fit the shirt into that range.


The displacement map effect relies on another layer as a source for the map. Since Premiere doesn't have unique layers like AE does it doesn't support this plugin. If you have After Effects then replace the shot with an after effects comp (right-click then choose Replace With After Effects Composition) and apply the effect in AE.


Are adapters that allowing lens change on cheap camcorders worth it?

Such devices do exist a reasonable amount of the time, but they rarely produce much in the way of quality.  There are exceptions, but they are fairly rare.  They do have their uses, but be aware that the results are most often marginal.  Your best bet to find them is generally looking around the various smaller NY/NJ photo/video shops that carry a variety of knock off products from around the world.

Make sure you are aware of what you are getting yourself in to with them.


ffmpeg quadruple video and audio play speed

The audio filters should be chained one after the another. Your syntax generates two audio tracks, each doubled in speed. Also, since you're dealing with one input and one output, you can just use simple filters.

ffmpeg -i 02.mp4 -vf "setpts=0.25*PTS" -af "atempo=2.0,atempo=2.0" 02ff.mp4


How do I resize the canvas of a image layer in After Effects?

Add an adjustment layer on top (right-click in empty area of the layer names. Go to New menu) Apply the effect to that.


How do I make an area in a video darker?

If I may, I would recommend using Davinci Resolve for this. It's free and does what you want way better than premiere. Since your question was raised for premiere though, let me propose two different solutions for this.

Use a Luma-Matte for an adjustment layer. To to this:

Duplicate your footage
Apply curves on the footage to maximise the contrast. (the wall should be completely white, your talent should be completely black.
Apply a curves effect on the adjustment layer and place it below your duplicated, contrasted footage and above your original footage-layer.
For the adjustment-layer, under "track mattes" select the luma matte from your contrasted footage-layer.
Now dial down the curve on the adjustment layer and see that it only affects the wall.

Use a Roto. If the Luma-Matte isn't working well because you can't really separate the talent from the background, this would be your last resort.

Draw a mask around your talent's face on the footage-layer and do that for every 2nd to 3rd frame, so that the mask moves with the face.
Apply curves to your footage-layer.
Press "e" to bring up the effects on your footage-layer and open up the curves.
Under "Compositing Options" click the small "+" and select the mask you just drew.
Make sure the mask is set to subtractive if you masked out the face, or additive if you masked out the portion of the wall.
Now dial down the curve in the Effect Controls and see that the effect only applies inside the mask.
You might want to feather the mask to not have a hard edge that might be distracting.

I hope this helped, have a good day! :)
Edit: You might want to use a mix of the two methods: The Luma-Matte for the hair, which is hard to rotoscope, and using masks for the simpler areas of the head.


How to live stream 4 cameras to a flat screen TV

You need something like the Blackmagic Multiview: https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/multiview or Matrox Quad-Split http://www.matrox.com/video/en/products/microquad/ or Decimator MD-QUAD http://decimator.com/Products/MultiViewers/MD-QUAD%20Quad-Split%20MultiViewer/MD_Quad.html

These units take HD-SDI input and can then display it on a HDMI (or SDI) display however you like.

So grab as many cameras as you need - you can decide what quality camera suits your needs. Get cameras with with SDI output for long cable runs. If they don't have SDI, you can get HDMI to SDI converters. If an SDI cable isn't long enough, you can get SDI/HDMI to Fibre converters that let you run fibre optic cable between your cameras and a multiview.

Any half decent multiview will let you use a computer to re-arrange the placement of the images on the screen.

Good luck!


placing text in video filmed environments

The general technique you're asking about is called motion tracking, of which there exist different types: Feature ("point") tracking, planar tracking, and 3D match moving.  After Effects (and the bundled Mocha) is probably the best entry level software to each of these methods, but it definitely leaves room for professional growth.  Apple's Motion includes a more basic toolset, is only suited to feature tracking, but is more beginner-friendly.

When text is flatly attached to a simple, clearly visible surface such as a picture frame, you can use Feature tracking to track the corners of the object, and "corner pin" an image or text into the frame.  The software will do its best to automate the process of tracking each corner, but if, for instance, an object passes in front of one of the points, you may have to manually keyframe its movement.

Planar tracking goes a step further and tracks the movement of full flat surfaces.  Mocha, bundled with After Effects, is a planar tracker.  It's fast and flexible, and you can achieve better results more reliably, but it's a little more complicated.  To mask out an obstruction, for instance, you must rotoscope out the offending object.

You would only use 3D matchmoving if you wanted your text to be three dimensional, cast realistic shadows, receive image-based lighting, reflections, transparencies, in other words, be a realistic object in your scene.  This is the most complicated method because it requires a back and forth workflow through tracking, 3d modeling, and compositing software.  Different combinations of software packages will lump one or more of these steps within the same application.

An example of a dedicated professional motion tracking application is Boujou, although there are others (PFtrack comes to mind).

Hope this gives you a place to start.


avconv converting videos in really bad quality

Get ffmpeg

Download a recent build of ffmpeg. Binaries for Windows, Linux, and OS X are available on the FFmpeg Download page. Development is very active and there is no need to use buggy avconv (note that this answer was written for ffmpeg, so I'm not sure if any examples will work with avconv).

Theora video & Vorbis audio in OGG

Theora is old and has been superseded in many cases by VP8/VP9 video in WebM (see example below), so there are few reasons to use Theora in OGG/OGV.

ffmpeg -i input -c:v libtheora -q:v 5 -c:a libvorbis -q:a 5 output.ogv

-q:v – video quality. Range is 0-10, where 10 is highest quality. 5-7 is a good range to try. If you omit -q:v then ffmpeg will use the default of -b:v 200k which will most likely provide a poor quality output, and libtheora may drop/skip frames if the bitrate is too low.
-q:a – audio quality. Range is 0-10, where 10 is highest quality. 3-6 is a good range to try. Default is -q:a 3.

Adapted from FFmpeg Wiki: A Brief Theora and Vorbis Encoding Guide.

VP8 video & Vorbis audio in WebM

ffmpeg -i input -c:v libvpx -qmin 0 -qmax 50 -crf 5 -b:v 1M -c:a libvorbis -q:a 5 output.webm

See FFmpeg Wiki: VP8 Encoding Guide and VP8 Encode Parameter Guide to optimize your command.
If you want to encode VP9 video, then use -c:v libvpx-vp9. It is currently a slow encoder.


Premiere encode in h264 using "ultrafast" preset

Not out-of-the-box as far as I'm aware. Those presets are specific to the x26* encoders. Premiere bundles Mainconcept's H.264 encoder. You can try third party plugins which allow one to use x264 from within Premiere:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/x264vfw/

http://www.x264pro.com/


I am not a lawyer, but I played one on TV.

If the contract wasn't specific then you might have some wiggle room. Typically contract law (varies by state) says that if the contract is unclear then it favors the person who didn't write it. So if they provided you an unclear contract it favors you when it isn't clear.

Unfortunately if they hired you to create the "work" of the footage, then it may be a "work for hire":

  A "work made for hire" is— (1) a work prepared by an employee within the scope of his or her employment; or (2) a work specially ordered or commissioned for use as a contribution to a collective work, as a part of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, as a translation, as a supplementary work, as a compilation, as an instructional text, as a test, as answer material for a test, or as an atlas, if the parties expressly agree in a written instrument signed by them that the work shall be considered a work made for hire. (17 U.S.C. § 101)

Read up on work for hire, but generally speaking, unless the contract states otherwise, if you are hired / contracted to create something, the party paying you owns your work.

BTW, to be a work for hire doesn't mean they paid you cash. They could be paying you in work experience.


Minimal working frame rate for H264 codec

I'm not sure how it will behave at very low frame rates, but it is worth pointing out this would also limit your options on how and when you could change frames since they would have to follow on the clock cycles.  What is more likely to work in this case is a long keyframe interval.  The majority of frames in a compression like H.264 only store the changes from the previous frame.  In the case of a still image, the compression ratios will be huge because very little (no) change occurs between frames.  I'm not sure that you would really pick up enough of a savings from dropping the frame rate to be worth the loss of control over when you can make a change to the frame.

The best bet would be to try it with your media and see the results.  Compression is a highly content dependent thing and the best quality and compression for any particular clip is going to depend a lot on the nature of that clip, so trial is still the best way to test it out.


Lossless concatenation of slightly different MP4 files

Your 2nd file is different. You can re-encode it this way,

ffmpeg -i 2.mp4 -map 0:a -map 0:v
       -c:v libx264 -profile:v main -c:a aac -ar 48000
       -video_track_timescale 2500   2-new.mp4

Depending on how the video in the other files was encoded, you may need to try adding -bf 1 or -bf 0.


How to avoid noise when filming dark red

Filming any light that is strongly a single color is likely to produce a lot of noise because it's absorbing more light. (In your case, the red brick is absorbing green and blue, leaving only the red.)

Furthermore, if you're filming with a Bayered CMOS sensor like the ones found in most phone cameras and DSLRs, the sensor captures twice as much green light as it does red or blue light. The sensor sites are generally set up in a red-green-blue-green order.

So you're starting with less light reflected from the material and your collecting less light at the sensor. Any noise is going to be magnified because the resolution of the red channel is half that of the green channel, too. So how do you avoid it? You have a few options:

Supply more light to the scene
Use a camera with a sensor that has good low light response
Apply noise reduction in post
If you can change out the background (either by replacing it or filming from a different angle), that might be better.


Marker animation trigger from parent composition

Totally possible, but there are some problems with your expression.

n = comp("myparentComp").layer("myLayer").marker.key(time);

In this line n is going to return a marker key object. However the last part of the line uses the current time in the method marker.key(time). This won't work. The marker.key() function expects an int referring to the number of the marker (1-indexed, so the first marker is marker.key(1), because WTF adobe). A marker key has a time property, which is probably where you're getting confused. Also then you're treating n as if it's an integer, and you use a variable marker without declaring it or giving it a value.

If you want the animation to trigger on the first marker, it should look like this:

var marker1time = comp("myparentComp").layer("myLayer").marker.key(1).time;
if(time < marker1time){
  t = 0; //hold the animation until the first marker
} else {
    t=time-marker1time; //will start at 0 at the point where time == marker1time
}
thisProperty.valueAtTime(t);

Some basic JS tutorials would probably help. I recommend the w3Schools ones, they're web-design focused, but almost all JS tutes are.


Keeping text centered during a transition

Although you can reposition the anchor point with the Pan Behind tool (Y),

an easier way to center it is in the menu.

Layer->Transform->Center Anchor Point in Layer Content.

I agree with the other posts here: It's important to set the correct alignment and placing of a layer before you keyframe anything.


Do I need to encode video in both ogg and webm?

Probably better suited for Stackoverflow but I think its still a valid question for this SE.

Producing theora(ogg) versions of your videos is actually redundant. Any browser version supporting ogg is also supporting webm.

For questions like these I recommend using caniuse.com.
If you compare webm with ogg you quickly see that you cover the same browser versions and more with webm.
Unless you need to cover Firefox 3.5+.


Don't do sync work with the MP4s/H264 codec. Use proper codecs (ProRes or DNxHD).
Work with .wav or .aif audio files.
Keep an eye on your audio file sample rates.

Lightworks is much less forgiving to small errors than other programs are. Be super precise.


How to reduce background noise in the video

This answer (and the video link included within it) tells you all you need to know.

The long and the short of it is that good audio is essential to good video, and getting good audio requires its own set of techniques, practices, considerations, and, in many cases, gear.

Sound attenuates at a 1/(r^2) rate for point sources.  Unfortunately, an automobile roaring through your walls functions more like a area source, not a point source, and thus decays very little from one end of the room to another.  Nevertheless, a headset can put a microphone very close to your mouth, and that can push the room noise floor down fairly far.  You might also consider making videos between the hours of 2AM and 4AM, when vehicular traffic is minimal.


To find the pixel dimensions of a layer in AE,

Hit 's' that brings up scale,
then right-click Scale to bring up the Edit-Value dialog,

then set units to pixels.


I use Vegas Pro, but I think this applies to the Movie Studio version as well. As far as I know there is no magic clean up button that removes the unused files from your folder. However, if you go to the 'project media' tab in Vegas, you will see reference icons of all the files that were used during your editing session including jpegs, and .wav files. This is an accumulation, so if you pulled a clip in and then decided to delete it from the timeline it will still show up here until you click the button with the lightning bolt icon, this updates this folder so it will show you everything that is currently on the timeline.

This can be your reference to manually remove from the folder outside of Vegas. Caution: if you delete a file that is in the timeline, Vegas will complain and ask you for the location of the file the next time you launch this session. Likewise, if you move or rename any clips that were in the timeline, Vegas will treat this like a lost file and you will have to show Vegas where it is.


lift adobe premiere ram allocation limit?

Premiere does not have a maximum memory usability limit. As several others pointed out, this is probably a motherboard limitation issue. @nofare's solution for working with proxies is one way to reduce the memory needs for your project.

My guess would be, based on your original statement, that the problem is not memory allocation, but disk read speed or perhaps some overly-gargantuan source files. I edit HD and 4K in Premiere on a MBP with 16GB ram all the time and can't ever remember maxing out my RAM.

A few other things to check, assuming for the sake of argument that your motherboard is not the problem:

What is Premiere's internal "soft" maximum memory allocation set to? This will not only tell you how much your OS is actually seeing, but also how much Premiere is willing to consume.
Where are your source files located - on internal storage, a USB drive, in the cloud, etc? Premiere could be slowing down as a result of trying to read your source files, particularly if you are using multiple streams simultaneously, from slow I/O sources like USB 2.0 or cloud-based drives.
What is your largest-resolution timeline asset? And, how is it encoded? If you're using gigantic Photoshop files on your timeline, yeah, well...it's gonna be slow. Same goes for RAW video or even 4k mpeg files. They just don't edit easily and could contribute to choppiness or temporary "freezing" in the interface.
What is your playback display quality set to? I typically work with this set to 1/2 or even 1/4 for optimum fps.


Software to move graphics over another. i.e. a bus over a map

You could try stop-motion. Basically your taking a pic of the bus everytime you move it on the map, then putting it together as a sequence in your editing program. Bout the only free way I can think of


I think your actual question is for a list of resources to get starting making gameplay videos (Let's Play is actually owned by Roosterteeth as a title).

But I think your premise is wrong, you shouldn't go into the game play planning to do "boring parts".  Today, creators usually stream for a long format "livestream" video, then they cut down that footage for a "gameplay" video, and then they will sometimes do "trailers" or "highlights", and this is a good business model.

By all means set up cool stuff and show us what you want, but you'll notice, for single player, that it will feel more organic to just play through.

They also require the same resources, as your first option is a subset of the 2nd option.

I recommend OBS, it's free and works great.  In theory, you need twice the graphics capability of the game to capture it cleanly.  It will stream or just record.

Past that you really just need a headset with microphone, any headset will do, but spring for a Snowball when you can, great quality and affordable.  I can help (sometimes) to have voice recorded separately, but most times it really doesn't matter if you're having trouble with it.

Once you feel ready, find an affordable webcam, and you can do face cam straight from OBS, whether or not you create a second instance of OBS to record it separately.

Eventually you'll need some basic lighting, and maybe a green screen, but leave that down the road until you're already super serious.

Once you get to a point where you feel like editing, you'll need GIMP (basically free photoshop) or any picture editor you have handy that will let you work in LAYERS, very important.

And of course you'll eventually want to actually edit, I recommend Da Vinci for your first free editor.  It has most of the functionality that Adobe Premier Pro or Sony Vegas has, but it's just not very intuitive.

I highly recommend you keep an eye on HumbleBundle, I got Sony Vegas for $20 through them because they occasionally do software bundles, and it's a good deal to find games (check out Monthly, it's fantastic).

Hit me back if I managed to leave anything out.


Vegas Pro 13 - Shaking Image - Including Preview

Yes. In a nutshell:

place an image on the timeline (set Alpha Channel in media properties if needed)
click 'Track Motion' button in the track header
select '3D Source Alpha' compositing mode
use keyframes to create animation


Using FFmpeg loop filter makes audio disappear

The loop option can't be used if you're ingesting multiple streams via the filter.

Use

ffmpeg -re -f lavfi -i "movie=filename=ShortLoop.mpg:loop=0"
       -re -f lavfi -i "amovie=filename=ShortLoop.mpg:loop=0"
       -vf setpts=N/FRAME_RATE/TB -af asetpts=N/SR/TB     test1.mpg


How can I find camcorders with high quality like Nikon D3100 but without its time limit?

I am not certain I understand why you need to shoot a scene for longer than 10 minutes.
Most of the movies I make are under 4 minutes and include up to 30 or more shots some lasting less than a 1/4 second while others may last a minute. I only mention this to give you an idea what I am used to. I have both a camcorder that can shoot as long as there is memory--up to an hour possibly, and I have a pocket point and shoot that has time constraints based on format, not unlike the Nikon D3100.

Assuming you have a need to shoot a scene for longer than 10 minutes such as a traffic study or to document a school play I will proceed to address the issues.

Reviewing the tech specs of the Nikon D3100 I see the following HD movie settings:

HD 1,920×1,080 / 24 fps

HD 1,280×720 / 30 fps

HD 1,280×720 / 24 fps

Noting that these all have a 10 minute recording limit.

Many DSLR cameras are bound to a 10 minute recording limit due to the way the firmware/software is designed to handle memory storage. Many cinematographers and photographers alike are pushing to have this issue addressed as in allowing for
longer takes so you are not alone.

Choosing a camcorder is a reasonable alternative but there will be tradeoffs. Here are few that come to mind. YMMV (your mileage may very).

1) The "Glass": the Nikon D3100 has a removable lens so you can swap in other lenses of different focal lengths and quality while most camcorders have a non-removable zoom lens.

2) FOCUS: the Nikon D3100 will allow you to change focus while shooting video while most camcorders do not allow you to manual focus on the fly or make this difficult by not having a focus ring on the lens but an external wheel which generally causes camera shake.

3) Shutter Speed: I am uncertain if the Nikon D3100 allows for changing the shutter speed while shooting video, but more advanced DSLRs will, e.g. Canon 5D Mark II. This is a significant feature for cinematographers engaged in time-lapse movies, where 'drag the shutter' is very desirable.

(NOTE: one thing you will trade up to is that the Nikon D3100 only records in mono, while almost every camcorder records in stereo if not Dolby 5.1 Surround.)

Here is a criteria that might assist you in choosing a camcorder.
Since the price of D3100 is nearly $649 USD MSRP, then you might consider using this as a baseline for your search in that price range e.g. Sony HDR-CX260V/T about $549.

Alternately you might consider the clarity and quality of the lens on the Nikon D3100 so choosing a Panasonic TM900K that comes with a Leica 12x zoom should be a pretty good contender--about $900.

Or perhaps you favor a camcorder that allows you to use a variety of lenses such as the Sony NEX-VG10 or NEX-VG20H--nearly $2000.

You might want to review the specs of each of these camcorders and visit local stores to give them a test ride.

One very important point, be sure that the camcorder you choose has a video format that works well with your current video editing software, this can definitely be a show stopper.
Currently your Nikon D3100 uses .mov files while Sony uses AVCHD and Panasonic has their version of AVCHD. You might want to join .mov files to work with another format so you want to be sure that they all get along in the same video suite.


If it is done properly, it should be impossible.  If there is some amount of information there, then it might be possible to get a result by cranking up gamma or luminance, but done correctly, the information is set to black pixels for the entire area and there is no difference between pixels over that area to work from.

It is sometimes possible to reverse images that have been pixelated, blurred or distorted (or at least determine if it is the same person) but there is no way to make up information that isn't there.


Will Compression/Format of Audio Change when Uploaded to YouTube?

Youtube generally reencodes all videos you upload to youtube to ensure compatibility across various platforms and to provide smaller versions of the videos for users with slow internet connections. So yes, both the video and the audio stream of your video file will be compressed and reencoded when you upload it. If someone uses a third party tool to download the video from Youtube, they will only be able to grab that reencoded file, never the original upload. Because Youtube compresses the video very heavily to reduce file size, there will be a noticable quality drop in both video and audio, which is a complaint many video editors have about youtube (though there isn't really a well-known alternative that doesn't reencode videos on upload). Youtubes will reencode the audio to m4a and aac files in various bitrates, as well as some low-quality ogg files.

If you want people to be able to download the unaltered original, you should provide a download-link via a file hosting service such as Dropbox or Google Drive. I believe if you have a Vimeo Pro Membership, you also have the option to allow people to download the original video, but I'm not sure about that.


FFMPEG demux concat dropping audio at stitch points

ffmpeg -i test.mp4 -ss 0 -t 5 test-1.mp4
ffmpeg -i test.mp4 -ss 5 -t 5 test-2.mp4

This is the root of evil. You almost never can split your audio/video with very high precise. Reasons for it:

Non-integer FPS in video. You can't split non-integer number of frames, so if you use 29.997 fps, you can't get 149.985 frames in file.
Audio codecs compress audio samples in blocks of samples, for example, in 1024 samples per second. So, if you split your sound in 5 second and sound has samplerate 44100Hz, you can only get 44100*5/1024=215.332 frames, this is too not integer. Actually, here you get small drop. Some codecs always add some silent frames at end, mp3 do in that way. Only one exception I know: pcm (any kind), this "codec" can save any count of frame, with no rough.

So, in conclusion, if you want split and concatenate files without loss:

use integer count for fps
use codecs what can encode any count of samples without rough or padding.


ffmpeg: How can I convert from H.265 into another 10bit format for colour grading?

I'm not familiar with DaVinci Resolve, but if the free version supports 10-bit H.264 you can use HandBrake to transcode to that format with CRF 0 and see if that works.

If that doesn't work you'll need to use FFmpeg. With a bit of fiddling I was able to convert your source file to DNxHR using this command:

ffmpeg -i DSCF1265.MOV -c:v dnxhd -profile:v dnxhr_hqx -color_range 2 -c:a copy DSCF1265.dnxhr_hqx.mov

This also copies the audio over, if you want to exclude it for some reason use -an instead of -c:a copy.

The -color_range 2 bit is important, without it the output looked different from the input (at least when watched with mpv).


I was a rusted on MPC (and more recently its derivatives MPC-HC and MPC-BE) fan until recently when the MPC devs flagged that it would not be continued. So I started looking to see what else was out there.

While the MPCs are still very capable players I've increasingly been using MPV, another mplayer-derived open-source project.

It has a fairly minimal UI (which IMHO is a good thing),
it is GPU-rendered and seems to be pretty resource light–on my machine we've been watching 6K camera footage in ProRes without problems.
It's easily configureable, has useful features such as colour management and HDR,
plays most codecs and formats that I throw at it without problems
It's cross platform, so if you swap between PC, OSX and Linux you can use it on all of them.

Another player that is useful to know is djv-view. This comes with some very useful tools such as histograms, RAM-caching for smooth playback and jog-shuttling and so on. It doesn't have audio so it's nto a general purpose media player, but it's a real winner for playing image sequences that would struggle to play smoothly otherwise–as long as you have the RAM for it. This is also cross-platform, available for PC, OSX and a linux package manager near you.