Recommendations on Video Editors similar to Movie Maker I used to create videos a lot in the past, and I am trying to get back into it. I used Windows Movie Maker back when it was 2.6 and really liked that version of it. I liked the ability to click and drag the clips into the timeline as well as when you imported the video you could click a checkbox and it would turn the video you were importing into smaller manageable clips that I could then click and drag into the timeline from the Collections section. I was hoping to find something similar to those features as well as had the ability to add in some cool effects. I was able to find something similar called Filmora. It is so close to having everything that I need. It even has a scene detection feature that is similar to the "Create video clips" feature that Windows Movie Maker has. But the clips stay in the timeline. I can't have them set aside in a collection out of the way so that I can click and drag them into the timeline in the order that I want. Does anybody know of any video editing program that is similar to Movie Maker that isn't too expensive? I don't need anything fancy. Just a few effects that I can add, a timeline editor, and the ability to create video clips when importing a video. Any suggestions?

Avid just came out with a free version of Media Composer, looks very capable. "It's a fact that over 95% of all mainstream movies released in 2016 were edited on Media Composer. And so were most TV shows, too! Media Composer | First is a completely free version of the same video editing application, available on either Mac or PC. If you are an aspiring filmmaker or vlogger looking to get a start in editing, there’s no better way..."
Adobe Premiere Elements is in the price range you mention.

But the clips stay in the timeline. I can't have them set aside in a
  collection out of the way so that I can click and drag them into the
  timeline in the order that I want.

So you want "playlist" insted of timeline?

Fresh article about alternatives in 2017: http://www.techradar.com/news/the-best-free-windows-movie-maker-alternative

Free only alternatives: https://alternativeto.net/software/windows-movie-maker/alternatives/?license=free

Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/edtech/comments/63f9f2/alternative_to_movie_maker/ and https://www.reddit.com/r/letsplay/comments/5pcgh2/does_anyone_here_have_a_free_alternative_to_movie/

And use google!


Simple program for trimming video I have a video of a concert, and a list of timestamps (5:06-15:49, 17:56-29:14...) that correspond to songs I would like to make into separate videos. Can anyone recommend a simple program I can use to do this? The one built into windows is troublesome to use and I can only make one clip at a time.

Depending on the format you have your video, one option is VirtualDub2.
It is a free linear editor, but it is good to trim a video without recompression.
Go to the Video Menu and choose direct stream copy. Do the same with the audio.
You need to do it one by one. Make a backup first. Open the video, cut the end of it first so you do not need to recalculate the timing and then cut the start of it, and save with a different name.
If you want to automate it and you are fine with command lines, try FFmpeg.
https://www.google.com/search?q=ffmpeg+batch+trim+video
If you need to do a bit more, like adding fade in and out, and control a bit more the trimming, you can use a free nonlinear editor, but most of them will recompress the video. Davinci Resolve, Hit Film Express, Open Shot for example.

The quickest, dirtiest way of doing this would be using Windows Movie Maker. The program is easy to use, free and terrible, but totally fit for what you're trying to do.

If you're looking for (free) alternatives, try:

test version of Sony Vegas
test version of Adobe Premiere
test version of Camtasia (eugh)
free version of Davinci Resolve (a bit more advanced)


Premiere pro cc2015 preview lag I tried editing a video shot on canon 750d @1080p 25fps.
I am using premiere pro cc2015 , windows 10 , Intel i3 and Intel HD 3000 graphics . When I import the video into premiere and play there is a red line on the timeline and the video lags.
Please help me out.
Thanks.

1080p is a large resolution. Based on the information you've provided, you're likely hitting a hardware bottleneck and won't be able to do much to increase your performance.


Combine multiple videos as separate streams in one mkv file So I have multiple videos of the same scenery from different angles. These are stored as separate files. Can I combine these as multiple video streams within one file?

For example I know this is possible with MKV, I just don't know how to "join" them.

Is this possible using ffmpeg? If so, which command sequence do I use?
If not, what other application would be able to do this?

Yes, this is possible using ffmpeg and the mkv container.

An example command sequence would be:

ffmpeg -i input1 -i input2 -c copy -map 0 -map 1 output.mkv

source

Breaking down the command:

-i input1 This selects the first input file. Could be something like my video_track1.mov.
-i input2 Here you can specify the second input file. You can add another entry -i input3 if you have more input videos. I don't know what the maximum amount of videos is you can place in one mkv container.
-c copy This copies all the streams (audio and video) in their original encoding.
-map 0 This maps all the streams (audio and video) of the first input file to the first track of the output file.
-map 1 This maps all the streams (audio and video) of the second input file to the second track of the output file.

More information on the -map option can be found in the documentation of ffmpeg.

'map' selects input sources, files in this case. Your command combines all the tracks into a single stream, not separate ones as desired.


Does 60 fps make sense for YouTube? YouTube says one should upload videos in the frame rate in which the video has been recorded. But if I have yet to record, what frame rate should I choose?

I noted that videos downloaded from YouTube have mostly 30 fps but some have 24 fps. I haven't seen any frame rather other than these 2 in videos downloaded from YouTube yet.

Will YouTube show 60 fps videos to the user with 60 fps (if it's possible)?

There of course are the downsides:

Raw material is bigger.
Rendering takes longer.
Rendered file is bigger.
Upload takes longer. (My internet connection is very slow.)

So I want to know whether it even changes something in advance.

Google has supported 60fps video since 2014.  YouTube has a page that talks about video formats, codecs, framerates, etc., here.  It is up to the Browser and YouTube to negotiate what format, frame rate, etc., should be served for optimal playback.

If you only care about YouTube as a video display platform, and not at all about any other platform, then you have the freedom to choose any of its preferred formats, depending on what sort of upload traffic you can afford.  If you want to be able to play something on your local computers, TV monitors, etc., then you should pick the format most preferred by your most-preferred platform, and let everything else try to adapt to that.

If you want "live" look and less stutter, then use 60p. If you want film-like motion then use 30p. Use 24p if you want to filmout (no one this nowadays) or you want to make a DVD (DVD support for progressive content is best in 24p mode, and it kinda spotty for 30p). Blu-ray can be made 24p, 30p or 60p, so see the first two points.


Changing Key of Audio Premiere I haven't been using premiere for long, and I want to try to make an MLG meme video.

For this, I wanted to get an audio file and change the note/key of it to match music.

From what I know (which is very little), pitch and key are unrelated. I may be wrong, but when I tried to use pitchshifter, it didn't seem to change the note.

I'm sorry that is a stupid question and I know this question will get negative reputation, but how would I change the note/key of audio files? Would I use audition, or is there something in premiere I am overlooking?

One approach is to change the speed of the clip slightly.  This will change the pitch; speeds above 100% will make the pitch higher, and speeds under 100% will make the pitch lower. You can fiddle around with the percentages until the pitch matches.  Obviously the clip will visually run faster or slower as well, so hopefully you won't need to change the speed too much. If it makes the clip look funny, you may want to separate the audio track from the video track so you can just adjust the audio speed while leaving the video speed at 100%.

As for pitch vs. key, I can tell you what they mean from a musician's point of view. A "pitch" is the vibrations per second (hertz) of a note.  The more cycles per second, the higher the pitch. The word "key" has two meanings.  On a piano, each of the things you can hit is a "key".  There are white keys and black keys.  Each one has a different pitch.  The other meaning of "key" pertains to composition. The "key" a song is written in defines the scale it uses (for the most part). Songs in the key of C major or A minor will be played on all the white keys (unless there is what's called an "accidental" note, which would be one of the black keys).  Songs in the key of G major or E minor are played on all the white notes except for F# ("F sharp"), unless there are "accidental" notes.  There is a major and minor "key" for each of the 12 "keys" in a scale.


Square edges after rotating video in DaVinci Resolve? I rotated one of my clips in Resolve to square up some of the lines (compositionally), then zoomed in so that the top and bottom edges were cropped to straight by the dimensions of the timeline viewer.

However, when I try to crop left and right to square up the sides, the rotated/slanted edge is preserved by the crop. How can I crop the edges square?

The intended picture ratio of the film is 1.33, which is why I'm not zooming to the full frame of the timeline. I suppose if there was a way to adjust the dimensions of the timeline to a 1.33 ratio, that would also be a solution.

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

Change the timeline resolution to Academy under Project Settings, then under Image Scaling select "full frame with crop"


After effects cc render time issues I recently made a video 3 minutes long with trapcode particular, 2 light layers and some simple expressions for particular (wiggle and time).
Rendering in quicktime h264, 1080p 30fps.

I started to render the video and on first it showed 28 minutes remaining. I was extremely happy with that. Came back 30 minutes later and now it was estimating 1h 20 minutes. Came back hour later and now it was at 1h 54min.
Although the rendering was now going for more than hour. The time kept increasing.

I decided to stop and use adobe encoder, with h264 and matching video settings high bitrate. Encoder at the start gave me 1hour and later increased that again.

So few hours later I am using after effects built in rendering and time remaining is 1hour 30 min and elapsed is at 3hr 44min and more than half way through rendering.

How could it be increasing all the time? I am using after effects for about a month now so I don't know all the hacks. I am using intel i5-6400 2.7ghz with 8gb of ram and 4gb of ddr5 gpu geforce gtx 750 ti.

Would it help if I would render particles separate with alpha channel and then add it to full composition? Would that reduce time?

Sorry for such bad explanation. English is not native for me.

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

Pre rendering comps is useful if the items in the pre render don't need any more tweaking. So if you're still working on the overall project but the particles are finished, maybe I would pre-render them.


Are there only a few standard video frame rates? In modern digital video, can a video file be marked with any arbitrary frame rate? Or are only a few specific frame rates widely supported? By "modern" I mean software players like Quicktime, VLC, Roku, game consoles, etc. I'm curious both what the video standards themselves say are allowed frame rates and then what actually works in practice.

I understand that 24 fps, 25 fps, 30 fps, 50 fps, and 60 fps are widely supported standards. HandBrake also offers 5, 10, and 15; are those standard options? Could I use any FPS number I want?  And what about the non-integer rates like 23.976 and 29.97; are they actually treated differently by software than 24 and 30? Also I see references to "variable frame rate" in H.264 streams; does that actually work and if so, what uses it?

My specific question is what the best way is to encode some 8mm film scans. The source is 16 fps, the 8mm film standard. Right now I'm doubling every other frame to bring it up to 24 fps which works OK, but I'm wondering why I can't just mark the video as 16 fps. FWIW I've produced H.264 mp4 files with Handbrake at 15 fps and found they only played back correctly in VLC. Mac Quicktime played them too fast, probably 24 fps.

There are several "standard" frame rates, but there are getting to be so many that supporting arbitrary framerates is easier than specifically supporting many specific ones.  This is especially true for software players, like VLC.

More and more support exists for VARIABLE fps.  (VFR, variable frame rate).  This is where the interval between frames within the same video isn't a constant.  Many video container file formats (like Matroska (.mkv) or MPEG-4 (.mp4, closely related to Apple's .mov)) don't even store a FPS number, but rather a time base (e.g. 1/30th of a second), and then each frame has a timestamp as a multiple of that time base.  It just so happens that the interval between each frame is one or a small integer number of units of the time base in a CFR (constant frame rate) video.

Security-camera footage with near-duplicate frames dropped would be an obvious use-case for VFR.  Even moreso if it's being compressed with a simplistic video codec that doesn't take good advantage of temporal redundancy (with inter (p and b) frames).  (play around with ffmpeg -vf mpdecimate to drop near-dup frames.  Use -vsync 2 if outputting to mp4, because for some reason it isn't the default for that muxer, but it is for mkv.)

Another case is modern smartphones.  For example, my brother's Moto G (2nd gen) records VFR videos.  It lowers the frame rate when the sensor needs more light.  Some of the output from running mediainfo on an mp4 created by the phone's software, recorded indoors:

Bit rate                                 : 9 999 Kbps
Width                                    : 1 280 pixels
Height                                   : 720 pixels
Display aspect ratio                     : 16:9
Rotation                                 : 90°
Frame rate mode                          : Variable
Frame rate                               : 16.587 fps
Minimum frame rate                       : 14.985 fps
Maximum frame rate                       : 30.030 fps

Playback of a single VFR video stream is not hard.  The software just gets the next frame ready to display, sleeps until it should be displayed, then wakes up and displays it.

Things get a bit more complicated when you take into account the fact that humans can only see video frames when a monitor displays them.  VFR monitors exist, but are still rare.  (google for g-sync freesync).

Changing the displayed image while it's being scanned out to the monitor results in ugly tearing of the video (commonly seen when playing a game with vsync off).  This limits a player to changing the displayed image at 50 or 60Hz.  (CRTs support arbitrary vrefresh rates, within a range, but it's complicated to cook up modes with all the timings correct, so most people just used a few fixed refresh rates.  And now people have LCDs which only support a fixed refresh rate anyway.  Until freesync monitors are more widespread anyway.  I'm really looking forward to that. :)

So with video frame rates that aren't a multiple or a factor of the monitor refresh rate, some frames will be displayed for 3 monitor refreshes, and some for 2, for example, even if the video is meant to be at a constant 25FPS (on a 60Hz monitor).

Things get more complicated when you want to work with multiple clips and fade between them, or picture-in-picture, or various other effects.  It's a LOT easier to write video editting software if you can assume that all the clips have a new frame at the same time.  (They force clip alignment to snap to whole frames).

This is why NLEs (like kdenlive or pitivi, to pick random Free software examples), are more likely to force you to a fixed FPS, and drop/duplicate frames from your clips to make them match that frame rate.  The CFR you choose can be arbitrary, but it typically has to be constant for the whole "project".

(Do any NLEs fully work with VFR clips, and produce VFR output in that case?)

So in summary, once we have variable-sync monitors and OSes, the only thing holding us back will be video editting, I guess.  And broadcasting, since apparently CFR is a big deal for that, too?

In case you're wondering, the 29.970 (actually 30000/1001) and 23.976 (actually 24000/1001, from telecining) annoying non-integer frame rates are the fault of color NTSC.  search for 1.001.  If only they'd been willing to risk a few B&W sets not being able to handle an extra 0.1% frequency for the audio subcarrier, the world would have been spared this nonsense.  (I think I saw another article somewhere that made it sound more like many sets would have been fine, but they weren't sure about perfect compat.  Wikipedia makes it sound like no sets would have handle a 0.1% higher audio subcarrier.  IDK the facts.)

Annoying frame rates are one of the lesser sins of broadcasting, though.  It's really interlacing that's been the bane of video quality on modern (all pixels lit at once) screens, and that wouldn't have changed.  I still don't get why interlacing was kept around for HDTV.  Why was 1080i60 was ever defined, instead of using 720p60 to get the same temporal resolution for sports and stuff?  It's similar to 1920x540p60, but with a stupid vertical offset between odd and even fields that requires a lot of computation on the receiving end to make it not look horrible.

edit:

For your use-case, I'd absolutely suggest archiving at the native FPS.  Don't throw away any information by dropping frames.  Don't dup frames and make your files bigger (or make your h.264 encoder spend more time noticing the duplicates and outputting a frame full of skip macroblocks that only takes 20 bytes for the whole frame).

In the future when we hopefully all have freesync displays that can play any framerate, you'll want to undo your pullup to 24fps so your video plays more smoothly!  Or if freesync somehow doesn't catch on, or the display that comes after LCDs is CFR, then rate conversion is probably best done at playback time anyway.  It's not like 24fps even plays perfectly on a 60Hz monitor.  (I don't visually notice the fact that some frames are displayed for 3 * 1/60th while some are displayed for 2 * 1/60th, but it's true).

If you're having problems with Quicktime, then IDK.  Maybe make sure Handbrake is making files with the right framerate set in the h.264 bitstream, as well as the container.  (Yes, h.264 headers can apparently store a frame rate, separate from what the container says.  See the docs for mkvmerge --fix-bitstream-timing-information.  And try using it with --default-duration 16fps to make an mkv file.  Then mux that back to mp4 and see if that fixes quicktime?)  Or maybe there's a way to do it with mp4 tools in the first place.  See for example: https://askubuntu.com/questions/370692/how-to-change-the-framerate-of-a-video-without-reencoding

I can guarantee that arbitrary frame rate mp4 is valid, and even variable framerate mp4 is valid.  If Quicktime plays it wrong, it could well be Quicktime's fault.  Or maybe Handbrake's fault for making the file wrong.  I usually just use ffmpeg directly, because I'm a command line ninja.

A few other notes.  First, 48 fps is becoming more popular and common thanks to The Hobbit and now YouTube's support for the framerate.  Secondly, 30 fps is usually actually 29.97 fps and 60 is usually about 59.94.


How to cut a single clip in a Sequence into multiple clips for use in multiple Sequences in Premiere Pro I have a single clip of a multi-speaker conference in Premiere Pro CS6 that I need to split into individual clips of each speaker, so that I can make a timeline of each clip with the end goal of exporting several individual videos, rather than one long video of the entire conference.

I've already split the clip up within a Sequence using the Razor Tool and removed extraneous footage, like so:

How can I get these split-up and renamed clips to their own individual Sequences for production as separate video files? (If there is a Premiere shortcut or tool specifically for this, I haven't found it)

Here's the "Premiere" way to do it.  Create N sequences, one for each of the N speakers you want to create an output clip for.  Copy (by reference) the clip into each of the N sequences.  If you do this correctly, you will have N sequences and 1 clip in your project folder.

For each sequence, set the in and out points of the clip to bound the speaker of interest.  Name the sequence according to the speaker.  If you do this correctly, you will still have N sequences and 1 clip in your project folder.

Here's the magic: select all the sequences and hit "Export Media".  This will queue up the creation of N clips.  Each one will be exactly the speaker it should be, and the clip file names will be based on the sequence name (meaning something related to each speaker).

That is how to do it.

Once you have one clip already cut up inside a single sequence, the easiest workaround is probably to make several copies of your current sequence. Within each new sequence, delete all the extra pieces, so that each sequence ends up as just one separate portion of the original clip.


No sound in Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2017 I searched internet alot but after all those usless advices I feel upset..

I'm importing .mp4 file which has music in it, but in Premiere there is no audio track at all.

I have restarted pc, installed k-lite codec pack, quicktime codecs but why? Why is it so hard to simply import .mp4 file with music to the video editor..

Ok, here is answer.
Quote:

  Please clear the Media Cache (keeping Premiere Pro closed). Find
  instructions here: FAQ: How to clean media cache files?

  Navigate to the Media Cache location as specified in the Premiere Pro
  preferences and rename the folders.

   MAC: Premiere Pro menu>Preferences>Media
   Windows: Edit Menu>Preferences>Media

  Please reply if your issue gets resolved after trying these steps.

  NOTE: Premiere Pro will conform all files after opening any/all
  project(s) and will generate the peak file for the audio. This might
  take long depending upon the number of Media used in the project(s).

Telion's answer was helpful to me in the past, but today it took me an hour to figure out that after some copying and pasting from other projects, my audio track had some Track Keyframes (notice the difference from Clip Keyframes) that were causing the volume to be 0.

So, I switched into the Track Keyframes mode and then used the Pen tool to highlight all of those keyframes, and I deleted them.


Batch video editing software that can trim without re-encoding What application is there that can open a video, modify it, and save it?
(the software that I am using now, only allows the video to be used as a source, and then exported)

I have adobe premier, but it does not actually edit videos, you have to make a new project, and set the output type/settings, then import the video, then bring in the video, edit it, and then save it.

I also have iMovie, and again, project, import, edit, export.

Is there any application that I can open a mp4 video make edits (clipping segments) and save it in the same format/size/container/etc as it was opened in?

If you can script yourself, all you need to do is call FFmpeg repeatedly:

ffmpeg -ss [start-time] -i input.mp4 -c copy -t [clip-time] output.mp4

Here, start and clip times can be in the form HH:MM:SS.mmmm, or just in seconds.

To give you a rough idea how that'd look like in Ruby, see this Gist of mine. It contains a script that takes an edit list, a folder of videos, and cuts them accordingly. I've used it very often for cutting videos based on an input edit list.

The edit list would look like that, with the timestamps in the proper FFmpeg format (e.g. 00:00:24.240) and the difference passed to -t in the last column.

Note that you can't expect it to work with any input/output without synchronization issues. If that's the case, you need to re-encode video and audio parts. I wouldn't use that script of mine though as it's not very … eloquent in that regard. Rather cut your video in a NLE.

I think you are trying to reinvent the wheel here...premiere does exactly what you want it to do, just use google to figure out the parts you dont understand


Split HLS TS segment at specific timestamp I am currently using ffmpeg to segment/transcode a longer transport stream into HLS with 10s segments. Now I want to grab the second segment from the following section:

#EXTINF:10.041667,
bbb_fhd_50s_000.ts
#EXTINF:10.041667,
bbb_fhd_50s_001.ts
#EXTINF:9.666667,
bbb_fhd_50s_002.ts

and split that into two chunks at 3s, result would look like:

#EXTINF:10.041667,
bbb_fhd_50s_000.ts
#EXTINF:3.008000,
bbb_fhd_50s_001_cut1.ts
#EXTINF:7.104000,
bbb_fhd_50s_001_cut2.ts
#EXTINF:9.666667,
bbb_fhd_50s_002.ts

Now, I got this to work using the following commands:

ffmpeg -i bbb_fhd_50s_001.ts -ss 00:00:00.0 -c copy -t 00:00:03.0 bbb_fhd_50s_001_cut1.ts
ffmpeg -i bbb_fhd_50s_001.ts -ss 00:00:03.0 -c copy bbb_fhd_50s_001_cut2.ts
ffprobe -v error -show_entries format=duration   -of default=noprint_wrappers=1:nokey=1 -sexagesimal bbb_fhd_50s_001_cut1.ts
ffprobe -v error -show_entries format=duration   -of default=noprint_wrappers=1:nokey=1 -sexagesimal bbb_fhd_50s_001_cut2.ts

Now when playing back the new m3u8 the transition between bbb_fhd_50s_000.ts and bbb_fhd_50s_001_cut1.ts works smoothly, but the transition back to the next uncut segment does not (from bbb_fhd_50s_001_cut2.ts to bbb_fhd_50s_002.ts). The video hangs for a couple of seconds after bbb_fhd_50s_001_cut2.ts has finished after which it continues. If I run the following sequence it works fine as well:

#EXTINF:10.041667,
bbb_fhd_50s_000.ts
#EXTINF:9.666667,
bbb_fhd_50s_002.ts

Anyone got any idea what goes wrong at the ending of bbb_fhd_50s_001_cut2.ts, and how to cut it correctly?

Try inserting EXT-X-DISCONTINUITY between those splitted ts


What exactly is a "sample" in audio/video context? I'm studying on video processing/encoding and doing so I started looking source code of some popular related tools. And all of them has some reference to "Sample"
For example an arbitrary code has the following lines
processor::readSample() peocessor::sampleRate()
Now when I Google search I get fully irrelevant results.
Can you explain what exactly  "Sample" means? (It certainly is not a demo/test video file type thing)

If you are working in a video editing app like Premiere or Final Cut, when you specify a sample rate, you are specifying the audio sampling rate.  This is how many times per second the audio is going to be converted into a numeric value and stored.  So typically with video, it is 48,000 times per second (a frequency of 48kHz), or 44,100 = 44.1kHz. You need two samples to correctly measure a frequency. This means that the maximum frequency you can record in an uncompressed audio recording is usually just under half the sample rate.  This is called the Nyquist frequency.  So at a sample rate of 48kHz, you cannot correctly record any frequencies about 24kHz without hearing alias frequencies (incorrectly recorded lower frequencies appearing in error in your recording).
Pixels are not commonly referred to as samples, and a frame (whether defined as an audio frame in a file format, or as a frame of video) is different to a sample.
It would improve your question to say which program your code snippet comes from - someone might be able to help directly.
Also - bit depth is not the same as sampling - sampling is how often you measure something. Bit depth is how many numbers you use to record the measurement.  So most audio is recorded at 16, 24, or 32 bits.  So each sample in a 16 bit recording could be measured between zero and 65,536 amplitude levels.

It depends on the context. For video, it’s usually one frame. But very rarely could mean one pixel. For audio, it most often a single number that represents the instantaneous power value in the wav. Audio sample rate is the number of samples per seconds. I.e. 48000, meaning 48000 numbers are needed to play back one second of one channel of audio. Audio samples are usually 16 bit integers, or 32 bit floats, but really could be anything.
Open an audio file in audacity, and you can see every sample.
But sometimes (for example in mp4) a sample may refer to an audio “frame”. An audio frame in this context is more that one audio sample compressed into a packet. The number of samples per frame is dependent on the codec (aac is 1024 for example)


Importing an .fcp file into FCPX A friend of mine created our wedding video in FCP and now that I've got the project I've been trying to import it into the trial copy of FCPX (off the App Store) but it doesn't like it.

I've read on Wikipedia that FCPX doesn't support FCP file formats, so what can I do?

Export your FCP project as a self-contained quick time video file.
Then import the QT file into X.
You'll be good to go.

You cannot do anything, from what I understand they have added xml support so you may be able to import an xml from fcp7 but why, fcpx is awful, stay in fcp7


How do I create a fading effect in my videos? I am trying to make a seamless tunnel ; so I want to fade it in distance. I have tried using set matte but doesn’t seem to work.Any help…..
I have attatched the project file here https://bit.ly/3obiTPA

While it really does depend on what software you use, I'll provide the steps on how you do it with ClipChamp Create (the software I use)
In the video editor:

Click on the element you wish to create a fading effect
Select the Fade option at the top of the screen
Adjust the sliders to your liking!

Hope this helps!


How to stack frames of a video together using lighten blending mode? I want each frame of video to get added on top of the previous frames. I don't want any of them to fade out. I am shooting locked down with a black background. A model moves through the frame with a light. I want to stack the frames one on top of the others so that the light moves through the frame and the last frame shows the path taken as a light trail.

What is the easiest way to add each new frame on top of the rest? I would like to avoid putting a separate layer for each frame manually.

Use "Echo" effect. I believe it will suite you.

You need adjust it. Make number of echos equal to your frame count.

Copy this script into a text file and save it as stackinator2000.jsx then in AE go to File>Scripts>Run Script File and load the file you saved. Then select a layer and run it.

NOTE

It will take a long time if the comp is long.
It will create a layer for every frame. I hope you've got a fast machine.
save your project before trying it. I've tested it and it works here, but  all care, no responsibility, yadda yadda.
It is important that the script is saved as stackinator2000.jsx—trust me on this one. If that's unacceptable then calling it The_Mighty_Stackatron.jsx or stackMeister_77.jsx is a possible workaround, but it will be 25% less awesome.

app.beginUndoGroup('stackinator2000');
var theComp = app.project.activeItem
if (!theComp) {
  //no comp selected, silly rabbit
  alert('choose a layer in a comp');
} else {
  var theLayer = theComp.selectedLayers[0];
  if (!theLayer) {
    //no layer selected
    alert('choose a layer');
  } else {
    var firstFrame = Math.max(theLayer.inPoint / theComp.frameDuration, 0);
    var lastFrame = Math.min(theComp.duration, theLayer.outPoint) / theComp.frameDuration
    var frame;
    //set the blending mode while we're at it
    theLayer.blendingMode = BlendingMode.LIGHTEN;
    //turn on time remapping
    theLayer.timeRemapEnabled = true;
    //delete the last key to make it a freeze frame - this will remove any other time remapping set
    while (theLayer.timeRemap.numKeys > 1) {
      theLayer.timeRemap.removeKey(2)
    }
    //step forward one frame at a time
    for (frame = firstFrame; frame +1 < lastFrame; frame++) {
      //duplicate the layer and work with the new layer
      theLayer = theLayer.duplicate();
      //offset the inpoint by one frame
      theLayer.inPoint = (frame + 1) * theComp.frameDuration;
      //prevents weirdness with the out point that I don't understand
      theLayer.outPoint = lastFrame * theComp.frameDuration;
      //set the time remapping for the first frame of the layer
      theLayer.timeRemap.setValueAtTime(theLayer.inPoint, theLayer.inPoint - theLayer.startTime);
      //delete the old key which should be before the current one
      while (theLayer.timeRemap.numKeys > 1) {
        theLayer.timeRemap.removeKey(1);
      }
    }
  }
}
app.endUndoGroup();


How to loop .TS files from Folder with FFMPEG I am using the code below as a batch file. The issue i am currently having is only one video in the folder keeps looping. How can i make all the videos play and loop?

@echo off

set FFMPEGDIR=E:\ffmpeg\bin
set BARKERDIR=E:\slatewithsound
:start
for /F %%x in ('dir /b /d %BARKERDIR%\*.ts') do (
    @echo %BARKERDIR%\%%x
    %FFMPEGDIR%\ffmpeg.exe -re -fflags +genpts -stream_loop -1 -i %BARKERDIR%\%%x -acodec ac3 -ac 2 -ar 48000 -b:a 192K -vcodec mpeg2video -s 1920x1080 -b:v 4.5M -mpegts_start_pid 0x101 -mpegts_pmt_start_pid 0x100 -f mpegts udp://239.203.1.61:4000?pkt_size=1316
)
goto start


How can I find duplicate videos from a large set of videos of varying formats? After losing a backup device with a bunch of my original videos I've had to download a large number of them (~300) back from Youtube. The new downloads are a mix of MP4 and FLV, and the originals are a mix of almost any video format due to lots of experimenting.

To make matters worse there's no clear cutoff for when my local copies disappeared; I've found a point in my youtube videos chonologically where I have some of the videos and I don't have others. I've been trying to manually weed out videos where I already have a copy, but with this many videos I'm sure I've missed some.

How can I effectively go through several hundred videos of different formats and weed out duplicates? The names will be similar but not identical. The formats may be different, and the file size may be different due to that (and or encoding differences). The file lengths should be the same, and visually the videos should be similar enough, but I'm not sure there's any tool to sort that out visually.

Am I doomed to go through the list based on running time and manually look for duplicates or is there a better way?

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

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

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

Similar images - https://tn123.org/simimages/ is a bit old, but still functional.


Is there a video container which is able to handle segments of different video quality (or even size)? Let's assume I have a video of 10 minutes length. And I want to reduce its size by having some parts in high bitrate, while other less important parts can be low bitrate. For this I'd cut the original into segments. Leaving the important ones as they are, while transcoding the unimportant parts to a lower quality.

Now, is there a video container format out there which is able to "glue" these different parts together into one file? With good support in players so trusty mplayer will play the video as if it's an ordinary file? And in a standardized/annotated/undo-able way so a simple cli command would untangle the segments into separate parts/files again?

I was under the impression Matroska would be able to do this, via chapters, where each of my segments would be one chapter. (I've read it somewhere where merging videos without transcoding was dicussed). But when I read the actual mkv docs, it seems mkv chapters are more like a textual index pointing into another (video) stream of an .mkv file - and not some low level kind of data block index which would help me with my idea. So mkv looks like a dead end.

Simple editing, or merging (which is possible losslessly, with some remuxing) wouldn't offer me having different qualities in different sections of the video - right?

What I'm looking for is region-of-interest adapted quality, something image formats like JPEG2000 offer for spatial areas, only here applied to video over time.

Any suggestions or ideas?

  The accepted answer suggests using the VBR capabilities of a format like mp4. While this works, please leave an answer if you know of a different way of achieving the desired result.

If the only difference is bitrate, then any container which accepts variable bitrate streams, will fulfill your requirement e.g. MP4, MKV..etc

Step 1 is to encode your segments, ideally using the same encoder, to different bitrates with all other parameters being the same e.g. via ffmpeg,

ffmpeg -ss 0 -t 5 -i input.mp4 -b:v 1000k seg1.mp4

ffmpeg -ss 5 -t 7 -i input.mp4 -b:v 3000k seg2.mp4

ffmpeg -ss 12 -i input.mp4 -b:v 500k seg3.mp4

Step 2 is to use ffmpeg to concat the encoded segments in copy mode, using the concat demuxer.

Prepare a text file

file 'seg1.mp4'
file 'seg2.mp4'
file 'seg3.mp4'

and then

ffmpeg -f concat -i list.txt -c copy joined.mp4

Clips with different properties, like resolution, can be joined together as well into one MP4, but compatibility across media players is iffy, and ffmpeg won't do it reliably at present, anyway.

Well I can't say I know how it would be done; but RED (www.red.com), their R3D video format uses a debayer process.

I own a RED Epic. It shoots at up to 5K 100 FPS.

When out in the field, and wanting to view the video on say a laptop, the throughput of uncompressed (or near) say 3:1 5K is huge.

So RED uses a debayer process; where the pixels are basically assigned into a grid pattern in terms of how they are both encoded and decoded.

So this eliminates the need for "proxy" files, files which are downres'd for editing because your system simply can't play the file in realtime.

The Debayer is 8 levels. And the RED player (as well as software that supports it such as PPro/After Effects, allow you to playback at 100%, 50% 25% 12.5% and so on.

The unique aspect with RED is when your computer does this, it actually isnt lowering the quality, it's just only displaying the x/100 quality you want.

So perhaps my answer is a bit backwards in thinking: But essentially with RED files you have a 1K, 2K, 3K, 4K, 5K, version- all wrapped into 1 file.

Hope this perhaps helps somewhat, even though it's not an answer to the actual question.


Copyright of materials used in a video It is common that TV channels or internet TV channels (e.g. those regularly post their shows on Youtube) use materials from other sources. For example, displaying photos from the internet, parts of videos already posted on Youtube and other websites, etc.

I am curious how the copyright permission is handled for using copyrighted materials in videos.

In the past, major TV channels were only in the market, and they had their own reporters and photographers to make their materials. Nowadays, there are many small channels (even personal ones), and I doubt if they take of care of copyright issues at all.

As a more specific example, how to obtain right to use a part of a Youtube video in an online show, which will be posted on Youtube ?

Very broadly speaking, you have a much easier experience obtaining permission if you are not making money from someone else's content.

Most copyright laws recognise 'fair use' -- a small quote or a clip that is proof of someone else having said something.  It is customary and advisable to put such clip in a box or window to show that the content is being referenced.  Fair use for a small portion of text or video is easily established than a picture, for a picture is the entire content.

For images, search engines usually have a license filter in the search. Usually, it errs on the side of caution. Unfortunately, you have to contact the original agency or person and obtain permission to use.
Youtube now has content signature comparison and will warn you that you are using someone else's content but will leave it up to the copyright owner to enforce it.

So, if it is does not fall under 'fair use' and is clearly someone else's copyright, you will have to track down the owner and obtain permission.

If you need royalty free music for Youtube you can download the samples of voiceovers+music .  It is a legal website and It is no charge


Premiere Pro: Simple fade for text? In most video editing softwares I have used, you can

- Click Text Object
- Click Button: Fade In/Fade Out
- Done.

But in Premiere pro, I have to

- Click Text Object
- Open Effects Tab
- Keyframe Transparency 0%
- Keyframe it again 100%
- Keyframe it again 100%
- Keyframe it one last time 0%
- Right Click Keyframe and Set Ease In/Out
- Right Click Keyframe and Set Ease In/Out
- Right Click Keyframe and Set Ease In/Out
- Right Click Keyframe and Set Ease In/Out
- Make sure I dont change duration of the text, or else I can repeat
  whole process again.

Is there no easy way to do this in premiere pro CC?

I know its supposed to be very flexible and fit everyones needs, but I really just want a simple fade effect for the text.

Yes you can set a default transition that uses the ctrl-d key combo. I believe it's set by default to crossfade, which I use. You click your clip, control-d and it'll put the fade in and out on the item.

You can change the default transition in the preferences.

It really is simple.

For bonus points, Control-shift-d works for audio.

Adobe Premiere Pro has a cross-dissolve effect.  You can select it as Effects->Video Transitions->Cross Dissolve.


Stabilize a really big drone ascent I have a 300' ascent with a drone looking at 2 actors lying on the ground. The drone does a bit of drifting and rotating on the way up. I want to stabilize the whole shot to be rock solid. If I use point trackers in AE starting from the first frame, then by the time it gets to the top, the points are very close together, resulting in inaccurate tracking. Can I add points on the way up? Or expand the distance between the points on the way up? Is there a better way? Or am I asking too much? Cheers


Play 24fps video smoothly on 50Hz monitor Most of the content that we download or get from media is 24fps. Which can not play smoothly on 60Hz/50Hz monitor as 24 frame can not directly sync with 50/60Hz monitor.

Now my question is it possible to directly play 24fps video smoothly on 50Hz monitor by increasing the speed of video by 1.05x by which it will become 25fps video which can directly sync to 50hz screen. If I'm technically correct what is the best way to accomplished this.

I believe you are technically correct but that in practice it would not be done in that manner.

In other words, if you simply increase the playback speed there will be visual and/or audio artifacts from the speed change.

What you would want to do is use software that would adjust the frames directly, like by dropping every 20th frame.

While I said you are technically correct, I believe your premise is slightly misguided.  Have you noticed any artifacts from playing video on monitors with different frame refresh rates?

Your brain is an amazing tool and can fill in gaps so dropping a few frames wouldn't usually be noticed.  But your brain has a top speed that it can process things like you describe.

24 fps is selected for cinema, as I am sure you know.  Video these days is usually recorded at much higher rates.

But think for a minute about why they chose 24 in the first place.  it is because if the frame rate drops below about 18 or so you can actually see the jumps between frames.  This is partly why interlacing was introduced, so a 30 fps transmission is half-drawn in between frames and the interlacing lets your brain melt one frame into another.

That's why stills from those kinds of programming - like old Betty Boop cartoons - look funny.  It is hard to capture a single frame unless your software is aware of the format.  Simple screen captures are not.

The point of mentioning the 18 fps thing is that above that most people can't see any syncing problems like you describe.

I would suggest you put this kind of question into Google in various ways and find others who have asked similar questions.

Have a great day.


Exported MOV from Flash Pro with alpha channel doesn't retain transparency I have an animation I've exported from Flash Pro CS6 as a MOV file with an alpha channel (ignore stage), and I want to do some editing in AE CS6. When I go to import the MOV as Strait-Unmatted, I do get a transparent background, however when I scrub the playhead with transparency grid toggled, a black background appears behind my animation.

I've tried a number of methods found here and elsewhere on the web including keying out black with luma key, but results were undesirable. Is there a way to get rid of the black behind my animation in AE without effecting the rest of my animation? Or is there an export setting I'm missing in Flash Pro?

Seeing as this appears to be a bug, my only suggestion is to export it as a PNG sequence. At my work we always transfer from Flash to AE as a PNG sequence, as we find MOV notoriously unreliable and buggy.

If you need to retain an audio track, try exporting that separately as a WAV or MP3 and placing it on your timeline in AE.

The only success I've had in AE with regard to rendering a video that has a transparent background is to render it as an FLV file. The other outputs I tried (various MPEGs, MOV, AVI) always pulled a background into the export regardless of the fact I had the transparent background toggle on. (Reminder: also render as RGB+Alpha).

There should be a toggle button to click as to whether or not you want the original video to be in the background of an effect or on top.

With regard to creating a PNG sequence, you'll end up with a PNG image for every frame in your sequence......just sayin' I tried it once.....but only once......I ended up with THOUSANDS of PNG images. I deleted them all and started over because there was no way I was going to assemble all of those. augh!)


What are the key PC specs for best editing HD videos? My wife bought a GoPro Hero3 for some simple home video: kids, holidays, etc.

The problem is that some videos are not playing very well on our old PCs.  We want to buy a new one for video editing. As far as I understood, such a computer should have as strong of a CPU as possible and plenty of RAM. It seems that the video card also has some role, but it's not as important as CPU/RAM in general. Is this assumption correct?

Dealing with HD video has two main components.  The first is the ability to decode the highly compressed video (which is computationally intensive) and then is the ability to deal with the large uncompressed data (which is bandwidth intensive).

The fastest encoders/decoders use the GPU on the graphics card to improve performance as a GPU is far more capable at attacking the problems related to rendering and compression than a traditional CPU is.  So if you have one of these, then the GPU is by far the most important piece.  If you don't however, then the CPU becomes by far the most important piece as encoding/decoding on a CPU is very, very intensive.

As far as dealing with the uncompressed data, the relatively small compressed files will be decompressed into memory and then played out of memory, so it is important to have high speed RAM, but not necessarily the need for a lot of it for play back.  For editing on the other hand, quantity becomes a bigger factor since the more video that can be stored in memory, the smoother your editing experience will be.

Finally, you have the hard drives.  It is very helpful if these are quick for loading videos (particularly for editing) and also for working as scratch disk (where editing stores temporary files that don't fit in memory), however it is probably the least critical part.  This can change though if you start working with higher quality, less compressed video where the file sizes start getting larger.

So, to summarize, GPU is highest priority if your software can use it, otherwise CPU and then speed of memory, quantity of memory and speed of hard drive in that order.  CPU is still second most important if you do have GPU processing support.  If you don't, then GPU is of almost no importance at all.

I have an old iMac that suffers badly with GoPro footage. I borrowed my wife's rMBP that has an i7 CPU, 16GB RAM, SSD, and a card reader.

This machine imported in an instant! Converting protune still took a little time, perhaps faster than 1:1 (meaning 10 minutes of footage was converted faster than 10 minutes) but you'll want to go eat a snack if you are working with an afternoon of GoPro footage. Editing (iMovie) was smooth and easy. No lag or stuttering at all. Exporting (rendering) was pretty quick. No snack needed.

The hardware accleration of the i7 was amazing. The rig I build will have the fastest i7 they make!! RAM is good but 16-32 should do it. SSD is expensive but essential!! A decent GPU is enough.


Pixelate effect when converting MOV to FLV via FFMPEG I have a .MOV video -created with Final Cut Pro 7 - which I'm converting to .flv using FFMPEG. I'm very happy about the quality and the size of the output file, but whenever I have fade in/out transitions in the input video, I get a pixelate effect on the output file. Any advice on how to solve this, without increase too much the output file size?

FRAME_SIZE=720x576
BIT_RATE=1200k

ffmpeg -s $FRAME_SIZE -i $1 -g 250 -ar 44100 -deinterlace -b $BIT_RATE -minrate $BIT_RATE -maxrate $BIT_RATE -bufsize 10000k -qblur 0.3 $2

Where $1 and $2 are, respectively, the input and output file.

You should explicitly specify a video codec using -vcodec as well as quality settings.

The problem is that ffmpeg's defaults aren't very sensible when you only specify a container format for the output, often choosing a sub-standard video format by default.

If you want H.264 output, try using the presets, e.g. -vcodec libx264 -vpre max. (To see what presets are available, try ls /usr/share/ffmpeg/*.ffpreset.)

Try the -sameq option. It tells ffmpeg to use the same quality in the output as in the input. I often find that ffmpeg likes to use sub-standard video codecs.


Which video editing software can create this style of title graphic? I'm trying to find out what video editing program does this type of graphical layer to input title over video.

Here are several videos edited with this same program but no reference of the video editor used.

google image search

If you are just looking for what video editor can do a title over a video, the answer is any of them that are worth paying for and most of them that are free.  That's the majority of the point of a video editor is to blend video together and that more or less inherently requires supporting transparency.

If you are looking for the particular template used in that video, I'd suggest asking the people whose YouTube videos used it.  There are many motion graphics template vendors who provide templates that can be used for similar looks if you don't know how (or don't want to bother) to make one yourself.  There are often even some that are free.

That particular effect could be for any number of editors, composition programs or titlers though.  It might come with one directly as an included template or it might come separately.  Nobody is going to know all templates everywhere, so the best bet is to ask the people that used them.

If you are just looking for software in general, I use Adobe After Effects for most things like that, but it's a professional level product so you may not want to go that high end.  Premiere Pro is also able to do a level of motion graphics, though it is more limited.  I'm not sure on the lower levels, but if text overlay or layer transparency or something similar is listed on the features of a product, it should be able to do something reasonably similar.

1, Download this picture
2, Search it in images.google.com via uploading image
3, Filtered the result with the right image
After i've done above, i found there is a related youtube video which may help you. Check the screenshot below.


Cross dissolve error in Permiere Pro I have a multicam project of 4 cameras. I did the multi-camera record which resulted in a single track sequence with the switching between the cameras. Then I applied the default transition to all cuts, which is the Cross Dissolve.

Although the right transition effect appeared everywhere, and in most cases it shows correctly, in some cases the effect works as if it was a Dip to Black (no, it's not coming from the footage). If I delete the auto-added Cross Dissolve transition and add it again manually, it works as expected. Is this a bug in Premiere?

You didn't mention which version of PPro you are using; but in version CS6 and prior there IS a bug with cross dissolve which is a bit idiosyncratic.

The fix; move all of your video (select all) up one layer.

Then add black video; or a color matte (black) which is the length of your program to the bottom (first) video track.

This in essence resets all the preview files PPro has generated; (which I believe is where the problem is).

If this doesn't work; you could try changing the default transition from cross dissolve to film dissolve... the visual effect is not "identical" but I don't think it would be a deal breaker if my first suggestion doesn't work for you.

Last option; you can pull the clips in; and out; using Trim; and make sure you make sure the dissolve rests on a new different frame on the timeline. + or - 1 frame to the left or right.

But yes; I have seen this; and it's why all our editors now cut starting on layer 2; and the last step of the process; is we lay black under the entire program before output.

I was having the same problem with the cross dissolve in a multicam track doing a Dip to Black in PPro CC 2017 April update. I saved my project, shut down PPro and restarted PPro, and that seemed to solve it for me.


What is the most lossless way to rip a laserdisc to a Mac? I want to rip a LD to my Mac as a digital video file. I will create a DVD from this file eventually, but I'm primarily interested in playing it on my laptop. What video output from the Laserdisc player would you use? And what hardware and software would you use to import to a Mac? What settings (image resolution, audio sample rate) would capture the best quality—without going over the top? (Clearly 4k would be overdoing it for the analog LD, but MPEG-2 might introduce compression artifacts that I don't want to see unless I make a DVD.)

An accepted answer will include:

Recommendation for video output from LD player
Recommended capture hardware
Recommended capture software
Recommended file format

A lot of these answers seem somewhat misleading unfortunately.

Forget about getting a capture card.  Practically every one has AGC.  AGC is very similar to macrovision, except it's superimposed onto any video source.  It's impossible to disable unless you use Linux and know your way around hacking drivers.  Some cards on Windows have third party tools to disable AGC, but the quality is extremely questionable and they all seem to use scaling and sub-sampling.

Think your best choice is finding an external device like a Panasonic DMR DVD recorder (these have a very decent comb filter).  If you could somehow find an external device with USB or firewire, I think this is your best bet.

I think 4:1:1 subsampling should be kept away.  I think 4:2:0 is actually better.  4:2:0 is most compatible and least problematic with transcoding and quality loss.  If you get a device with 4:2:0 chroma, make sure it oversamples before subsampling; these seem to give the least quality loss after subsampling, and might be considered transparent sometimes.

For a laserdisc player it's hard for me to answer.  You could stick with a player that doesn't split the composite or audio signal.  These will have a single composite and audio output, with no RF or additional svideo or second composite/audio outputs.  These also have missing features like digital still mode on CLV discs, and probably more common as very simplistic industrial players.  People may recommend something like the HLDX0 or similar, but these are very expensive and actually pass the composite video through various noise filtering and splitting stages; these players are so huge and expensive I think because splitting analog signals introduces immediate quality degradations, which these players supposedly avoid according to their owners.

Avoid scaling at all costs.  You'll get scaling artifacts immediately which isn't usually noticeable.  Instead of 4k output, you should stick with whatever native resolution your capture device uses (usually 720x480).  Let your software or hardware scale later, instead of the encoding and capturing.  Same thing with audio.  If you capture audio, make sure it's bit perfect digital stereo (LD calls for 44050khz according to wiki).  Analog audio should be captured at 192khz 32-bit float at least, and can be compressed later.

Laserdisc video is actually pure analog AFAICT.  RF is passed to a custom modulator and cut-off filters, which send the result to a TBC.  TBC produces the composite video which is an analog signal.  The composite signal can be routed directly to a composite video jack, but almost every player will split this into UHF, comb filter with svideo, and/or secondary composite output.  The only players that avoid that are like those I mentioned previously (LD-V4200 I believe is one, and with a strong signal, albeit with noise).

Laserdisc video quality is a love or hate thing IMO.  The quality is actually very high and with a high end system can be considered better along with its sound, vs DVD.  Only LD's that may seem inferior are widescreen, or those improperly mastered.  Quality is basically 425 TVL always with good chroma.  DVD by comparison is considered 525 TVL before MPEG2 compression.  Unfortunately MPEG2 reduces DVD video quality considerably, and the only advantage DVD has in this situation is a pure digital path with consistent quality (no analog difficulties like noise and interference).  MPEG2 reduces DVD TVL resolution to a variable of maybe 250 to 500 TVL lines at best with considerably less chroma by comparison.  Mpeg2 quality greatly varies depending on the movie, and the movie length unfortunately.  Only exceptions might be "Superbit" DVD releases which are very small in number.  See a DVD and downscaled HD-TV source for resolution and chroma comparison here: [url]http://www.cornbread.org/FOTRCompare/[/url]

I hope I may have been of some help.  I think your best bet may be an external device with firewire or usb.  AGC is the biggest problem you'll have to avoid, especially with computer capture devices (USB, PCI, PCI-e, etc).

The capture format will be dictated by the abilities of your capture hardware.

Many models of DV camcorders from the 2000's had a transcode capability - they will encode something sent to their analog inputs into the DV format, and send it over firewire to the computer, and you don't have to record to tape.  Different models had composite and s-video inputs, s-video would be a little sharper. I've done this with the original iMovie - it plays well with the cameras and decks from that time period.

A professional capture device would give you the ability to capture to less lossy and higher data rate formats, possibly Apple ProRes. This would be as good quality as could be managed in my opinion. LD is a nice stable digital source and outputs a very clean analog signal. Given the SD format's limitations, I would consider this option overkill.

I see no advantage to using a higher resolution than the source - there's only so much data in the signal. Adding resolution would increase storage and rendering requirements to absurd levels to no benefit.

Either way you would convert to H.264 for viewing later.


Youtube convert my video on bad quality I have some problem with video and its representation on youtube. When I upload video which was encoded with MPEG4 or H.264 codec, I get bad quality video after youtube processing.

What is this video. And what is my task.
I get source video from Iphone, Ipad, Ipod. Format of this video is - mp4. Then, I decode this video on frames with Java Library - Xuggler. This library is a wrapper of ffmpeg. After some filters on frames, I encode this frames on final video. I use codec MPEG-4 and try H.264, final format - mp4. And this final video is fine. It has the same quality as source video, when I play this video on Windows Media Player. But, when I upload video on youtube, after processing I get video with bad quality.

This is characteristics of source video, after uploading on youtube it doesn't lose quality:

And this is characteristics of final video. It loses quality after youtube processing:

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

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

This is because youtube uses its own compression. When you upload, that videos is a compressed mp4 or wmv ,quicktime or something. Youtube's process compress it much more. You lose details in the corners of your movie. You lose many data when a frame makes a decent change comparing to the previous frame. And even lose quality on very dark regions and very bright regions. Youtube cannot handle contrast rate wich is bigger then the average. I tried to upload many different ways and didn't have any luck.


How do I 'downgrade' an Adobe Premiere Pro project file to open in older versions? Is there any way at all (perhaps with a plugin, paid or otherwise) to save an Adobe Premiere Pro project file so that it's compatible with an older version of the software? The scenario I have is that I use Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5 but I need to send project files for editing to someone who only has CS3.

Since this is the top google result, I would like to give the actual solution to this problem

Option 1

Duplicate the .prproj file you want to downgrade and name it temp_downgrade.prproj or something. Just so you don't have to mess with the original.
Download 7zip.
Right click on temp_downgrade.prproj and select Extract here.
You should see temp_downgrade next to the original temp file with no .prproj.
Now right click on the temp_downgrade file and open it with a text editor.
You should see a couple million lines of confusing text, ignore it. you are looking for the 4th line, it will look like this:

<Project ObjectID="1" ClassID="62ad66dd-0dcd-42da-a660-6d8fbde94876" Version="29">

That version=29 (or whatever it says in your file, could be any number) is what you have to change. Simply set it to 1 so the whole line reads:

<Project ObjectID="1" ClassID="62ad66dd-0dcd-42da-a660-6d8fbde94876" Version="1">

Save the changes you've made to the file.
Now right click the temp_downgradefile - remember the one without the .prproj - extension and select add to archive under 7zip .
Change archive format to gzip and change the file name to be something. like temp_downgraded.prproj. Doesn't really matter it must end in .prproj though.
That's it open temp_downgraded.prproj like a normal premiere project and it'll ask to upgrade the file or something. Save the copy somewhere permanent as that's where any changes you make will be saved. You can delete all the temp files now.

Here is a gif of the whole thing.

Option 2

EDIT 2018: This tool mentioned in an answer below mine seems great! http://joshcluderay.com/downgrade-premiere-project-converter/

If you would prefer a local open source version, I also made a small JavaFx app that should automate everything in Option 1. You can download it for a Mac/Windows computer with Java(!) installed. Over here.

Are there any consequences from doing this?

Not reeeeeally. At least - it's much less than the current accepted answer on this thread. If you export something as an xml file on premiere you will effectively lose most of the editing you've done. Aside from maybe the most basic sequences. All the colour correction, Sound work, etc is gone. With this method - yes some of that will disappear if you are working on an old enough version of premiere. But, I'm talking like five years old. If the difference is CC2017 and CC2016. Sure you'll lose any effects that only exist in CC2017. But I would bet this is mostly niche stuff and 99.999% of your project will probably be fine! But - even if it isn't - say you make some small changes to your downgraded version on CC2016. If you copy the downgraded version to a computer with CC2017, after the changes have been made. All the newer features will still be there. So as long as you render on the computer with CC2017 nothing will be lost.

tl;dr: Obviously there are some cases where you could lose information, but if you just need to make minor edits or fix something small on your home computer then take it back to work or something - this is fine.

Why this works?

Apparently adobe save files are just gzipped xml, so that's why. Should work on AfterEffects as well.

guys. I know this is an old topic, but I just found something that worked for me.
I don't really know why, but it did. A friend has send me a project created with a recent version.
I could open it, but only by clicking in the "download bar" in the bottom of my browser (google chrome). If I open the folder where the file was saved, I could't open it, but by clicking on the "google chrome download bar", it opens!

Hope this can be replicated.


Extract audio from video preserving audio quality I need to extract sound from videos. There must be know loss of quality (since the sound files will be used in speech-to-text services).

So I want to extract the audio from the video exactly as it is and then place it in a new container to create an audio file.

What tools are available for this? Can VLC do it? Some online service?

EDIT: Please notice that I want to extract the sound exactly as it is from the video (so I do not loss quality).

And I tested this with the GUI version of VLC, but I did not see any way to do what I want there. However I just found this page that says you can do it from the command line with VLC:

VLC HowTo/Extract audio

Since I am not going to do this myself, but tell my users how to do it I am looking for an easy way for them. (They are not programmers. But I am. So I can perhaps write a version myself with ffmpeg, but I want to avoid that if I can.)

Is this perhaps not the right group to ask this question in?

If you aren't adverse to using a terminal to extract it, FFmpeg is a very good tool that you can use. The command that you'd want to run in ffmpeg -i [input file name here] -c:a copy -vn -sn [output file name here].

-c:a copy: This argument copies the audio stream of the file.
-vn: This argument informs FFmpeg to not account for any video streams.
-sn: This argument informs FFmpeg to not account for any subtitle streams.

Altogether, this results in a lossless extraction of the audio stream from the video file. If you have some knowledge in making scripts, you could create a script that will perform this action for a set of files so that you don't need to do it manually.

MPEG Streamclip can save audio track (or batch) without recompression.


Compressing of DSLR video I m recording full HD video in 1080p /30p format with my Nikon D5200 but i find the size of video is to high i.e. 10 GB for an hour. Now i want to compress it to lesser size in the range of 1-2 GB without affecting even a bit of quality so that i can archive it without exhausting my storage drive. I want it in 1080p format with lesser size after compression. As i have recorded 200hr video and still keeping RAW video with my storage which has exhausted it. Is there any software or any solution so that i can convert it to lesser size? Pl help as i havnt found any full proof solution for this. Ur suggestions will heartly be welcomed. I have to use these videos on my large screen tv for teaching purpose.

Theoretically
Current DSLRs use H.264 compression for their video. Optimizing an already compressed image without losing quality is something commonly done for GIF, PNG or JPEG still images, and while it's theoretically possible to optimise compression in existing video files, currently no one bothered to develop the software to do so. The only solution left for you is to recompress your video with your codec of choice.
Don't try lossless codecs
While you won't lose any quality, lossless is only useful if your source material has a very high datarate. You will probably not gain anything compared to your DLSR files. (Your files seem to be about 25Mbit/s. Lossless x265/x264 will give you at least 100-200Mbit/s)
Try almost-lossless
Still, it's good to know that the internal (hardware) codecs of DSLRs are inferior to what your current CPU can do with recent software. But you should also know that any lossy recompression will result in an image that is slightly worse than the original, even if you encode in a higher quality than the original. That being said, here is a list of modern codecs that can compress your files with minimal loss: x264, x265, vp9 and av1 (to be released in 2017).
x264/x265 Settings for recompression with minimal loss

Encoding mode: constant quality. It will encode in one pass and output the lowest file size for a given quality setting. Your new file will contain variable bitrate video — your original DSLRs files are probably constant bitrate files
CRF quality setting: Choose a value between 12 and 20 (quality difference will be between indistinguishable and fine-for-the-less-discerning), if the source material is compressed in low quality, you can sometimes go higher than a CRF of 20 without noticing any difference. Incrementing CRF by +6 means about doubling the file size.
Codec: Compared to x264, x265 compression produces about half the datarate at the same CRF, but it is a lot slower.
Speed/Compression ratio: Use the veryslow setting to get the smallest file. Warning: this might be very slow ;-)

Depending on the above choices and on the complexity of the image and on the efficiency of the codec of your DSLR, your recompressed file will be up to 10 times smaller (probably less).
Handbrake is a nice app that will help you achieve all this. If you prefer the command line you should definitely go with ffmpeg:
ffmpeg -i DSLR.MOV -c:v libx265 -preset veryslow -crf 18 -c:a copy recompress.mp4

There are a range of free or lowish cost compression programs available online. I asked a similar question on [PICList](http://www.piclist.com] recently. The following is an extract or portions of some replies. This thread was migrated from SE Photography where it was "OT". Despite the downvotes there or here for whatever reason this is liable to be of significant use to some people with similar needs.

Actual thread here on the 'Nabble' webscraper

I wish to upload a number of videos to Facebook & You tube (the shame!).
Any suggestions re free or for money WIN10 compatible programs that meet the following need would be welcome. In many cases these are usually of higher resolution / quality / size than is generally required.
The files are 1080p MP4 format, usually "Out of Camera".
A web search for converters produced several zillion promising leads and nothing as yet attractive enough. "Free" would be nice (and there are various claims re fully free) but 'sensibly priced' is acceptable if useful enough.*

Windows Moviemaker allegedly runs on WIN10 but attempting to download the allegedly relevant 'essentials' package produced discouraging messages.

Allen Mulvey.
I think WinX HD Video Converter Deluxe will do what you
want. Not free but reasonable. Their DVD ripper is also very
good.
https://www.winxdvd.com/specialoffer/index.htm#a3

Ashampoo also has a large variety of high quality but
inexpensive software. I'm not sure if they have exactly what
you want. You can find some of their stuff here:
https://www.ashampoo.com/

James Burkart:
Try Handbrake. https://handbrake.fr/

David VanHorn
I use vsdc free video editor.

Ross McMillan
I use WMM.  It is pretty smart when it comes to uploading - you can fine tune the parameters or use one of the "canned" ones - and it tells you how much storage (and presumably upload bandwidth) per minute of video is used by whatever you have selected.

Richard Prosser
I've used "Format Factory" although it's been a while since I needed
it.  Not sure aout Win10 compatability - I'm on Win7 & linux.

Russell
https://www.winxdvd.com/specialoffer/index.htm#a3
Looks reasonable and far more capable than the core task I wanted it for.

Nicola Perotto
from SourceForge there is TEncoder
https://sourceforge.net/projects/tencoder/?source=directory
very good, simple and fast. Good for batch conversions.
For fine tuning the conversion use ffmpeg http://www.ffmpeg.org/

Russell.
As a first attempt "Handbrake" has made a useful difference and I'll try to check all the free recommendations and maybe the so far single for $ one to see what other capabilities are available.
I am an 'obsessive' still photo taker but 'videos happen' along the way and being able to easily put them on the internet is highly desirable.

Justin Richards
VLC does a good job at everything to do with media it seems.

Ken
I have used Handbrake several times to make backup copies of commercial DVD's.
https://handbrake.fr/
The user interface is pretty clunky and it took me a while to figure out how to use it and what the best settings were, but once that was sorted out it works as advertised.  I have never used it for video file format conversion but I believe it can do that too. It's probably been updated since I last used it a couple of years ago.

I have also heard good things said of Free HD Video Converter  - but have not used it myself.
http://www.videoconverterfactory.com/free-hd-video-converter/


Can you link an audio track to a video track in iMovie? I am editing a video in iMovie. The video file is independent of the audio file; the video file's audio is what the camera picked up, and the audio file is what our lav mic picked up. After carefully listening/watching to the two tracks, I now have them synced in iMovie. Is there a way to link the two together so they act as one audio/video file in the timeline? Right now I'm exporting it as a movie file to re-import in as one file, but I hope there's a simpler way.

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.

http://homerecording.about.com/od/homestudiobasics/ss/How-To-Replace-Audio-In-iMovie.htm

You can do it easily. I've just done it. Have a look at the link above. Enjoy and have fun! =)


Output is shaky after exporting an edit of several clips in Premiere Pro I am quite new to video editing, and I am trying to make a clip out of different source footage:

sources made from my DSLR are at 24FPS
sources from my video camera are at 24.97FPS
Other sources (video clips) are at 29.97FPS

I wanted to edit those videos and to upload the result. However when I choose the "Vimeo 720p" export preset (29.97FPS), the exported final clip appears to shake from frame to frame, which is annoying.

I wonder whether that could come from the different framerates used throughout the project, and if so, how could I solve the issue?

Maybe your footage are shaky, because you filmed it that way? Try to use effect "Warp Stabilizer".

If it will not work, try to described in detail what you mean by "shake from frame to frame".

Being good at Premiere Pro, and as advised above, use Warp Stabilizer or try changing format. If problem occurs edit your question and give detail


Recording streaming video from my computer How would you go about recording a WebEx session that's being played in the Network Recording Player (not browser)? I cannot save the WebEx session so I thought of having a screen capture software that will record as the WebEx session is playing and then I need to capture the audio part of the WebEx session too. So how would I go about setting it up such that I start the streaming video, then 2-3 hours later I have all that stuff in an AVI file or something of that sort?

Standard screen-recording software such as Camtasia will work for this.

I used the Quicktime screen recorder to record some full-screen video art, and I noticed that it is very compressed, and I didn't see any options to change settings. The rich color of the art was squished into a smaller color space, and there were visible compression artifacts. But I'm sure it is fine for recording tutorials and such.


Final cut pro export file size is huge (despite the small size of the initial video) - how can I shrink it? I'm a complete novice at final cut. I have recorded a dnd game over zoom, it's a 2 hour video, the file saved from zoom is 756mb. I have edited it a bit (just minor stuff, add a couple of images, remove a few outtakes), and now I'm trying to export.
I'm exporting the "master file", format "computer", video codec "H.264". It shows me 11GB estimated file size. Why is it so huge? What setting can I tweak to reduce it?
Do you know why this happens in general? Why would it turn my ~750MB file into ~11GB file?

A Master file export is a multipass high-resolution export. Its meant for archiving or transcoding into other formats.
Also, your Zoom recording is probably in a format what is not natively compatible with FCPX and was transcoded into ProRes during import. ProRes is excellent for editing, saving space is not its purpose.
Depending on where you want to publish your video you should choose different export presets, what will trade size for quality or vice versa. However, I doubt you can export in the same format than the recording from Zoom, so export size might vary significant.


Adobe After Effects: Keying layers based on other layers I have 4 video streams:

a color stream A1
a black and white stream A2, representing the distance of objects in the color stream A1
a color stream B1
a black and white stream B2, representing the distance of objects in B1.

Now I want to key between either stream A1 or B1 depending on which is closer to the camera. Being a programmer myself I thought of solving this by running an operation on every individual pixel of the separate streams in order to generate the output video:

if luminosity of A2 is smaller than luminosity of B2, use the color of A1, otherwise use the color of B1

Is it possible to do this kind of operation in After Effects, or is it possible to write expressions like these that run on every pixel?

There is a way of doing per-pixel logic such as what you want, by using Blending Modes. Basically the different transfer modes in AE can be though of as Boolean logic operations that go on at the pixel level. The different transfer modes are spelled out here.

So I think I've worked out how you'd do it.

Here are the images I'm using: two depth maps and two colour maps:

Picture 1 and depth matte

Picture 2 and depth matte

As you can see, no expense was spared with the render.

OK so in AE I make a comp with just the depth mattes in it. I set the blending mode of the top layer to Darker Color.

The darker color blending mode does this logic on each pixel:

(luminosity of this layer < luma of layer(s) below)? This layer: lower layer

This means the darker object will appear wherever two objects overlap That gives me this result:

Now we have to turn this into a matte for picture 1, where the black will be opaque and white transparent. To get rid of the parts of the comp that aren't relevant to picture 1 I put this comp into a new comp, along with another copy of depth matte 1, which I put on top.

I set the blending mode of the top one to Difference which can be though of as:

(this layer == lower layer)? 0: abs(this layer - lower layer)

and this is the result:

OK, now I put this comp in a new comp with my colour images. This comp goes above image 1.

In this final comp I set the depth map comp as a Luma inverted matte for picture 1. Note that when you do that it turns off the visibility for that layer (see the eye icon is disabled on the top layer). This is the result:

Obviously there's a bit of a problem in that there are semi-opaque areas. So I need some sort of threshold. I could do this a few ways, but the way I like is with the curves effect. I apply curves to the top layer (the depth matte layer) like so:

I originally set this to be a hard step at 50%, but that makes the edges of the matte super sharp, so I made it slope a bit around the mid-point. You can play with this to get it right. That's the advantage of using Curves instead of say the Threshold effect.

Finally I got this result, with the figures correctly sorted on the "z" axis:

I hope this all makes sense, and that it works in real life. Thanks for the question, it was an interesting exercise.

I can't take the time to write the expression script now, but that would be your best bet. Writing an expression which could, perhaps reference a totally separate composition; which includes a key (color key/chart or luma key) with the values you want it to identify, then have the expression perform the action based on matching results.

You'd have to play with it to get it to work, but definitely possibly with some tinkering.


Looking for a suitable lossy video codec to quickly record video in-game I'm working on integrating a video recording functionality inside of a game, so that game footage can be
automatically encoded to video and shared online from within the game.
Currently I've integrated the libtheora codec, but it is too slow to be really functional(it can encode about 4 Full HD frames per second).

So now I'm looking for a faster video codec that should ideally also have the following requirements:

Output file shouldn't be too big (duration of video can go up to 30
minutes and needs to be shareable on-line).
The codec should ideally work for Windows Mac and Linux.
Has a license that is usable in a commercial game, so probably not GPL.

paid options are also possible, I have a small budget available.

Do any of you have a suggestion for an appropriate codec for my specific application?
Thanks!

There is a rule in compression, quality, size and speed, pick two of three.  Video compression is an incredibly complex process that requires a lot of resources on either the CPU, GPU or both.  You can get around that one of two ways, you can either reduce the level of compression (with lossless being the fullest extreme) or you can reduce the quality (making larger approximations means the video has more artifacts, but is simpler to compress).

Unfortunately, in the case of video games, this problem is compounded as the game itself requires the same resources that the video encoding requires.  This means that your best (and really only) option for high quality, high compression encoding of video games is to move the processing off the resources that the game is using.

Most simply, this generally means using specialized real time encoding hardware that is optimized for making real time, high quality streams.  Such hardware is unfortunately not particularly cheap and generally runs around $100 on the low end to over $1000 on the high end, with $200 to $500 being around the point at which it becomes "professional" hardware, depending on the features of the device.  Unfortunately, this solution doesn't help your scenario at all other than suggesting that you may want to include support for some of the most popular real time encoders to be used with your game natively.

You can also try doing it by capturing uncompressed on one system and streaming that data over a really fast network connection to another computer and have that computer do the encoding.  This can be a bit cheaper if you already have a second powerful computer and a fast (gigabit or higher) network, but if you have to build a computer for it, the real time encoder is a better option as it is cheaper than a dedicated PC for the job and will do a better job anyway.  You might consider building your own client that could simplify this process for users.

One thing you can do is use the encoder support built in to some more recent graphics cards.  Some cards have started including their own consumer level encoding support for doing things like streaming.  If you tap in to this functionality, you would be able to make pretty good quality encodes on the fly.

Overall, your best bet though, is probably to capture to a lossless or near-lossless quality file and then encode it after the fact.  You can include an encoder of your choice and batch things up to run during free cycles that the game isn't making use of.  After compression finishes, you can get rid of the full size file.

I'd also suggest at looking at some of the codec options used by software like FRAPS to determine what might work well for that high quality, high speed codec that would make the files a bit smaller, but always keep in mind that the more compression you do, the more it will impact the performance of your game.

You really only have one option. h.264. It is the only codec that can fulfill you needs here. And its the only codec that can play on mobile. You will have to pay licensing to MPEL LA, and probably to the software vendor (most likely core codec). You can also encode using some OS/Video card features (NVENC for example), and possibly save the software costs.