text:
How to avoid Premiere to YouTube upload errors?
When I try to publish videos from Premiere to YouTube, I get this error:
02/24/2016 01:20:41 PM : YouTube({
 "error": {
  "errors": [
   {
    "domain": "youtube.video",
    "reason": "invalidDescription",
    "message": "The request metadata specifies an invalid video description.",
    "locationType": "other",
    "location": "body.snippet.description"
   }
  ],
  "code": 400,
  "message": "The request metadata specifies an invalid video description."
 }
}
) - {
 "error": {
  "errors": [
   {
    "domain": "youtube.video",
    "reason": "invalidDescription",
    "message": "The request metadata specifies an invalid video description.",
    "locationType": "other",
    "location": "body.snippet.description"
   }
  ],
  "code": 400,
  "message": "The request metadata specifies an invalid video description."
 }
}

I've encountered a similar error from both FCPX and Premiere when my title is too long (over 70 characters).  I'm wondering what the rules are for a YouTube description.  I've read that the max character length is 5000, but I didn't find that on an official YouTube page, so I'm not sure.  Plus, my description text is way less than 5000 characters, so It must be something else.  I've tried eliminating most special characters (everything but spaces, periods, minus signs, and capital letters), but I'm still getting this error.
Can anyone point me to an official list of requirements for the title text and description text of YouTube videos?
This is an especially frustrating problem because neither Premiere nor FCPX will warn against these errors before rendering out video.  They'll happily churn away for an hour or more, try to upload, then poop themselves.
edit
A few people have recommended that I export from premiere to my local machine, then upload to youtube through the web interface.  The trouble is, I don't have my company's YouTube password.  I'm on a company workstation which knows the password and should be able to upload, but I don't know it myself.

No need to upload directly to youtube. Just export an mp4 file from Premiere (and wait only once for that hour) and THEN try to upload to youtube via the youtube web page. If something is wrong then just rename the file or re-write the description. No need to render again

Can you just upload with no description and then add it?

@Mulvya @ kazanaki I'm on a company workstation where I don't know the youtube password.  Premiere knows it, not me.  I could ask my boss to change the description, but it'd be better for everyone if it just worked right in the first place.

It could be that the Premiere script is post-processing the description and introducing some illegal characters. To eliminate that possibility, upload a very short video with no description and one with just a couple of characters.

@Mulvya Good idea.  I'll try that after this hour is up.

What did you find out?

Just export as a .mp4, and then upload it to Youtube! Simple as that! Also, I think the "directly uploading" features just make it more confusing. Hope this helps!

As I mentioned in the comments above, I don't have the company password to upload to youtube directly.  I'll edit the question to mention this.

Ok. Sorry about that. I think asking your boss the password to the Youtube channel might be the easiest solution.

You're right, that would be an easy practical solution.  But the company I work for is large enough that giving the keys to its public perception to a single editor is a bad idea.  Also, I don't want to be liable for any unapproved video or text.

Hmmm... then I'm not really sure... I wish I could help. Maybe you could try going onto the Youtube forums. I am not really sure... :(


text:
I'm having trouble scaling strokes in After Effects
I am new to after effects and I am having trouble understanding scaling shapes. I have an initial shape ( image 1 ) that I wish to expand and animate to a wider shape ( image 2 ). But as you can see, the grey stoke also widens when I expand it when I want it to remain the same stroke width as the previous image and just have the shape widen. Basically I want image 1 to animate to a wider shape and look just like image 3 without the stoke becoming thicker. Hope that makes sense.

Any help will be most appreciated.

If you created the shape with the rounded rectangle tool, then you won't initially have the same control over the transform as you would if you'd made the shape with the pen tool.  But there's a simple fix.  Just right-click on "Rectangle Path X" and convert to bezier path.  Now you'll be able to use the selection tool to draw a marquis around the individual corner points and animate them however you like (just tick the stopwatch next to "path" to create keyframes).
Just to be clear, don't animate the "Scale" transform property x value.  This will distort the lines, even after they're converted to a bezier curve.  Instead, animate the actual corners of the path.

Animate the x value of the Size property of the rounded rectangle path, rather than the Scale to leave your strokes the same width. This will let you change the size of the rectangle without affecting the stroke size, or indeed the size of the corner radius.

However the down side is that you can't just drag the corners in the comp window, this will affect the scale, rather than the size property, so you have to use the numbers in the properties panel. If that's not the way you work, convert them to Beziers as @Jason Conrad suggested. The down side of that approach is that with a rounded rectangle you're now dealing with eight bezier points and sixteen handles, rather than two numbers. The up side is that you can work with them in the comp window.

source: Stack Exchange

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

sort: votes


text:
All of my tags from WeedlLon's paid rig are missing when I reopen the project
Okay so for some of you that may not know, there is a YouTuber named weedlion. He does minecraft advanced rigs and such. So I bought his advanced rig with moving teeth, a moving mouth, moving eyebrows, moving eys and such. So I bought his rig, in the right there are the tags. When I insert the rig into cinema 4d the tags come up great. They work fine (btw the tags, when I double click comes up in a new window and I can click on the picture and and select what body parts I want to move and such. But when I save it, close out, and reopen, the tags are gone. I can still open the window, but either way the tags are not there. Can someone help me figure out what's happening so I can import that rig into another project?

Open the project that you want to insert the rig into.  Open the rig by using the "Merge" command under the file menu instead of the usual "Open" command.  This will place a copy of the content in the project upon which you are currently working.  For help with disappearing controls, I'd have to actually see the rig and how you're using it to know what's going on.  It sounds like maybe the HUD elements are only set to display under certain circumstances.  You can change this behavior by right-clicking on any HUD element and changing it's settings, but again, I'm only guessing that this might be your issue.  Any way you could upload some screenshots, or better yet, a video of how you're using the rig?  I could modify my answer to be more helpful.
*edit  I think the tag you're talking about is the Visual Selector Tool.  I found a video that might be helpful to you.

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/


text:
How do I add a crosshair guide to a FCPX angle editor viewer window?
I need to keyframe the Y position transform of a moving subject to keep her in the center of the frame and would like a set of crosshairs to help me do it.  I've seen solutions which employ Motion titles, but I can't get this to work because the clip I'm translating is inside a multicam clip. I've looked, but cannot find, plugins to add this functionality. Thanks

Not familiar with FCPX however in Vegas Pro there is a button to add a grid to the preview, do you see any such button near your preview screen? Yes, I know a grid is overkill, but at least you would get a crosshair out of it.

We've got a title safe/ action safe overlay in the dropdown switch next to the viewer, but there are no other options for other types of overlays afaik.

It is indeed impossible to put a title over a clip inside a multi cam clip... Unless you turn that clip into a compound clip. Then you can add whatever overlay you want to it.
So you will have:

keyframed clip with crosshair overlay
inside a compound clip
inside a multicam clip

Just right click your the clip inside your multicam clip and choose New Compound Clip ( ⌥  + G )

The best workflow I've found so far is pulling the left and right edges of the viewer frame inward to isolate the center of the picture.  This is obviously far from ideal.


text:
How to have a non square video inside a video?
Is there any free software available for green-screening? I prefer Linux, but Windows is also fine.

Any of the tools mentioned here will do this:
http://video.stackexchange.com/questions/12208/what-is-good-software-for-video-editing-under-linux/12209#12209

The title of this question doesn't really match the question asked in its body.  I recommend that OP change one or the other to clarify.  A circular inset could easily be achieved without chroma keying, for example.

Any relatively basic non-linear editor should support greenscreen and what is available changes often enough to put this in the realm of a product recommendation question that is better answered by an up to date Google search for products.

Depends on what your definition of good green screen is.
In terms of free software to do green screen well...Only one that I can even think of that does keying is Da Vinci Lite which is free from blackmagic's website.  It is pretty complex and pro based, but with a little searching around you might find what you want.  I am not sure if you can technically do green screen with it though.

Yes, Resolve can do this, though I'm not sure if it is suppoted in lite or not.  Here is a tutorial I found on it with some quick searching.

Resolve can greenscreen, but it's not made for it.  It doesn't, for instance, have built-in spill suppression or light wrap.  Because it's node based, you can hack your way around these limitations, but it's still quicker to greenscreen with purpose-built apps and plugins.  Also, resolve currently won't export an alpha channel, even in codecs which support alphas.

you can use OBS which can key. it is livesreaming software so the keyer is meant for face cams, but it should work.

@JasonConrad I understand its not designed for it, but the OP asked for free applications that are good at it, and I don't think that truly exists

don't get me wrong.  I'm a huge proponent of Resolve.  I'm just saying, don't expect to get an alpha channel out of it.

@JasonConrad Absolutely agreed

If you don't mind learning there is a tool that has them all, green screen, video editing, 3D, compositing...
The name's Blender


text:
Wavy screen and lines showing now and again in live streaming cam
I have setup a trial live streaming cam in my chicken coop to test this little camera. I am seeing some waves and lines in the feed now and again.
Does anyone know why this happens and what the fix is? I am using the RCA / BNC connector to connect to my video in and this is a 12v system running through 100' of wire.
Here is an example video (around :10 shows the most...):

I have this connected to my gamer PC which is more than powerful enough to process all this video if that could be an issue. Might it be the video capture mechanism? If so, anyone have a good card in mind?

That appears to be analog signal degradation resulting in a loss of frame syncronization.  You may need to add a video amplifier on the end near the camera to boost the signal enough to get it to your computer or possibly use a device that can convert it to digital and stream it over a network connection directly.


text:
What is this cable for?
I'm tidying up and have found a cable that came with a Lumix camera.
It has a micro-usb port at one and and white and yellow phono plugs at the other - just like this one.
My question is, what is it for?
Can I use it to output pictures from a Nexus to a TV?
Cheers

What's the model number of the camera?

Yellow and white generally mean video (yellow) and mono audio or left channel audio (white).  It is fairly typical for a usb like port to be used as a video connector when the proper cable is inserted.  It sometimes even uses the same exact port.
Note that it requires special hardware in the camera.  You can't simply plug it into any USB port and expect it to work.  RCA's carry an analog signal while USB is digital.  There is however a system called MHL that is often present in smartphones that allows output of an HDMI signal over the USB port, though external power is often required.

authors: Валентин Никин


text:
Free software to synchronize audio and video recorded at the same time
So I just filmed something using two webcams and a separate audio recorder. This means I have 3 files, 2 video, 1 audio and they all need to be synced and then I need some sort of software which will allow me to put all three files into it, sync them together (I clapped at the beginning so I can Sync the Video and Audio) and then throughout the video, choose whether I want File 1 or File 2 being shown.
Free Software is my only option as I don't have funds to buy.

possible duplicate of Non-Linear Video Editor for Free or Cheap That Does These Things

Possibly, but that was all jibber jabber to me :/ I'm new with this :/

I disagree that it's a duplicate of http://avp.stackexchange.com/questions/2389/non-linear-video-editor-for-free-or-cheap-that-does-these-things because the latter seeks extra features including a chroma keyer, and limits price to $100.

What you need is called a non-linear video editor or NLE.  Basically you can load in the files and then you put them on a "timeline".  Each audio track and video track goes on a horizontal track.  You move the clips right to left on the timeline to synchronize them and once you have them synchronized, you can cut out portions of the top most clip that you don't want and the bottom clip will take its place since it is under the top clip.  You can also add in transitions to switch between the clips.
There is a lot more to video editing as you get in to it, but that should give you the primer you need to get up and running.  Take a look at the duplicate post for suggestions of some NLE software you can use for free.

Cheers, great answer, especially for a beginner like me! Do you have any (Free!) software you would recommend?

@ZedSpencer-Milnes - see the question I marked this as being a duplicate of.  It lists numerous options.  I do not personally stay up on the free tools because I own professional tools that are far more capable and easier to use.


text:
Detecting a particular colour
Hey, I have a canon DSLR 650D, and I want to know if there are any settings or features in the camera that will only catch/accept the predefined color. For example, I just want to capture red, and everything else should be in black and white.
Please don't suggest Adobe Photoshop.

This question appears to be off-topic because it is about photography and should be asked at http://photo.stackexchange.com

Note for Mods, this question has also been asked on Photography so this can simply be deleted rather than migrated.

For stills, or video?

This question appears to be off-topic because it is about photography and has already been asked at the photography stack exchange

You can't do advanced manipulation like that in camera.  In general, most DSLRs are limited to relatively simple or special stuff like limited HDR processing, simple B/W or basic cropping.  Advanced editing like selective coloration require post production work and often require some matte painting to get it to work the way you want.  It doesn't have to be Photoshop, something like GIMP could also do it, but you can't do it in camera.

No there is not feature you want to.

So I have to use Adobe Photoshop ?

I think yes, but Photoshop allows you to create "action" so you can do it very fast for bunch of photos

Photoshop also allows us to blur the image but camera provides blurring effect so I think there will be a way for doing that

@MoeedFarooqui That's some nice reasoning there... according to that your camera should be able to do everything that Photoshop does.


text:
Final Cut X Events missing
Added a new external drive. Moved Final Cut X Folders to new drive. Now Events and Projects missing. I know files need to be relinked, but I'm not even seeing the Event folders. I relocated the FCP folders back to original drive, but Events/Projects still missing. What do I need to do to regain original configuration?

This is just a guess, but when the projects and events folders are on an external drive, they need to be at the drive's root level for FCPX to see them.  So, when you had them on your external drive, the file path would need to be: External_Drive/Final Cut Events/YourEvent and External_Drive/Final Cut Projects/YourProject.  They will not show up any other way.
When they're on your system drive, they need to be at ~/Movies.  When you move projects and events, it's better to do it from within Final Cut (instead of Finder) because Final Cut keeps track of all of the symbolic links.  To do this, choose File->Move Project (or duplicate project, duplicate event, move event, duplicate event).


text:
Premiere workflow: Maintain multichannel sync from dailies through edit lock to sound?
I am volunteer editing a production with professional sound recording and need to deliver picture lock to the audio dept so they can add foley, mix, and master.  I've delivered a few tests, but it's clear that the workflow needs improvement.  In the first test, I just edited and delivered camera scratch audio, but the audio dept isn't able to re-sync the master recordings to camera scratch.  Second test worked for them, but made my edit timeline a nightmare with 8x more audio tracks visible than necessary.  Looking for a better way to work.  Goals are:
• Sync Zoom 8-channel (per file) .WAV files to camera, either via waveform or timecode, maintaining camera timecode. This is the easy part.
• Combine synced A/V into “Merged Clips” (or any outside-the-box method of syncing audio to video) where the resulting clip channel format is “multichannel,” not “mono,” so that editing all eight channels into an adaptive audio timeline track results in a single track, not eight.
• Output stems for final mixdown with synced proxy video. Quicktime container format worked to transfer 8 streams of mono from 8 separate mono timeline tracks (A1-A8), but a better solution moving forward should use “8-mono mapped to Adaptive” clips, nested in adaptive audio timeline tracks (just A1). The resulting file must be multichannel, whether it’s 8 streams of mono or one stream of 8-mono, etc.  I’d prefer a more compressed video codec than prores proxy.
•Give the sound guy an .AAF, .XML, or similar, which accurately conveys the edited timeline with references to the original 8-channel .WAV files.  This is the ultimate goal.  The particular DAW he's using is Reaper, but DAW-agnostic answers are preferable.

According to this document from Adobe, "Note:
You cannot modify audio channels of a merged clip. They must be mono by default. However, you can still reorder and enable/disable all of the available audio channels from the component clips." https://helpx.adobe.com/premiere-pro/using/clips-channels-tracks.html

So, if merging clips is the way to sync sound in Premiere, and merged clips must be mono by default, it stands to reason that synced multichannel audio is impossible in premiere.  Hard to believe that an entire industry is using a "workaround."

I still have not found a good solution to this problem, though I've posted my best efforts as an answer below.  Our engineer has recently added AATranslator to his toolkit, but we're still struggling to get that to work.  PP2019 won't let you unmerge merged clips but AATranslator requires unmerged clips.  Subsequences are cumbersome.  I've even tried DaVinci Resolve, with no success.

The Subsequence Method:
This is the first method I developed to work in this situation.  I'm posting it as an answer here because it might be a sufficient answer for someone with a similar problem.  However, I do not consider it a good or elegant solution.  It has serious drawbacks which complicate the editing process (Subsequences don't display audio waveforms on the timeline, using Shift+O to open in source monitor is awkward, e.g.). I mention Reaper in this answer because it's the specific DAW we're targeting, but the advice might be generalized to other DAWs. Vordio is a translation tool which works in this context, but I cannot comment on its efficacy in others; YMMV

Select all of the Zoom audio, right-click on it, and “select modify audio channels.” Change number of audio clips to 1, set clip channel format to adaptive, click OK.
Create a new sequence from the file menu, making sure that the audio tracks are adaptive.  This first sequence is just for sync dailies, so you only need one adaptive (or stereo) track on A1 for camera scratch, and a Poly on A2 for Zoom audio (with # of channels depending on how many sources used by the recordist.
String out the video by selecting it all, and clicking the automate to sequence button.  The camera scratch audio should land on A1 when you do this.
Drop Zoom audio on A2 and sync each clip, one-by-one, either by using the “syncronize” command, or by lining up slates
Once you’re done syncronizing, delete A1 camera scratch.  You don’t need it any more.
Select each A/V clip pair in turn and “Link”.  This step’s kinda optional, but without it, the Subsequences generated in the next step won’t be linked.
Select each linked pair in turn and “Make Subsequence”
Re-name all of the subsequences.
Now, make a new timeline for editing.  Since double clicking subsequences in the project browser doesn’t open them in the source viewer like regular clips, you’ll want to use Shift+O (That’s an Oh, not a zero) instead.

Edit your material
Once your edit is locked, you need to flatten the subsequences before sending to reaper.  Follow these steps.
Basically, make sure the “insert and overwrite nested sequences as nests or individual clips button” is disabled (white, not blue)
Make sure selection follows playhead is enabled
Lock any tracks you don’t want to affect, and make sure the sequence targeting is active for the track you do want to affect
Repeat the keyboard sequence: [ x ] [ f ] [ . ] [ shift+3 ] (ex, eff, period, shift key and number three together) for every clip in the timeline.
Now, to export a project for mixing, follow these steps:

Command+M
Set Format to Quicktime, Chose Apple Prores Proxy from the Preset dropdown. Under the “Basic Video Settings” section of the “Video” tab, uncheck the box next to width and height and change either number to a quarter of their original size.  The other number should scale by the same amount automatically.  If it doesn’t, make sure the link icon is active.
Under the “Audio Channel Configuration” section of the “Audio” Tab, change “Output Channels” to match the number of channels in the poly wave.  Make sure all of the other, “Basic Audio Settings” match the quality of audio the recordist started with.
Hit Queue, and let Media Encoder do its thing.
Now, to translate via Vordio for Reaper, follow these steps:

In Premiere, do File->Export->Final Cut Pro XML.  Use the default Final Cut XML version.
Download Vordio if you don’t already have it (http://vordio.net/download/) , and open it.  In the “Convert Project” tab, click “Browse” by the “Source File” field, and navigate to wherever you saved the XML.   Browse for an Output Folder the same way, and click convert (all of the other settings can be left at default)

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


text:
How to make video with a scrolling graphic?
I want to make video like this

I am noob in video making...give some direction to start

You create the whole graphic as a still image - for the above, likely a 1080 x 28000 px image to start with.
Then I'd import the image into either Premiere or After Effects based on what you're more comfortable using.
Then you set a keyframe on the initial position of the graphic - then move the graphic horizontally to the left, all the way to the end, move your timeline to the end of the project and drop another keyframe for the ending position.
Then you'll likely have to tinker with the project length and keyframe positions to fine tune the timing of the virtual camera pan.
There's a ton of tutorials available to accomplish a simple task like animating an image:

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


text:
Why does Adobe Premiere increase video size even when nothing has been done?
I record my screen using Adobe Captivate. A 10 minutes recording results in a video of 15 MB in size, with acceptable quality for educational purposes.
Now I take that video into Adobe Premiere to edit. However, even if I just open it and export it, I can't get that 15 MB size anymore and it always export in a much higher size.
Adobe Captivate's recording info:
Windows Properties:

Media Info:

As you can see, Captivate records videos in MP4 format. Thus in Adobe Premiere I choose H.264 as the export format to get MP4 file type. Now no matter what I do to reduce the size, it never gets less than 25 MB. This is so frustrating, specially that these two apps come from the same company. Even with any Preset and even if I reduce the Target Bitrate to the lowest value, still I can't get below 25 MB.
How can I export in Premiere so that I get the same size as what I had in Captivate?

I can't believe that after two weeks this question got no answer.

You cannot do this with Premiere.
The media info of the recording tell us that you need a maximum video bitrate of 0.108 Mbps to achieve 15 Mbyte. However Premiere's smallest available bitrate is 0.19 Mbps which would yield a 23 Mbyte final video (including the audio) in theory which is pretty close to what you see. As far as I know you cannot get below that.
If this bothers you, contact Adobe for help. Technically there is no obvious reason to stop at 0.19 Mbps. Tools like ffmpeg can work with even lower bitrates with this codec.


text:
Satellite DVR: Cant play recording on computer
I have a Satellite STB which saves .mpg files.
I can't play them through vlc and avidemux gives me a blurred output?
Is there any way I can edit these recordings?
EDIT: Here is a link to a very short clip in this format (6.6MB).

mediainfo output:
General
Complete name                            : CCTV-11[02JUN2012-183712].mpg
Format                                   : MPEG-PS
File size                                : 3.94 GiB
Duration                                 : 1h 43mn
Overall bit rate mode                    : Variable
Overall bit rate                         : 5 473 Kbps

Video
ID                                       : 234 (0xEA)
Format                                   : MPEG Video
Format version                           : Version 2
Format profile                           : Main@Main
Format settings, BVOP                    : Yes
Format settings, Matrix                  : Custom
Format settings, GOP                     : M=3, N=12
Duration                                 : 1h 43mn
Bit rate mode                            : Variable
Bit rate                                 : 5 108 Kbps
Maximum bit rate                         : 10 000 Kbps
Width                                    : 720 pixels
Height                                   : 576 pixels
Display aspect ratio                     : 4:3
Frame rate                               : 25.000 fps
Standard                                 : PAL
Color space                              : YUV
Chroma subsampling                       : 4:2:0
Bit depth                                : 8 bits
Scan type                                : Interlaced
Scan order                               : Top Field First
Compression mode                         : Lossy
Bits/(Pixel*Frame)                       : 0.493
Stream size                              : 3.68 GiB (93%)

Audio
ID                                       : 192 (0xC0)
Format                                   : MPEG Audio
Format version                           : Version 1
Format profile                           : Layer 2
Duration                                 : 1h 43mn
Bit rate mode                            : Constant
Bit rate                                 : 256 Kbps
Channel(s)                               : 2 channels
Sampling rate                            : 48.0 KHz
Compression mode                         : Lossy
Delay relative to video                  : -921ms
Stream size                              : 189 MiB (5%)

I'm not sure, but I think .mpg is just a container which can contain different codecs. To diagnose your problem, could you maybe post some more information on the video? Running MediaInfo and posting the output here will help people to answer your question.

@BartArondson done

OK, not sure what it might be... but googling around shows that someone else had the same problem and fixed it with a remux to mkv. As Avidemux is also showing you a weird output I'm guessing the stream might be damaged (no idea, just a guess). Look here on how to repair it.

@BartArondson ProjectX demuxed the video correctly, but the demuxed audio stutters constantly.. now i'm looking for a tool to demux the audio correctly

@BartArondson I added a link to an example file

The sample plays fine on my mac with Mplayer, although it has some interlacing effects. Maybe you can use that program to play the video?

@BartArondson gah, works now - thanks for your help. The fact that you could play it fine gave me the clue that it might be a codec issue (see answer). Sorry for the waste of time.

Okay this has a stupid answer.
I installed the ubuntu-restricted-extras package and avidemux opens this file fine now.
Looks like I didn't have the right codecs.

Don't forget to mark this answer as accepted, such that this question is marked as answered.


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

that's the image, but i can't quite figure out how to do this.

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.


text:
Which tools are most likely used to create animated video (i.e. corporate commercials)?
Animated video is sometimes very well done and extremely attractive and captivating. I would like to know what tools are typically used to create this kind of video. I specifically have in mind the kind of animation typically used in corporate training or commercials. Here's an example:

I can't be really sure, but most of that can be done using After Effects and a simple screen recording. You record the screen of a phone, put that into after effects, get a picture of a hand and put that into after effects, and just move it around with the frames.
The whole of screen recording could also be made using Adobe Flash or After Effects instead of actually taking it, but it would take a while... This way you could create a minimal and simple version of your app or something, which might be more eye-pleasing and less complicated to the audience.

If you are a Mac user, Apple have a motion graphics suite called Motion 5 which is available for $49.99 USD. There are some templates that come with it and many commercial templates can be purchased and customised. In my experience, Motion excels in very short, but snazzy animations and is quite resource intensive.
After Effects is one of the most popular animation programs. It is an Adobe product that works on both Windows and Mac and can be used with a license that costs $20 USD / month.
A free alternative to both of these is a 3D software called Blender which can also make 2d animations. It is open-source software and works on Mac, Windows and Linux. It is available at https://blender.org
However, it is arguably more suited to technically minded users and may be frustrating to learn how to use. It is an incredibly powerful though and feature rich.


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What are the pros and cons of the Microsoft Surface Pro 4 for video editing?
I'm in the market for a new computer. I really, really want mobility. I have been considering the newest Microsoft Surface Pro 4. I would get the model with the highest ram and processing specs. From reading the specs, it seems to me that it would be plenty powerful enough to do standard video editing (1080p or less), and with the dock, probably recording over USB3 just fine as well. Combined with external monitors, it seems I would have the best of both worlds (mobile and powerful).
But I might be wrong. What are the pros and cons that I may not be seeing?

As you mentioned, mobility would be your biggest pro by far. With the Surface Pro with highest specs (as you mentioned), you'll get a very competitive machine. The biggest thing you'll be missing (from my perspective) is a dedicated graphics card. You can probably still pull off multiple monitors, but it's not going to be pushing it for sure. The Surface Book actually does have a dedicated GPU, and could combine that mobility with a powerful graphics card (it does come at quite a bit extra cost, though).
The best thing I've found with my Surface (a Surface Pro 3, admittedly, but still in the same family) is that I can connect a mouse and external keyboard via Bluetooth (was never a fan of the Type Cover) and still have my USB port free.


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How to light a scene with a window and monitor in the background?
I have a scene where I want to sit on a chair with a big 43 inch monitor and a big window behind me. I am having headaches. I already put a shader in front of the window that reduces its brightness. I also lowered the brightness of my monitor as far as possible and it is getting better.
Now I need some advice on how to execute 3-point lightning to achieve a nice and bright scene like in an interview.
Is it possible to use the window and monitor to my advantage as a backlight? How would you set up the scene? I would be happy if you can post a sketch and some explanation.

Your foreground lighting must exceed your background lighting, or else you'll have to manually increase your iris/gain a lot, which is not ideal because it will washout the window and monitor.
I would recommend minimizing the amount of window in the shot. Daylight is both extremely bright and inconsistent, even minute by minute. I'd settle with your second still shot and blocking the window completely with a shade. Daylight interviews are atypical mostly because of inconsistency, but also, the closed and controlled nature of a slightly darkened room gives the intimate feel most interviewers are going for.
By "3-point lighting" I assume you mean to say that you have three light sources to illuminate the foreground. This is plenty to work with, but using the monitor and window to your advantage is not worthwhile.
With three light sources you'll want to put one low and center and the others slightly high and on each side. (By low and high, I mean relative to the subject's face). The low center fills the deep parts of the face, like the eyes, under the nose, and neck. The high sides fill everything else. Generally, low center will not need to be as bright af the high sides.
I expect the room has a ceiling light, so you can use that to your advantage. It's likely the shot will look better with it on. If not, I recommend changing the bulb, because ceiling light off will leave a lot of your background dark.
I'd try the follow and adjust as necessary. The green arrow is the cam and the purple arcs are the lights. The gray circle is a mystery of mobile image editing ;)


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Can duplicate frames effect motion?
I understand that sometimes when editing, converting, and rendering new videos you can end up with duplicate frames. In other words, two successive frames can be exactly identical.
To what extent can duplicate frames affect the appearance of motion in a video? I've seen the charge that it can make motion appear faster or slower, but I don't really buy this as one frame in a 30 FPS video is only 0.033 seconds. One frame on a 15 FPS video might be noticeable, but again, I doubt it.

What effect you see will depend on the content, and your own perception. In a static scene dupes will have no visual effect, but they always lengthen the clip.
With motion in the scene, a duplicated or skipped frame might be quite noticeable. I usually find them visually disruptive, but others might not -- it depends partly on what you're trained to see, and how engaged you are in the content.
On the other hand, a repetitive sequence of duplicated images will generally not be disturbing, though a trained eye may see it. This is the essence of 3::2 pulldown, for example. That doesn't serve to lengthen or shorten the scene, but to convert a taking frame rate to a presentation frame rate.


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How to precisely trim video with ffmpeg? -ss and -t are off by more than a half second
To put this plainly, -ss and -t don't work very well or even consistently.
I'm trying to take a single input file1 and only encode from a certain start point, -ss, and for only a certain time, -t. I've checked and double checked my in times are what I want, down to the frame (calculated to milliseconds2), but ffmpeg adds anywhere from 10 to 19 frames to the beginning, which is more than a half a second. I need frame precise cuts at the in points. Out points can be off by a few if necessary.
I've run the following commands all with exactly the same results on 13 different files. All add the 10 to 19 frames to the beginning.
ffmpeg -ss 00:00:34.600 -t 00:26:40.400 -i 002.m2t [commands] 01.mp4
ffmpeg -i 002.m2t -ss 00:00:34.600 -t 00:26:40.400 [commands] 01.mp4
ffmpeg -ss 00:00:34.600 -i 002.m2t -t 00:26:40.400 [commands] 01.mp4

The [commands] section is exactly
-filter_complex "scale=852:480,setsar=1","eq=brightness=0.05:saturation=1.0" -crf 24 -c:a aac -b:a 64k -ac 1 -loglevel quiet -stats -movflags +faststart

I find many with the same issue, but no solutions. I thought at first that putting -ss and -t before -i would work, but as you can see I've tried moving them around and get exactly the same results.
Is there really no way to cut a video with frame precision in ffmpeg?

In the documentation I found -seek_timestamp which says

This option enables or disables seeking by timestamp in input files with the -ss option. It is disabled by default. If enabled, the argument to the -ss option is considered an actual timestamp, and is not offset by the start time of the file. This matters only for files which do not start from timestamp 0, such as transport streams.

I know m2t (see footnote 1) is a transport stream, so I tried using -seek_timestamp, but I get errors that seem to be about parsing the arguments. I've tried putting it in different places in the command too. Maybe the answer is here, but I'm having trouble with the syntax.

Footnotes

The input files are MT2 HDV recorded via firewire from an old Sony cam direct to Vegas Pro.
I import the files to Vegas Pro and trim them on the timeline like any other edit job, but instead of rendering in Vegas Pro, I export the events to eventually derive the ffmpeg commands, with -ss and -t effectively pulled directly from the Vegas Pro timeline. When I do this, the -ss 00:00:34.600 in the command above  actually came from the Vegas Pro events like this: 00:00:34;18. The 18 at the end is 18 frames. Since this is 30 fps footage, I calculate the milliseconds needed for the ffmpeg command by dividing by 30. 18/30 = .6.

For TS files, ss should come after the file name. ss before -i relies on a global index in the container which TS files don't have. TS files timestamps also can be a bit offset since there's a delay often added to allow the streaming receiver to get initialized properly. Can you share a small sample of this input? ffmpeg -i 002.m2t -copyts -c copy -t 50 sample.ts and also an image of the expected frame for 00:00:34.600

@Gyan Thanks for waiting. Here's the expected frame for 00:00:34.600 and the copied first 50 seconds. I had to run the copy command without -copyts but verified that they are identical and can reproduce the issue on sample.ts when converting it to mp4.

Why did copyts fail?

@gyan Not sure. Don't remember.

@Gyan Did you find anything? Could you reproduce the issue on the sample file?

I'll look at it today.

I had a look. Slightly involved, so I'll post an answer in the morning.

@Gyan Wow, I didn't think it would be such an issue. If you get something that works, there's a 100 rep bounty in it for you.

Related: Why are there missing frames in the Vegas Pro editing timeline?

Transport Stream files are meant for streaming, have no global header, and may be sliced or joined together without the help of a format-aware utility. Because of this, there'a a lot of metadata structure within a TS file that allows them to be playable even after such operations. What that allows, in turn, is having multiple streams of different duration starting and stopping at different times. A format-aware utility like ffmpeg will parse the metadata and respect these features whereas a video editor which is mainly designed for a static file-based and indexed media usually won't - not with full fidelity anyway.
In the sample, there are two streams - 1 video and 1 audio. Run the following to identify the start_time of each stream
ffprobe -show_entries stream=codec_type,start_time -v 0 -of compact=p=1:nk=0 sample.ts

For your file, this results in
program|stream|codec_type=video|start_time=1.978233
stream|codec_type=audio|start_time=1.400000

stream|codec_type=video|start_time=1.978233
stream|codec_type=audio|start_time=1.400000

Ignore the first two lines. You can see that the video start is delayed relative to the audio. FFmpeg respects this delay. Your editor likely doesn't. It will either ignore the surplus audio or desync it with respect to the video.
So, 00:00:34.600 in the editing timeline actually references absolute timestamp of 34.6 + 1.978233 = 36.578233.
So, to accurately extract the desired frame, you need to know the delay of the video stream. Now, ffmpeg, by default, removes the starting offset i.e. it subtracts the start_time of the earliest starting stream before ingesting into its processing pipeline (unless copyts is set).
So, without copyts, the video start_time will be modified to 1.978233 - 1.400000 = 0.578233 and the desired frame will be at 34.6 + 0.578233 = 35.178233.
So, run
ffmpeg -i sample.ts -ss 00:00:35.178233 -t 00:26:40.400 [commands] out.mp4

You can use
ffprobe -show_entries format=start_time:stream=start_time -select_streams v -v 0 -of compact=p=1:nk=0 sample.ts

to get
program|stream|start_time=1.978233

stream|start_time=1.978233
format|start_time=1.400000

where the relative offset for the video is 1.978233 - 1.400000 = 0.578233


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How to fix invisible image cropping in Vegas Pro
Can anyone help me out, I don't even know how to search this on google, I just do small editing from time to time...

The red lines where put by me on the screenshot.
The image (is the text) is cropping when it reaches some "virtual line", both on top and bottom, how can I correct that to crop only on the black bars?
I'm using Sony Vegas Pro 15
Thank you all

The easiest way to fix this is to right-click on the pan/crop area and select Match Output Aspect.


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Is "redmere" technology in HDMI cables useful or is it marketing?
I'm in the market for some longer HDMI cables and came across HDMI cables with Redmere technology inside. The promise is that:

It allows HDMI cables to be manufactured at lower cost with the same results as regular HDMI cables. By using a lot less copper, it allows for thinner and more flexible cables.

That sounds great to me. I'm looking to get several cables at 25 feet and 50 feet and will have to travel with them. Thinner, means lighter, means money and backbones saved.
However, cables seems a difficult industry with a lot of marketing ploys to get you to buy what you don't need. Is Redmere technology significantly better in practice? I've looked at a lot of HDMI cables on Amazon today and only one advertised Redmere, but almost none of them tell you the wire or cable thickness, so it's hard to compare. Worse, for my needs, weight is important, but they don't tell you that either.

Example product advertising Redmere HDMI:

RedMere chip enables a clear signal over long distances and allows for a thinner, more pliable wire gauge for improved cable flexibility and portability
Description on Amazon HDMI cable with Redmere.

Side note:
If there's anything I should want in 25 and 50 lengths of HDMI, please let me know.
Update:
I did buy two 50 foot lengths of the Amazon listing linked above. They work great, but don't really seem much lighter or flexible than regular cables. Maybe a little, but not much. One issue is that they are not bi-directional. They have a "source" end and a "monitor" end. I didn't realize that until I tried to use one in the field and had it revered. I almost came back here to complain about a DOA. Considering the price and solid construction, I'll probably buy more and of different lengths too, but I don't notice the Redmere doing anything special. I'll update again with actual weight and circumference when I remember and get a chance.
If you do know anything about Redmere specs and actual quality/weight ratios or something, please do answer.

I asked for opinions in chat, if anyone's interested.

In what context are you using the cables? The answer may differ if you are using the cables for set technology or for connecting a camera to a recorder, etc.

@MichaelLiebman Primarily, it will be to record a laptop send. I typically split off from a projector. In the future, I hope to also take in the output from a Sony cam, specifically, the HDR-FX7.

I've used a 25ft HDMI with RedMere purchased from Amazon for about 3 years now.  Connecting a MacPro to a Yamaha ARx3070 Home theater amp. Predominantly for HiRes audio. I was skeptical as well. At the time of purchase, I wasn't able to find info online regarding RedMere. My understanding is the RedMere boosts the signal over the extended distance. Basically making it an "active" cable without requiring its own power source. With standard HDMI cables, I often experienced handshake issues upon power up between the computer and amp. Not an issue with this cable. I don't get how the cable being single direction still sends a signal in the opposite direction.  But clearly, my Mac receives a signal and is aware of the details from the amp. The funny thing is, since I installed this cable, I've not been able to get the two devices to connect with any other HDMI cable. Even with a HDMI cable that had previously worked.
I came across this thread researching RedMere again as I'm purchasing a new active HDMI 2.1 one direction fiber optic/ethernet cable with additional AC power connections on each end. I'm curious if it will work in place and how the ethernet functions in one direction. It had better.  At 20X the cost I'm also expecting it give a good old-fashioned handy before bed, if not a hummer. Fingers crossed...


text:
How to recover a video that has no time index?
I have a wmv video file that was recorded using widows media encoder. However, while recording, the computer lost power and the video is was not "completed". The video will play in most player, however, it reads that it is 0:00:00 minutes long. So when I try to seek the video the player either freaks out and crashes or it won't do anything.
I tried loading the video in Vegas Pro, but it didn't work. Vegas Pro sees it as an infinitely small clip, rather than the whole thing. So I can't edit it either.
I was able to convert it to an Mp4 in handbrake, but now that I have to do some editing on that, I'm going to lose significant quality. I would rather not have to do this and just be able to find the index file.
What can I do about this? Is there a program or feature in some program that can reanalyze the video and give it a proper time index (if that's what this is called)?

I've had some success with ASFTools and Steeper WMV Repair. Both of these are older tools (Steeper is from 2005) so may not be able to handle later versions of WMV, but they're worth a try.

Yes, wonderful! ASFTools was able to fix it. Steeper was not. In ASFTools I first clicked on "Make Seekable", but then it suggested clicking on "Lost Chunks". That fixed it. Not sure what that means technically speaking, but it is now seekable and I can edit the original video.

If you know and understand the technicals of how this works, please consider answering my next question: What was technically wrong with this unseekable wmv?


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What exactly does the video rendering quality option do in Sony Vegas Pro?
I have created a video with Sony Vegas Pro 8.5 with an intro that includes graphics, pan/crop events, and generated text. There is also a "lower third" banner right after it.
What is odd to me is that there are quite a few issues when I render it with "best" video rendering qualtiy, while "preview" gives me no troubles. While on "best" the problem is that the text, most of the images, and anything with a pan/crop event are blurred and/or wiggle. You can especially see the wiggle on the portrait images once the next image starts scrolling up and on the third slide for the duration it is showing.
Here is a "best" sample of the video on YouTube.
Here is a "preview" sample of the video on YouTube.
This makes no sense to me. Why is the "preview" setting better than the "best" setting? What exactly does this setting do? Vegas Pro 8.5, if it matters.
Sample Render settings:

Project properties:

Here are some snap shots that show it looks crisp with "preview" but not "best".
            Crisp "preview" snapshot on left                     Not crisp "best" snapshot on right.

Hypothesis : the preview mode uses uncompressed video whereas your export is in MPEG-2, which even at it's best settings will produce artifacts such as those observed.

@audionuma I should mention that these artifacts are consistent across all formats tried. mpeg-2, mp4, HDV, etc. I wasted a lot of time this evening realizing that it was this setting. I tried it last because "preview" implies lesser quality than "best". My question was originally "How to fix this" but tried this as a last ditch so I can say I tried everything. I was not expecting it to fix it.

This is the explanation for the four quality modes, as provided by Vegas tech support long ago:

Quality: Best
Scaling: bi-cubic/integration
Field Handling: on
Field Rendering: on (setting dependent)
Framerate Resample/IFR: on (switch dependent)

Quality: Good
Scaling: bi-linear
Field Handling: on
Field Rendering: on (setting dependent)
Framerate Resample/IFR: on (switch dependent)

Quality: Preview
Scaling: bi-linear
Field Handling: off
Field Rendering: off
Framerate Resample/IFR: always off

Quality: Draft
Scaling: point sample
Field Handling: off
Field Rendering: off
Framerate Resample/IFR: always off

Scaling:
These methods come into play when conforming sources that differ from
  the output size. They are also used when panned, cropped or resized in
  track motion.
Bi-Cubic/Integration - Best image resizing algorithm available in
  Vegas. Quality differences will be most noticeable when using very
  large stills or stretching small sources.
Bi-linear - Best compromise between speed and quality. This method
  will produce good results in most cases.
Point Sampling - Fast but produces poor results.

Field Handling:
This refers to the field conformance stage of Vegas's video engine.
  This includes Interlaced to Progressive conversion, Interlaced to
  interlaced output when scaling, motion or geometric Video FX and
  Transitions are involved. Skipping this stage can sometimes result in
  bad artifacts when high motion interlaced sources are used.

Field Rendering:
When the output format is interlaced, Vegas will internally render at
  the field rate (twice the frame rate) to achieve smooth motion and FX
  interpolation.

Frame Rate Resample / IFR (Interlace Flicker Reduction):
Frame Rate Resample:
This kicks in when speed changes are made through Velocity Envelopes
  and/or event stretching. In can also be used when up-converting low
  frame rate sources. This only kicks in if the resample switch is
  turned on and quality is set to good or best.
Interlace Flicker Reduction:
This kicks in if the event switch is turned on and quality is set to
  good or best. See Vegas' documentation for a description of this
  switch.

Thank you. Very valuable information. Since Preview and Best differ by three of the four settings, which do you suppose was causing the issues?

My guess is field rendering. Can you post your render and project setting screenshots?

I've added snapshots of the render settings to the question.

Post project settings as well.

Mind you - 2 mbps is very low for 1080p output. It should be ~5x that. If you want a final output around 2 mbps then you should recompress the Vegas exported file with a tool like Handbrake or ffmpeg.etc

Added project settings. I've been told that before about the bitrate and use Handbrake of ffmpeg to recompress. Two things. 1) I don't really notice a quality difference, 2) This would add significant processing time to my workflow.

Why is your project settings so odd? For one thing, if you're working with NTSC widescreen footage, you want 720x480 with the appropriate pixel aspect ratio. And if you need the output to be 1080p, then the external encoder route is recommended even more, as you can select a scaler like Lanczos, which is higher quality than the bicubic/bilinear available in Vegas and preserves thin lines and edges better than them.

It's HDV footage. I don't know why the settings are that way.

I don't know, in Vegas 8.5, if the rightmost icon on the Template line in Project settings is 'Match Media'. If it is, click that and select one of the footage files. If it's not, right-click on one of the footage files, check its resolution, frame rate, field handling, pixel aspect ratio and set those in Project Settings.


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How to prevent frame smoothing (i.e. get really sharp frame images) when making a video with ffmpeg?
I have been digging around here and on the ffmpeg site trying to find some commands to use to generate a movie from a set of images. The command I tried that gives me a video I can watch on my MacBook is
ffmpeg -framerate 20 -i slice%04d.png test.mp4

This produces a video but the problem is it smooths out some of the features. I need to capture the sharp features of these images. To give a sense, a single frame from this video is shown below.

The video is smoothing out some of the details, especially from frame to frame. I assume this is a compression issue, so I would like to just avoid compressing the video. Unfortunately, everything I have tried from other help sites and the ffmpeg site do not produce a video file I can actually visualize on my mac. Can anyone provide me with a better command line call to solve this problem?

Since you're asking for "uncompressed" I assume you don't care about file size. If so, I suggest rendering to mjpeg. This smoothing issue is because your command is defaulting to h.264. The difference between h.264 and mjpeg is that mjpeg is intra-frame compression only, but h.264 is intra- and inter-frame compression. As such, mjpeg is a massive file by comparison, but each frame is unique and not dependent on previous frames like in h.264. One benefit is frame fidelity, enough should fix your issue. Mjpeg is also pretty universal. You won't need a codec pack to play it.
To make your images into an mjpeg video run:
 ffmpeg -framerate 20 -i slice%04d.png c:v mjpeg -q:v 3 -an output.mov

c:v mjpeg means video codec
-q:v 3 is a quality control factor. Range is a linear 2-31, lower is better. Tune the number to your tastes.
-an means no audio channel included. This is good to run if that's your goal, as some codecs confuse players if you don't.
Output is mov but I'm pretty sure you can wrap mp4 or avi too. Mp4 seems mostly likely to work for your users on windows as well as mac.

Before you try this, maybe don't quite give up on h.264 yet. Run your original command with the crf flag.
 ffmpeg -framerate 20 -i slice%04d.png -crf 18 -an test.mp4

crf is "constant rate factor", and is a quality control. Range is exponential 0-60something. Lower is better and 18 is considered functionally lossless.

This was a really insightful answer, even disregarding the commands you came up with, so thank you for that! The first option worked when I outputted to .mov and the result looks great! It actually failed to run as an .mp4 for the same command, which is interesting. The latter command failed for me with the latest ffmpeg that I downloaded and compiled on my system today (version 4.1.4) because it claimed it did not recognize the -crf command. Not sure what's up with that.

@spektr Probably have to add -c:v libx264 to get the crf flag to work. Let me know.

Optionally, run the h264 command on your mjpeg output if you want a smaller file size.


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What are the pros and cons of using a 4k to HD digital extender zoom
On some of Sony's new 4K cams they claim the following:

The new model incorporates a 25x optical zoom lens to cover a wide focal range for multiple shooting requirements, with three independent lens rings to support intuitive operation. Using optical zoom lens with Digital Extender in an HD mode, a 50x zoom equivalent image without any picture degradation can be captured thanks to its 4K resolution sensor.
Sony Z190

Basically, Sony claims that this "digital extender" feature can digitally double your zoom, but still send full HD resolution.
I'm skeptical there's no significant difference. I would think that using only a portion of the sensor with the extender means less light and color information goes into making the image compared to down scaling the 4K image. Also, I'm not a physicist, but my understanding is that it's physically not the same as more optical zoom with more exposure.
Am I right? What are the differences I should notice? I actually do own this cam and personally think there is a loss in clarity, but can't explain why that would be. Exposure and color look the same to me.

I don't know about this camera/lens specifically, but a few years back I saw a demo at NAB that electronically panned an HD image out of a 4K raster. There was no noticeable quality drop compared to a native HD image.

@MichaelLiebman  I'm very much intrested in the name of any available softwares that do that.  I'm also intrested if the software can auto track motion within the frame.  Do you member what this after was called with a company that makes it?

Conveniently enough, at NAB this week, Panasonic demo'd extracting a 4K crop from an 8K sensor. And like you were hoping, they are using computer vision techniques to track faces, including in profile, and key objects. The example they gave was being able to keep a tennis player who is serving, and their racquet, properly framed. Unfortunately, I can't find an product info, but I'm pretty sure it is going to be an add-on to their PTZ cameras.

@MichaelLiebman I think I need to start attending NAB. Is this the same thing or a lesser event or something else?

By the way, I heard rumor that the Hollywood red carpet events are managed with a massive sized sensor camera and they capture multiple full HD scenes from the one cam, all along the red carpet. Or maybe a series of three or four, but still, impressive if true.

I've shot 4k footage since 2014, and when mastering in 1080p, I often use digital zoom in post. There are multiple factors I would look at.

Cameras that use a single sensor will display debeyering artefacts when examining the direct pixel readout (mushier detail and reduced colour information). This issue is nicely improved when downsampling 4k to 1080p, but is revealed when digitally zooming. The Z190, however, uses a 3-chip design. If each chip is full 4k (which the marketing copy certainly implies), the quality difference between downsampled and a direct pixel crop should be significantly less noticeable than on single-chip competitors.
Lens resolution can be a contributing factor as well. If the lens barely keeps up with the 4k resolution of the sensors, or the three-chip design introduces optical issues, then downsampling will likely hide minor softness. Digital zoom will reveal these optical shortcomings simply by magnifying what's being projected onto the sensor. On the upside, lens performance is typically best near the centre, so a centre crop is at least likely to be optically stronger than the edges.
While exposure and colour should look identical because nothing is changing (aperture, shutter speed, gain, pixel pitch), you're right that the exposure performance will change, as measured by the amount or type of visible grain. From user reports I've read, this is best demonstrated in the Sony A7 series of cameras where similar light sensitivity (based on the amount of visual noise) can be seen in direct pixel readouts from the A7s (giant pixels, lower resolution) and downsampled readouts from the A7r (smaller pixels, higher resolution, but the subsequent higher noise is reduced during downsampling). Digital zoom will reveal the per-pixel noise that downsampling would have averaged out, which can impact perceptual sharpness.
If you decide to record in 4k and downsample to 1080p afterward, zooming as needed in post, compression may come into play as well. While the Z190 records 4:2:2 10-bit, digital zoom can reveal minor compression softness in colour detail that would have been reduced during downsampling. However, I would expect this to apply only to downsampling/zooming 4k footage in post. If the camera is recording a 1080p 4:2:2 image directly, switching between a downsampled full sensor readout and a crop of the centre pixels should have little to no impact on compression results.
Some cameras may simply process things slightly differently when performing downsampling versus direct pixel readout.

When tracking down the source of the softness, I'd recommend starting by recording 4k footage and cropping it in post, then comparing it to footage shot using the 1080p zoom mode. Though highly unlikely, if poor camera processing of 1080p footage is to blame you'll see the difference here.
It's more likely a combination of lens resolution, optical performance of the three-chip design, and perceptual sharpness improvements from reduced noise when downsampling. But by all means, try some locked down resolution tests first! After tracking down the source(s) of the softness, then it's a question of how to combat it.
My approach has always been to shoot in 4k and rely on "digital zoom" in post while never reaching a full 2x zoom (direct pixel crop). This ensures the footage is always downsampled to some extent, maintaining the higher relative quality we're used to seeing now.

Giving the selection, but I'll report back if I ever get around to some resolution testing.


text:
How to specify different flags for inputs with FFMPEG?
You can specify multiple inputs to FFMPEG and mix them into a single output. I understand the basics of this, for example:
ffmpeg -i vid1.mp4 -i vid2.mp4 [commands] output.mp4

What I can't figure out is how I can specify different commands for each input. For example, I have the following I'm trying to do:
 ffmpeg -i vid1.m2t -i vid2.mp4 -map 0:a -filter_complex "[0:v:0][1:v:0]vstack=inputs=2" -crf 24 -c:a aac -b:a 128k -ac 1 -movflags +faststart output.mp4

vid1.m2t is a 1440 anamorphic hdv mpeg stream, and vid2.mp4 is a regular 1920 h.264. Using -filter_complex "[0:v:0][1:v:0]vstack=inputs=2" I'm trying to stack vid1 on top of vid2, but I get the error that says it can't proceed because the two videos are not the same width. Well, yes, except in display the m2t is actually 1920 wide, not 1440.
When I'm converting just the hdv by itself, I use -filter_complex "scale=1920:1080,setsar=1" to ensure square pixels. I know that works well, but how can I incorporate that into this vstack command? If I put it in with the other I get errors. I've tried a variety of different ways, including before the input (thinking that would make ffmpeg apply it only to the input before sending it to the other commands for output), but they all make errors.
Additionally, I wonder if the -crf 24 command can be specified for each input. When converting individually the m2t needs to be at 24 or less, or it looks bad, while the mp4 can be as high as 30. I might be misunderstanding what vstack does, but I would think that if I can tell ffmpeg to give different attention to quality for each input would lessen file size.

I have the same issue with hstack. FFMPEG will render the output, but the m2t file comes out 1440 wide, therefore skewed. So the total video width is 3360 wide, instead of 3840.

Maybe more specific to this exact problem, how can I use vstack or hstack when the inputs have different dimensions?

Suppose a video stream is 1440x1080 with sample/pixel aspect ratio of 1.333, leading to a display of 1920x1080. Realize that the actual resolution of the stream, and what's stored in the file, is 1440x1080. The aspect ratio flag tells the consuming app (player/editor..) that the intended display proportion is different than the raw ratio of the width to height and that it should use the aspect ratio to rescale the video to produce an accurate display. FFmpeg will not automatically make a video square-pixel since the user may not want that.
The stack filters require that all streams have the same size at the interface that they are joined at - for hstack, that's height, and for vstack, that's width. Only the raw size matters, the aspect ratio is just an informational flag.
So, you'll have to rescale the first input before stacking.
Use
ffmpeg -i vid1.m2t -i vid2.mp4 -filter_complex "[0:v:0]scale=iw*sar:ih,setsar=1[vid1];[vid1][1:v:0]vstack=inputs=2" -map 0:a -crf 24 -ac 1 -c:a aac -b:a 128k -movflags +faststart output.mp4
As far as the encoder is concerned, it is just presented with one stream of 1920x2160 - the historical provenance and composition is lost. Now, if you want to apply different levels of compression to parts of the frame, that's called Region Of Interest encoding. Some initial patches were applied last month to allow this for x264 and x265, but it is not operational yet. I'll update this answer when it becomes so, but for now, you can only assign a single CRF value for the whole frame.

Thanks, Gyan. Works as expected. I also had the need to adjust the brightness and saturation on the m2t, but not the mp4, so I fiddled with it and came up with -filter_complex "[0:v:0]scale=iw*sar:ih,setsar=1,eq=brightness=0.2:saturation=1.5[vid1];[vid1][1:v:0]vstack=inputs=2". I'm very happy it works, but I'm failing to understand the syntax in this command. Can you explain a bit how the , ; and [vid1] are working here?

Answering my own question here: Separate filters with a , . A string of , separated filters is called a filter chain. Separate filter chains with a ;. A string of ; separated filter chains is called the filter graph. Reference inputs with [x] at the beginning of the chain. A [y] at the end of the chain can be sent down the filter graph to another chain. [0:v:0] calls the first input (specifically the first video stream only). Filters are applied in the chain, then that output is named [vid1]. [vid1] is then immediately called as if it's an input in the next filter chain.


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Why are there missing frames in the Vegas Pro editing timeline?
I found the weirdest thing in Vegas Pro 13. I was trying to verify the exact frames of a generated file, so was looking for a zero number frame to drop it into the timeline. I was surprised to find that two frames in the Vegas Pro timeline are missing. The timeline goes from 00:13:59;29 to 00:14:00;02. There should be a ;00 and ;01 entry there as well, but it's not present. See in the image below, zoomed in so that each vertical line is a frame. The two frames missing are between the blue line.

My first thought was something to do with NTSC 29.97 framerate vs actual 30 framerate. I figured if that's the case, the issue should repeat at regular intervals. I checked between other values and determined that the issue repeats every minute, except at 10 minute marks (it may be more nuanced than that).
How can I make it not do this?

Why, you ask? I edit in Vegas Pro like any other vidiot, but then I use the events window to extract all the timeline data then render in ffmpeg. This means that If I try to target a specific frame, I may actually be off by several frames. This is an issue because some of my process is creating separate video and audio files, but they play simultaneously, so I can't tolerate more than 1 frame off for the lip sync.
My thought is that I need to record in true 30 fps, then everything will fall in line. Is that the only solution? How can I account for this in my ffmpeg scripts? For example, if I see 00:14:00;02 in Vegas Pro, do I need to tell ffmpeg that the actual frame to target is less than that? If I have a 10 hour clip, 2 frames difference every minute adds up to a lot of frames. Almost a minute! I haven't looked closely at any of my renders to see if I notice a subjective lip sync issue.

Vegas is not showing you the actual framerate based measurement. Instead, it is showing you 30 fps Drop Frame Timecode, which exists for compatibility reasons and does have to do with NTSC video.
For purposes of alignment with ffmpeg, switch your display to SS.mmm i.e. fractional seconds rather than SMPTE timecode. No need to change the project framerate.
Right click on one of the times at the top of the timeline and you will see that SMPTE Drop is selected. You can change that to "Time" or "Seconds" for a convention that FFmpeg will naturally understand.


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What are the benefits of a CLI encoder (e.g. FFmpeg) over GUI Software?
I have seen here a lot of questions regarding FFmpeg, but I didn't know it was a command line application until yesterday.
If we have GUI software like Final Cut Pro and Premiere Pro? Apart from the expense, what are the benefits of such programs?

This question does not have a definitive answer and is only going to attract opinionated answers, hence it's not a good fit for Stack Exchange. Voting to close. There are plenty of reasons to use CLI software.

One of the reasons is enough to get the point, just like the answer below. @slhck

Five words: batch processing via power shell.

Related: How to set up and use ffmpeg?

Like I said, there are plenty of reasons. It's free, open source, scriptable, extensible, fast, cross-platform, actively developed on a daily basis, user support, etc.

You have 10,000 videos that need to have a logo overlayed, subtitles burned in from srt files, and a standard copyright notice attached to the end. Then you need to make three different versions of each, at different sizes and codec settings. It's a quarter to five on Friday night.
Option 1, you spend all weekend doing it in a GUI app, and you have no life.
Option 2, you do it with ffmpeg, which can do all these things, you spend fifteen minutes setting up a CLI batch encoding script, and as the big hand points to 12 you leave it running and head for the pub.

Now that is something that can't be done in GUI app. Thank you @stib for this answer. I can see a benefit of learning FFmpeg, for example I could batch resize 4k footage before doing editing. As 4k slows down my machine.

@mega Oh yeah. Anything you can do in PowerShell, previously cmd.

Oh definitely - Powershell or zsh, depending on your OS. Don't waste your time with cmd, and although bash is good zsh is betterer.

Thank you guys, not sure what is PowerShell, bash and zsh? I am using CMD on Windows 7

Powershell is a modern object-oriented shell scripting language. You can certainly use cmd if you're used to it, but powershell is so much easier to use, and hooks into the .NET framework to give you a whole bunch more of useful tools. Bash and Zsh are shells for posix systems, like Linux, BSD and OSX.


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What are brightness, gamma, and lut filters doing to my video? What's the difference, which should I prefer?
I get videos that were recorded at a conference, which I have to edit and produce. Usually there is only modest casual lighting, so no production or studio level lighting. During record, the tech has already used some software settings to better the capture1, in addition to the typical iris and gain settings on the camera.
I usually brighten them with ffmpeg using the simple eq filter eg=brightness=0.1, which kind of robs the colors, so I bring them back with eg=brightness=0.1:saturation=1.5. Not always those exact numbers, but that's my starting point and I don't usually change it.
I was thinking that there might be a better way, and I found lut and gamma. In some experimentation, I ran the following three:

lut=val*1.2,eq=saturation=1.5
eq=gamma=1.2:saturation=1.5
eq=brightness=0.1:saturation=1.5

All of them get the job done, but with nuanced quality differences. lut produced the best, brightness the worst, and gamma was somewhere in between. Primarily, brightness kind of puts a screen on the video, like wearing tinted glasses, except instead of changing color it makes it appear brighter but also just kind of whiter. gamma does it also, but less noticeably. lut probably also does it, but it's not very noticeable to me. I wonder if I fiddled more, I'd prefer gamma or brightness over lut, but for now, lut is the clear winner.
Here's the thing: I don't really know what these do behind the scenes. If we start off with a color value on a given pixel, what does brightness=0.1 do to it, for example? Also, why do all of them diminish all the colors, making me want to use saturation as well?

Footnote

They are recorded in vMix at 1920x1080. The settings that were changed are in the "Colour Adjust" tab (for individual inputs). The "Black Stretch" and "White Stretch" were raised and lowered, respectively, and the "Saturation" was raised. Was this wrong? Should records that will need color correction only be corrected in post, because of loss of information or something?

And in making sure I don't post a duplicate question, I just discovered curves, which is purportedly more friendly to changing pixel formats. That is a concern, since sometimes I mix in jpeg and png images of all kinds of varieties.

Here's what all these settings do, typically. Some pieces of software define or apply them differently, but this should give a general idea.

Brightness simply changes the brightness value of each pixel, by increasing or decreasing the red, green, and blue values equally. For example, when brightness is increased, blacks may become a dark gray and white or near-white pixels may "clip" and become completely white. It affects the entire image uniformly, and applies the same adjustment to each pixel.
Gamma is similar to brightness, except it adjusts the values on a curve. So, how bright the pixels were initially determines how much they will change in brightness, but the red, green, and blue channels are still adjusted together. How exactly this modifies your image depends on the gamma curve that your software is using. Gamma adjustment is typically used to make colors look more true to life when there's a mismatch between how a camera captures video and a monitor displays it.
LUT stands for "Look Up Table". It applies modifications to each pixel depending on their original color, and does not change the red, green, and blue channels uniformly. It sounds like in your software it has a built-in LUT, and you're simply changing its intensity. Different LUTs will create different image looks, for example some may enhance certain colors or change the tint of the entire image.

When you increase your brightness, images start to lose their color because of clipping- a red pixel, for example, may be fully red. Increasing the brightness on this red pixel would make it seem less saturated because you're increasing the green and blue channels, but not the red channel since it's already fully on. As colors get brighter, they simply get closer to white. This makes the image seem duller.
When you increase the saturation, it moves each pixel "further" from white. You can visualize this by looking at a color wheel. Saturation essentially places every pixel of your image on a color wheel, and then moves them radially outward towards a more extreme color. So, if a color approaches white when you turn the brightness up, you get some color back by increasing the saturation because this undoes the clipping effect of the brightness.

Thank you. Very informative and easy to understand. If I want to know specifics about ffmpeg's LUT filter, I'll ask about that specifically. I can see how color adjustment could be a specialty, with all this info here.

I wonder now if I can design my own lut, that fits my typical needs...

You absolutely can!


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High bitrate in AVCONV converted MPG file causes DVD reading problem
I convert AVI to MPEG with folowing command:
avconv -i file.avi -c:v mpeg2video -b:v 6000k -c:a mp2 -b:a 384k file.mpg

When the MPG file has been burned to DVD it is hard to read afterthat. The DVD on the computer starts to make noise and to read slow the DVD. Also it is hard to watch directly - it is like there is no buffer in the VLC player. The Windows media player doesn't even play the MPG file.
I checked with avprobe the MPG file and another MPG file made with EDIUS program.
Here are the resuts:
MY MPG FILE
avprobe my-file.mpg
avprobe version 0.8.6-4:0.8.6-0ubuntu0.12.04.1, Copyright (c) 2007-2013 the Libav developers
  built on Apr  2 2013 17:00:59 with gcc 4.6.3
[mpeg @ 0x9b6f240] max_analyze_duration reached
Input #0, mpeg, from 'my-file.mpg':
  Duration: 00:34:56.47, start: 1.000000, bitrate: 6411 kb/s
    Stream #0.0[0x1e0]: Video: mpeg2video (Main), yuv420p, 720x576 [PAR 16:15 DAR 4:3], 104857 kb/s, 25 fps, 25 tbr, 90k tbn, 50 tbc
    Stream #0.1[0x1c0]: Audio: mp2, 48000 Hz, stereo, s16, 384 kb/s

EDIUS CREATED MPG FILE
avprobe edius.mpg
avprobe version 0.8.6-4:0.8.6-0ubuntu0.12.04.1, Copyright (c) 2007-2013 the Libav developers
  built on Apr  2 2013 17:00:59 with gcc 4.6.3
[mpeg @ 0x8449240] max_analyze_duration reached
Input #0, mpeg, from 'edius.mpg':
  Duration: 00:34:56.47, start: 0.346411, bitrate: 2290 kb/s
    Stream #0.0[0x1e0]: Video: mpeg2video (Main), yuv420p, 720x576 [PAR 16:15 DAR 4:3], 6000 kb/s, 25 fps, 25 tbr, 90k tbn, 50 tbc
    Stream #0.1[0x1c0]: Audio: mp2, 48000 Hz, stereo, s16, 256 kb/s

The two files are with great quality but I am questioning myself how to achieve two things:
What to change in my command line to reach edius bitrate on that line:
  Duration: 00:34:56.47, start: 0.346411, bitrate: 2290 kb/s

instead of:
  Duration: 00:34:56.47, start: 1.000000, bitrate: 6411 kb/s

And how to reach this 6000kb in Edius STREAM line:
Stream #0.0[0x1e0]: Video: mpeg2video (Main), yuv420p, 720x576 [PAR 16:15 DAR 4:3], 6000 kb/s, 25 fps, 25 tbr, 90k tbn, 50 tbc

instead of mine 104857kb :
Stream #0.0[0x1e0]: Video: mpeg2video (Main), yuv420p, 720x576 [PAR 16:15 DAR 4:3], 104857 kb/s, 25 fps, 25 tbr, 90k tbn, 50 tbc

I think that will resolve my problem with burning and reading DVDs.
ALso whe I am converting the yellow sigh appears:
[mpeg @ 0x8e75f40] VBV buffer size not set, muxing may fail

Is this a part of the problem?
Thanks in advance!


text:
Using a Flash to Light Video
I have a Nikon D3100. It has a built in flash.  Can I use it as a light when filming videos?

Generally speaking, it is not possible to use a camera flash as a light for video.  A true flash is a high intensity discharge bulb which produces a very short (1/100 second or shorter), very bright burst of light.  It is not designed to be used for constant light output and has insufficient power, durability or cooling to be able to operate as a continuous light source.
Some devices, most often smartphones, use LED light sources as a "flash" but actually are not flashes, simply constant output lamps that can be used for video or as a low brightness "flash" for still images.  This is very rare to see with a point and shoot or DSLR.  When it is included with DSLR flashes, it is typically as a separate, distinct light on the same unit, such as the video light built in the Canon's 320EX flash.

As mentioned above, no. The bulb and circuitry is not set up for it.
If you are looking for a cheap solution to home video lighting, go to a hardware store and buy a set of Double Halogen Work Lights With stand. It will run you like $40 and is just as good as any fancy video light for basic stuff.

Just be cautious of the heat they put out.  They will set things on fire if you put them too close to things.

True, however I find them bright enough that I dont need to get them any closer than 3 ft. At that distance you are safe. Just dont touch them.

Yeah, they are best used bouncing off of something (often the ceiling) to avoid too harsh of light.  They can work great, I just like giving the caution when someone mentions them since people tend to not realize just how much heat they really do put off.


text:
Command Line Tool for Converting Image Sequence to Quicktime .mov Video
I have large number of numbered .tif files and I'd like to convert them to a .mov/Quicktime video file for further editing in Final Cur Pro X. Therefore no artefacts should be added in the process.
Is there a good way to do this conversion. I'd prefer using a command line tool.

You can use wonderful ffmpeg for your desired workflow. There is a guide here on this page but once you have the ffmpeg installed, you can simply cd into your folder with sequence, and type in your terminal:
ffmpeg -f image2 -pattern_type glob -i '*.png' -vcodec qtrle -r 25 -s 1920x1080 test.mov

To understand the options, you can check the documentation but here is the explanation:
When importing an image sequence, -i also supports expanding shell-like
wildcard patterns (globbing) internally, by selecting the image2-specific
-pattern_type glob option.

In this specific command, -r is for framerate, and -s is our image size. -vcodec qtrle tells ffmpeg to use QuickTime Animation. For ProRes, you can use:
-vcodec prores -profile 2

Here -profile refers to ProRes Profiles (0, 1, 2, 3), 0 being Proxy, and 3 being High Quality (source).
Besides these, if you are going to use ffmpeg, there are lots of detailed bits of commands online, or we can figure out specific commands for your workflow here.

Consider using -r as an input option. The output will then inherit the input frame rate. Otherwise, if you choose an output frame rate other than 25, ffmpeg will convert from 25 (input default) to your output frame rate and drop or duplicate frames to compensate.

If you are using ffmpeg, you need to supply some additional parameters to maintain the color, I would recommend:
ffmpeg -r 24 -start_number 1 -i inputfile.%04d.png -sws_flags area+accurate_rnd+full_chroma_int  -pix_fmt yuv420p \
        -vf "scale=in_color_matrix=bt709:out_color_matrix=bt709" \
        -frames:v 100 -c:v libx264 -preset slower \
        -color_range tv -colorspace bt709 -color_primaries bt709 -color_trc iec61966-2-1 \
        outputfile.mp4

See ORI Encoding Guidelines for more details.

I'm using tlassemble which is easier for me comparing to ffmpeg.
Highly recommended.
My common command line options are:
tlassemble DirectoryWithJpgs output.mov -fps 24 -height 1080 -codec h264 -quality high

tlassemble is a simple utility the serves the same purpose as Time
  Lapse Assembler, but can be run from the command line.

You should provide a usage example.


text:
Simulate 'grass' using a replicator
In Apple Motion I thought I'd be able to use a replicator to simulate grass using 'Randomize' on the element angle and then duplicating the individual 'blade' elements using a replicator with 'random fill'.

Unfortunately, every element ends up with identical movement - the randomize behaviour globally affects all the replicated elements, so I end up with something like this.

Is there a way to individually randomize the motion of replicated elements?

I suggest you add some tags to this question and tell us what program you are working with.

I tagged it Motion! I'll see if there's an "Apple Motion" tag...

I went through all the library replicators and found one that used a Randomize behaviour on the cell's Object.Angle Randomness.Angle Randomness. This looks okay. Everything is still kinda moving in sync if you look carefully but things go to different angles more naturally. I think overlaying a couple of these will look about right for my purposes. But I'd still rather each replicated element had parameters of its own.


text:
Term for upcoming TV summaries (broadcast design)
Television broadcasters show short "outlooks" or "summaries" of the upcoming program, often right after the advertisement (w/ or w/o the Digital on-screen graphic).
What's the term for this short announcments?

I am not aware of any particular term for showing the schedule.  It's just a schedule of upcoming programs and may include playing teasers or previews, which are the video clips to promote upcoming shows.  It could also be referred to as filler since it is content that is run while the credits are going (which they have to display) but want to fill it with some more interesting content.

broadcast schedule design was the magic term. Thank you.

You may be referring to a "teaser" or "pre-cap". These are clips of upcoming shows designed to pique your interest and remind you of an upcoming episode.
An ordinary teaser usually runs separately from the program, where (what we always called) pre-caps are teasers that run at or near the closing credits for an episode -- as in "Next time on XXX..."
If that's not what you're referring to, I don't know what term you mean.


text:
Why is Adobe Premiere Pro / Adobe Media Encoder freezing my computer when rendering?
This is happening when rendering lasts longer than ~20-30  mins.
I've tried checking the temperatures, they are holding steady at a maximum of 45 Celsius (on both CPU and GPU).
Freezes computer completely (no response to mouse/keyboard, image is frozen).
I really need help with this as I plan to make videos a lot.
I doubt its the memory (I have a new Corsair Vengeance memory), thinking It might be the power supply (its 500W, claimed to be OK for GTX 650 Ti + Core i3-3220), Zalman ZM500

How much memory? More than 4 GB? Assuming you have a 64 bit architecture too. Also, please describe the time line as in how many video tracks, how many audio tracks, and types of effects. All of this would be useful to understand demand vs. resources.

Have you tried limiting memory and rendering cores?  Are you using the latest compatible drivers for your graphics card?

I have 8 GB of memory (OS is Windows 7 64bit), 6 of which being used by Premiere.
Effects: only a title. 4 tracks, 2 of which are being used (one for video, one for title). 1-4 videos on the video track. Videos taken by Fraps, 1680x1050. Videos checked, not broken or something. Renders perfectly with quality set to Good (taking 20 minutes or so), but fails to render at Best quality.
Yes, I'm pretty sure I'm using the latest driver (320.49)

When the computer freezes, have you let it go for another 5 minutes to see if it gets moving again? Otherwise, I think that since it only does this at the 'best' setting, you likely have a resource issue.

filzilla, tried giving it some time, does not unfreeze
And I'm actually thinking that it depends on how much time it renders. I remember trying to render a longer video with good quality, and it still froze.

If you can, a sure way to tell if your machine is resource bound, test the same render on an identical machine but with 16 GB to 24 GB of memory. If it does not freeze on this other machine then you know you will need more memory on your machine.


text:
What new piece of hardware to get to increase video rendering performance?
So, I've got the opportunity to buy some new piece of hardware for my PC. I do video rendering quite often, so, my question is - what piece of hardware should I replace to get a guaranteed rendering perfomance raise?
I render using my GPU.
Should I buy a better GPU (got GTX650Ti with 1 GB memory), or a better CPU (got Core i3 running at 3.3 Ghz), or may be more RAM (got 8 GB)?
Mostly I use Adobe Premier.

Can you elaborate on what you're rendering and with what software? Specific apps may or may not use the GPU, or may be optimized for specific ones and not others.

Ok, modified the post.

related.. https://video.stackexchange.com/questions/13068/which-part-of-a-computer-is-critic-to-work-on-4k-footage

https://video.stackexchange.com/questions/10802/2gb-vs-4gb-graphics-card-memory-for-playback-and-encoding-of-videos-in-adobe-pre

https://video.stackexchange.com/questions/10373/slow-video-render-incl-new-old-pc-specs

https://video.stackexchange.com/questions/9342/what-options-are-there-for-hardware-encoding-decoding

https://video.stackexchange.com/questions/4703/should-i-just-get-a-gaming-pc-for-audio-video-production

Not sure that any of those really is an exact duplicate, but this topic in general has been discussed a lot around here previously.

A GPU will give you the best performance boost, but your rendering software has to be optimized to use the GPU; most is.  Upgrading the CPU is the best option if your software doesn't support GPU rendering.  Upgrading RAM won't give you a noticeable performance if you have 8 or more gigabytes.  You might see some slight increase in performance if you have less than 4 gigabytes.
Some notes on upgrading components.  With a CPU, higher clock speed isn't necessarily better.  Unlike gaming, rendering can make use of as many cores as are available, so get a quad-core at least.  Put your money in more cores rather than higher clocks (unless you game on the side).  An Intel Core i7 or Intel Xeon is ideal.  With a GPU, Nvidia is best.  Most rendering software takes advantage of CUDA which is specific to Nvidia GPUs.  There is immense amounts of information about 3D rendering times on different GPUs available online, use that to make your decision.  I recommend the GTX 660 or 760.  Quadro isn't worth the money unless you need weeks of nonstop uptime from your GPU.

Will buying a new CPU give me a considerable boost with GPU rendering, given that my Core i3 only supports PCI-E x16 v.2, while my graphics supports v.3?

That would require you to upgrade your motherboard, and that would essentially require you to buy a new computer. Upgrading your CPU isn't an easy task compared to upgrading your GPU or RAM.

I have socket 1150 I believe, so there are Core i5s which fit that socket, right? And my motherboard does support v.3.

I'm not positive on the compatibility of parts, but if you can upgrade to a quad-core i5 or i7 that would be a significant improvement over the i3.

If you want to increase the rendering performance during export a GPU might not bring that much of a performance boost, while GPU enabled effects are still rendering on the GPU. The encoding to the desired codec (like h264 or MJPEG) depends largely on the CPU and takes quite some time in the whole process. So far only h264 can be rendered on the GPU in Permiere but it still uses a lot of CPU and the quality can even be worse due to implementation limitations of codec on the GPU.

Either buy a dedicated encoder or a better GPU (more or faster CUDA cores) if your effects and encoder support GPU acceleration (in which case the CPU will barely be used.)  Upgrade the CPU if you have effects that can't be offloaded to the GPU.  Don't bother upgrading memory beyond a base level unless you are hitting issues like not having enough room for RAM previews.  Working on video is largely a stream operation and thus does not often have major memory constraints.


text:
Can the VGA port of the laptop be used as input port?
A few days ago I had a problem installing a video conferencing system, as I was unable to take the output of the codec display on a TV for some reasons. I was wondering could I have used the VGA port of the laptop as the display input just like that of a TV? If Yes how?

No, VGA ports on a laptop are output only.

To expand on AJ Henderson's answer, it would be extremely rare to find combined output/input ports for A/V on a computer, and certainly not combined input/output VGA. This is because the underlying technology to receive and process video is very different to that required to send it and uses high-frequency electronics which tend to be very picky about how they are laid out and connected. As a result adding both send and receive hardware to the same physical port is impractical, bordering on impossible. There are also implications of cost, naturally adding anything to a laptop that's not really needed by the majority of users will drive the price up, and nobody wants that!


text:
Search mpeg / avi frames in linux
I might have an unusual problem for this site; among other duties, I manage the wireless network for a large corporate campus.  As part of an upgrade to our wireless access-points, I used a metal bracket to mount an AP on a rail about 10 feet off the ground.  When it was mounted, the bottom part of the access-point was parallel with the floor.
A week later, our cabling technicians noticed that someone had bent the AP about 70 degrees upward; given the strength of the bracket, it took a lot of force to do this.  We have a security camera about 90 feet away from this AP, but the relevant area I care about is about 3% of the camera's image area.
Due to the fuzziness and small area in the video, our security team said it would take about 30 man-hours to search the video (one person watching it for 3.5 days... given restrictions in playback, they can't zoom in during fast forward); as such, they weren't interested in going farther.
QUESTION:
It seems like there might be some way to build a list of candidate time slots in the video, where this 3% area drastically changed from normal for a given time-frame... let's say at least 20-seconds.
TBH, the bracket is only $30; however, since our old-crusty security guy swore it couldn't be automated, I took it as a point of curiosity to see whether that's true.  Obviously there are commercial solutions... I'm looking for "free" in linux.
The file would be about 6GB.  Is there a linux CLI solution to this problem?  I just need to reduce the times we look at to something manageable.  Even if I had to use a python image analytics library like OpenCV-python, that's a possibility but I'm hoping to (ab)use something like ffmpeg for this purpose.  If there isn't such a tool, which Open-CV function would be best for this job?

FFMPEG doesn't really have the tools to do motion detection out of the box. You can certainly do the cropping using the crop filter: -vf crop=w:h:x:y where w:h is the size of your cropped area and x:y its coordinates in the original image. So your ffmpeg script might look like:
ffmpeg -i input.avi -c:v libx264 -crf 20 -vf crop=123:45:67:89 output.mp4

Then you could find a frame of the output that contains no movement, export it to a still image, invert it and add it back to the video using overlay so that only parts of frames that are different would show up. Then use the blackdetect filter to find frames that are black. Then you could use some shell-fu to delete those parts of the video and finally concatenate the remainder into one clip. Whew.
…or you could use openCV. Here's a ready-rolled script that does motion detection: https://github.com/RobinDavid/Motion-detection-OpenCV

when you say -vf crop=w:h:x:y, you're talking about ffmpeg cropping, right?  When you say an "empty frame", I'm not sure how I would find that in a video file... I'm thinking the github project you mentioned might be the way to go

"empty frame" meaning a frame where nothing is happening. Yeah, use the script, unless you really want a learning excercise.