text:
Audio randomly cuts out for remainder of clip - Adobe Premier Elements 11
I have a Sony Handycam HDR-XR260, and haven't had any trouble before the last two weeks.
While editing, occasionally a clip's audio will suddenly disappear a few minutes in, and not return until the next clip. Could be a 10 minute clip, could be a 20 minute clip.
The microphone is built in, so it isn't a matter of disconnected mic equipment. I'm not doing anything different from one clip to another, during filming or during uploading.
Super frustrating - any thoughts on the cause?
EDIT
I checked the original files on my computer, and the audio is still there. So for whatever reason, the clip isn't importing into Premiere with the audio, even when I try again.

Through more research, I learned that Adobe struggles with .m2ts files (proprietary Sony format) despite being a supported file extension.
I updated my codecs for this extension with k-lite, but it didn't solve the issue.
I ended up using some free conversion software to convert to .mp4, and was able to bring in the audio finally! I only did this extra step for clips that lost their audio, since the conversion added additional time.

I've had similar issues using Premiere Pro and a Sony Handycam too. I usually had to convert that particular clip to another format. But if Premiere can't figure out the audio, my experience is that, other Adobe programs wont either so you can't convert with Adobe Media Encoder because you will have the same problem.
Once I recopied the file from the camera to the computer and imported it again into Premiere and that worked.
It only happened a couple of times though.
If it's a regular occurrence for you, there is probably something else wrong.

Sadly, I've already cleared the footage from the camcorder. I'll look more into the format, thanks.

I'm not that familiar with Premiere Elements, however in Premiere Pro, there is a conforming process during which a special preview video is made that can be used for more efficient editing.  I wonder if perhaps either the conforming has not finished yet or if perhaps you are having a problem with the conforming.
Does it stop at roughly the same time on all clips?  Is the spot that it stops consistent?  How high is CPU usage and memory usage during the drop outs?
If the spot that it stops isn't consistent within a particular clip, then it is highly likely that it is an artifact of the conforming progressing.  If it is roughly the same spot across multiple clips, there may be some other kind of software or buffering issue going on that causes it to error or crash.  Also, if CPU or memory usage is high, it may support being a buffering issue where your system simply can't keep up with the playback.
This is also probably something that will be hard to troubleshoot over the Internet, so it might be worth contacting Adobe to see if they have any ideas as well.  It certainly doesn't sound like typical behavior.

I have two clips with the issue in front of me. Each clip consistently loses its audio at the same point, but it's not the same between both clips (56s and 1:46m). There doesn't appear to be any strain on my cpu when the audio drops. Also, I don't believe it's a conforming issue, because the conforming process is shown in the status bar at the bottom, and has completed before I checked.

@AaronContreras - it may still be that an error occurred while conforming.  After conforming, Premiere will play the conformed files rather than the original.  You could try deleting the conformed files from scratch disk and see if it conforms differently the next time.  It's still odd that this is happening though.  It may be a bug, so you may want to contact Adobe for support.

After going through all the settings and trying all kinds of options, I stumbled on the magic combination to fix this.

Go to Edit > Preferences > Memory - change setting for "Optimize rendering for:" to "Memory"
Go to Sequence > Sequence Settings - add checks to "Maximum Bit Depth" and "Maximum Render Quality"

So if I understand this correctly, you DO NOT want your sequence to render. You want a red line instead of a green above your footage and this audio drop out will stop.  Before you make this change, watch when the audio drop out occurs.  You open your project.  You see the red line above your footage.  The second it turns green you start having the audio drop out problem.
Hope this helps!


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Does Sony PMW-EX1R HDMI output contain audio?
I'm trying to get a Sony PMW-EX1R XDCAM to output HDMI for live streaming (using Teradek Vidiu). The picture looks fine, but it seems to lack audio. Is there a setting that I'm missing, or is it impossible to use HDMI in this way?

HDMI does support audio, but it is possible that either the PMW-EX1R doesn't output audio over HDMI (which would seem odd to me, but is possible).  It is also possible that the settings are wrong on the Vidiu.  The Vidiu appears to support audio input from either the HDMI port itself or a line input.  If it is expecting signal on the line input, it might ignore the HDMI audio.
I'd check the documentation for the Vidiu to see if you can find anything about that since I don't see anything in the PMW-EX1R documentation to answer it.  You could also try plugging the PMW-EX1R in to another HDMI device to see if you get audio.  If not, you can also try running the audio output of the camera in to the line input of the Vidiu and monitor off of the headphone jack of the Vidiu.

Oh. I feel so stupid, but of course there was a setting on the VidiU: Sound | Input, and it was set to Analogue. Thank you very much!

@DavidHjelm - nothing stupid about it.  Mistakes like that happen all the time.  It seems simple once you know what it is, but there can be a pretty good number of variables to keep track of.  Best bet for a case like this is usually to follow and verify the signal path as much as possible, but that can be tough depending on what resources you have available at the time.

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


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What Happens to Frequencies Above the Nyquist Limit?
If I record a sound at a rate of 8,000 samples per second, I know that the highest frequency that can be reproduced from the sound is 4000Hz. What I want to know is:
If the sound contains frequencies above 4000Hz, when I play the sound back what would I hear and what frequencies would be produced at the points where the frequency of the original sound is greater than 4000Hz.

Please edit your question. What is 8,00 samples? Is it 800? If that's 800 samples, then the maximum frequency is 400Hz. If that's 8000 samples, maximum frequency will be 4000Hz.

Note that this wouldn't happen in a properly designed system – good ADCs and nonlinear digital effects include bandlimiting precautions, so if you "try" to produce frequencies higher than Nyqvist you only get silence there.

Sounds above the Nyquist limit (in this case 4000 Hz) will seem to fold back into the allowed range. For example, a tone 100 Hz above the limit will appear as a phantom tone 100 Hz below it. So a frequency of 4100 will seem to appear at 3900, one at 4200 will appear at 3800, and so on.
This is called 'aliasing' or 'folding'. The apparent 3900 tone is an alias for the 4100 tone. Since actual, complex sounds are composed of many frequencies, the audible effect is not as clean as theory describes it.

The result of using a sampling rate that is too low for your program material is easiest understood with a graph.
If the blue wave is the actual sound you are attempting to record, in your example, say, 4.5KHz, with a sample rate of 8,000 samples/sec, the signal can only be recreated with the information that was recorded (in red).  So to answer your question, you get a lower frequency.

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


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fps resampling dilema
I want to mix some vacation clips into a single video. The sources I have are:

48 fps
25 fps

I don't care whether the end result will be at 24 or 25 fps but I do want to maintain the best viewing quality for the two different sources I got.
So the question in my case is, what is better between the following two?

resampling 25 to 24 (and perfect resampling 48 to 24)
resampling 48 to 25 (and leaving 25 as is)

48 to 25 should be better because you have more frame information to interpolate, though the contents of the clips could also matter.  If all the 48 fps clips are high speed motion while the 25 is relatively static shots, then it will probably interpolate better.
The key is that frames are going to have to be guessed at and the less time that passed from the last frame that can be used for the guess, the better off you will be.  Since 48 frames much closer to the correct timings it should generally get a better result.
Ultimately though, I'd suggest trying both interpolations and see which looks better to you.  While what I explained is a good general rule, sometimes the content of the clips makes weird things happen and there's no replacement for trying it out to see.


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How do I set up an RTMP stream server and URL endpoint?
I've got a Haivision Barracuda, which can stream RTMP to a URL (secured by username/password) set in its interface, but have very little experience of streaming video. What software do I need (Windows or Linux, but ideally free or open source at the moment) to set up a server that can provide this URL on which to receive the stream, please?
Can I then rebroadcast that (also as RTMP, to a remote URL endpoint), and how can I view the live stream to test that it's working?

Turns out we had the free version of Adobe Flash Media Server installed on a Linux server that could receive the stream and show it via players connecting to the URL and the inbuilt test applications. We didn't have time to take down one of our servers to test the Windows Streaming Media path, but thanks for the suggestion, AJ Henderson.

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

authors: Оля Кузнецова


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How can 1080p films be so disproportionally lightweight?
I calculated that for a film of 2 hours with 30 fps, over a 1920*1080 (16:9) display with 32 bps (True Colour) had to weight : 2×3600×30×1920×1080×4 Bytes which is 1,7915904×10¹² so 1,8 TB...
Is there something I didn't get right? Or is it that uncompressed, I could not have more than 1 film stored on my computer to watch on my very standard 1920*1200 Display?
Are the films that are shot and projected in 1080p really that size?
And my question is : if so how are Blu-Rays compressed into a measly 25-100 GB disk? I thought DVDs and such were lossless encodings and even if not how can we lose 95%+ of the information (100GB/2TB) and be ok watching it?

Your basic idea is correct but uncompressed 'true color' doesn't require 32 bits per pixel, just 8 bits for each of BGR. Having an alpha or transparency layer doesn't add to the color depth. Still, the point remains that the work done by modern compression algos is impressive.

I figured since it's 24 bits already they used 32 bits cause the 4th byte was useful for whatever anyway. At any rate (pun definitely intended), there could be 24 fps and 24 bbp it would not only halve that 1,8TB, but good point nonetheless

You're right that using 32 bits has advantages for internal purposes. But for compression there's no advantage, and the bit depth remains the same. The other thing to consider is sample depth, which is 4:2:0 (or 4:1:1) in most compression schemes. BGR color is matrixed to YUV, and these are sampled at different rates -- one color sample for each luma sample. Any DCT compression is then applied to this subsampled video.

In movies most frames look more or less like the previous frame, and do not have edge sharp contrasts.  These two facts are what movie encodings depend on.

DVD and Blu-Ray content makes massive use of lossy encoding.
An easy way to see for yourself is to find a dark scene in a film, and then pause it. If the only issue was a limited number of black levels, you would expect to see a stepped gradient curve from the darkest region to the lightest region. Of course, if true 24-bit color was being used, the "stepping" would be too subtle for your eye to see. But the video isn't even that good! You will most likely see large solid rectangles in the black part of the screen. This is the result of the compression algorithm "guessing" that a square is a good enough approximation, and everything within the square is close enough to the same color to just use one color.
This works well most of the time, but tends to fall apart in films that make extensive use of dramatic dark scenes.
Added from comments: Encoders "cheat" on everything they possibly can. If you can think of something new to "cheat" on that most people won't notice, you can make a lot of money licensing your codec in the video production world.

Oh so encoding "cheats" even on colours?  If so does that mean a normal video player like vlc will normally only use let's say 16 bits or less?

Encoders "cheat" on everything they possibly can. VLC itself probably uses the full 24 or 32 bit colorspace, but the video being played will most likely only be using a small subset of that space at any given time.

You're talking about banding.  This happens because an area of solid color is easier to represent than a gradient, and the encoder thinks that'll be a good way to save bits to better represent details elsewhere.  x264's AQ (adaptive quantization) helps with this, but getting x264 to spend more bits on smooth-looking areas instead of spending so many bits making high detail areas look better.  It's nothing as simple as a codec reducing color depth.  10-bit h.264 does have fewer banding problems, though, partly because of having more choice of coefficients that will look the same, compress well

Your guess is correct. That would be fully uncompressed, true to its settings.
You're right, there's only so much data that disks can handle, so there's compression that does need to take place. We can't always notice it. That's why there's different formats (MOV, MP4, WMV). They all have their individual compression types. Compression, really, is just removing data that is deemed "unnecessary" and remove.
To put it in a perspective, here's an example:
You have a bag of air. It has Hydrogen and Oxygen in it. Let's say you want to keep the Oxygen, but get rid of the Hydrogen, because the Hydrogen is extra space (like extra lines in the binary code of files). When you compress it, and take out Hydrogen, you have a smaller bag, but you also still have Oxygen. The more you want that bag to be smaller, the more Oxygen you'll have to take out. Therefore, there will still be Oxygen there, it's just not as good.

I understand the concept of lossy encoding but to think that 95%+ is lost data is quite amazing to me. Also how about the theatres? Do they use 2TB films or do they also encode the raw film before distribution?

@sinekonata most video cameras - even the ones used by Hollywood - already record using lossy formats, so outputting to raw video would give no benefit. You can see the standards listed for digital cinema on Wikipedia - tl;dr they use (lossy) Motion JPEG2000 with a maximum bit rate of 250 Mbit/s.

@sinekonata it is not lost data, it is redundant data.  If you have a sorted dictionary in a file - one word pr line - each word usually share one or more of the first letters.  For instance "house" and "housing" share "hous", so if "housing" was written as "+4ing" instead you have saved two characters by encoding four characters as two.

For distribution to theaters, typically the files are several hundred gigabytes to a terrabyte per film (depending on the quality level that they choose to distribute).  Even for cinema, some compression is generally used though the quality is still higher than bluray.  Even if they choose lossless, compression can still probably cut it down by a significant margin in most cases, the file sizes for lossless 24bit HD is still very high though and it gets even worse when moving to 4K.
For distribution on DVD and Bluray, very heavy compression is used.  Over-simplified a little, they use a technique that involves storing "keyframes" of the video and then storing information only about what changed from the last key-frame that was seen.  Since video, by nature, has a lot of similarities between one frame and the next, this kind of compression scheme works exceptionally well with minimal quality loss despite the massive amounts of raw data being thrown away.
It does have some costs, such as making it harder to work with the file and making it so that generations of loss are a factor for editing, but for average consumer viewing, it is still plenty high quality to be very near the look and feel of the uncompressed original.

I recenlty discovered that the open source codec FLAC is able to compress lossless files 30% of the original. So knowing that it gets much easier for me to understand how codecs can be so efficient.

@Sinekonata - yeah, basically the general idea of compression is to look for patterns and store those patterns only once.  Anything that regularly has patterns is easy to compress and both video and audio tend to have patterns to them if you describe them the right way.  The difference between lossy and lossless is simply how close the pattern has to match.  For lossless, the pattern has to match exactly, but for various degrees of lossy, the acceptible closeness of the pattern becomes more and more different.

There are lossless video codecs.  On non-grainy sources, lossless x264 can still take advantage of a LOT of the temporal redundancy (between frames), and just plain arithmetic coding.   On the output of a slow deinterlace (of DV 4:2:0), I got a factor of almost 6 or so.  (2.213 Bits/(Pixel*Frame) for 4:2:0.  vs. 12 b/p/f for raw 4:2:0).  This is LOSSLESS, i.e. can be decoded to the bit-exact source, checked with md5sum.

But of course, as AJ says, lossy video can be visually transparent (you literally can't tell by flipping between them which is the source and which is the encode), while still saving lots more bitrate than that.


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Is it possible to store subtitle srt files in an m3u playlist file?
I have a folder that contains around 51 videos and another folder with their respective subtitles.
I don't want to merge the folders into one folder so I was wondering if there's a way to store subtitle srt files location (or at least a folder location for all subtitles) in an m3u playlist file along with the video files locations.
Note: Video file format is flv.

yes, VLC supports that with the EXTVLCOPT custom tag.
example:
#EXTINF:-1,Abenobashi ED - Anata No Kokoro Ni (In Your Heart)
#EXTVLCOPT:sub-file=/p/Documents/mus/lyrics/Abenobashi ED - Anata No Kokoro Ni (In Your Heart).srt
#EXTVLCOPT:subsdec-encoding=UTF-8
Abenobashi ED - Anata No Kokoro Ni (In Your Heart).flv

Note that the path must be absolute and remote files are (unfortunataly) unsupported.
Alternatively you may change the sub-autodetect-path in vlcrc and add more search paths.


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After Effects - Making a compilation
I have been practicing with Adobe After Effects for quite a while.  I've created some effects like gunshots, intros and such.
I now want to learn how to combine many videos together, and with additional effects - not only fade in and fade out, but more amazing stuff!
I have not found anything helpful when looking for where to start learning about this.
My main occupation is game programming.  Would you suggest that I go learn better video editing and Photoshop or rely on an artist to do so?

If you are trying to do editing, you are using the wrong program.  Adobe After Effects is an effects and compositing program.  It is designed to make alterations to clips of video that can then be used together.  It is not designed for editing clips together.
If you wish to do video editing, you want a piece of software known as a Non Linear Editor (or NLE).  Adobe Premiere is the NLE in Adobe's software line.  Adobe Bridge allows for you to move back and forth between them, so you can include an After Effects composition as a clip in Premiere or open a clip from Premiere in After Effects to do effects or composition work on the clip.
As a bonus, note that this same kind of interaction can be used with Adobe Encore to add a Premiere Sequence directly to an Encore project if you wish to make a DVD or Bluray disk from your videos.
Update: Since you asked about it, here is a list of the major Adobe CC applications and their purpose.

Photoshop: In depth Image Manipulation
Lightroom: Photo cataloging, Non-destructive RAW processing and basic touch up, workflow management, printing, publishing.
Premiere: Non-linear Video Editing
After Effects: Video effects and compositing
Encore: DVD/Bluray disk production
Prelude: Video/Asset intake
SpeedGrade: Color grading
Illustrator: Vector graphic creation and editing
Flash: Vector and sprite based animation, script-able and interactive capable as well as supporting video playback
Audition: Audio Editing DAW
InDesign: Print layout
Acrobat: Public document finishing, creates PDFs
DreamWeaver: Web design
Muse: simpler web design
Fireworks: Alternate image manipulation application, primarily targeting the web.
Bridge: Minor Adobe product that interconnects the applications to allow them to exchange nested data
Media Encoder: Minor Adobe product that allows for a shared render queue and encoding of final assets

Adobe encore? Too damn many adobe programs! I have installed Ps CC , Ae CC and Media Encoder CC (Im going with Creative Cloud). My PC has 8 gigs of ram and GTX 660 gigabyte windforce GPU . The processor is hydrocooled with the h100i. Now , adobe premiere pro... OK , Im downloading it. Any list in which I can see the adobe products? (BTW just for joining clips fast I use Movie Maker sometimes!)

@user3029101 - yes, there are a lot of Adobe products.  Adobe Encore has traditionally been bundled with Adobe Premiere and is the DVD/Bluray authoring package.  Adobe also used to have bundles of software that included sets of applications related to different tasks or the Master Collection which included all the Creative Suite (now CC) apps.  Once you learn what all the Adobe software does, it really isn't that hard to use in your workflow.

Oh, just an observation about your setup.  You should upgrade the RAM.  8gigs will meet the minimum for what you are doing, but it will limit you.  12 to 16 GB would give you a significant advantage over 8.  SSDs would be good if you don't already have them as well.  The ability to move data quickly is just as important or more so than processing power when it comes to video.

I am going to add another 8 gigs for sure... (I had an issue with the h100, it leaked :'(). I dont trust SSDs here. they seem to get broken pretty easily... I think I will stick with the Ae - Me - Ps - Pp. I already have the free version of Acrobat , I do not think I will ever need to create a PDF . Also , they seem to be A LOT specialized. Do I need more stuff to do some video compositing/editing AND video game designing? I am a developer and I have stucked at the design thing!

@user3029101 - I don't particularly trust SSDs either, however what you can do is use them as a scratch space.  Temp files will be written there and Adobe software will cache to it so that it can load quickly, but if it crashes out you won't be at any great loss.  My setup is to use a 12TB Raid 5 array for all my long term storage and two striped SSDs for my working space.  (I do copy over the assets I'm working on at that time as well, but they also stay on the RAID 5.)  Note that Acrobat Reader is only a reader, but if you don't need to make PDFs you don't need Acrobat.

For video game design, it depends on what you want to design.  Flash and Illustrator will allow you to design and build 2d sprite based games.  If you want to do anything with 3D assets, the one product Adobe doesn't make is a 3d modeling application.  Your options there are either Blender (FOSS), Cinema4D or one of the many Autodesk owned products (3DStudio Max, Maya, SoftImage).  Illustrator is also generally useful for storyboarding as vector graphics can be resized and manipulated much more easily than raster graphics.

In fact , I am not a web developer or designer. I have knowledge over OpenGL (Java particularly). It may be a while till I decide to code my own 3d game from scratch. For now on I am making these pixel side scrollers, till I get used to more advanced stuff. I am using LWJGL

@user3029101 - you will definitely want to check out Flash and Illustrator then.  They can easily do side scrollers like that.  You can make your sprites in Illustrator, bring them in to Flash and then script up the actions.

OK. Last question. Anything better than dfxr ? Both fast and easy to use.

@user3029101 - dfxr?

dfxr.com , it is a sound production site


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Error while opening encoder for output stream #0:0 - maybe incorrect parameters such as bit_rate, rate, width or height
 ffmpeg -i test.mp4 -acodec libvorbis -vcodec libvpx out.webm
ffmpeg version N-57647-g1880294 Copyright (c) 2000-2013 the FFmpeg developers
  built on Oct 30 2013 19:25:44 with gcc 4.4.7 (GCC) 20120313 (Red Hat 4.4.7-3)
  configuration: --prefix=/usr/local --enable-version3 --enable-libopencore-amrnb --enable-libopencore-amrwb --enable-libvpx --enable-libfaac --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libtheora --enable-libvorbis --enable-libx264 --enable-libvo-aacenc --enable-libxvid --disable-ffplay --enable-shared --enable-gpl --enable-postproc --enable-nonfree --enable-avfilter --enable-pthreads --extra-cflags=-fPIC --arch=x86_64
  libavutil      52. 48.100 / 52. 48.100
  libavcodec     55. 39.100 / 55. 39.100
  libavformat    55. 19.104 / 55. 19.104
  libavdevice    55.  5.100 / 55.  5.100
  libavfilter     3. 90.100 /  3. 90.100
  libswscale      2.  5.101 /  2.  5.101
  libswresample   0. 17.104 /  0. 17.104
  libpostproc    52.  3.100 / 52.  3.100
Input #0, mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2, from 'test.mp4':
  Metadata:
    major_brand     : isom
    minor_version   : 512
    compatible_brands: isomiso2avc1mp41
    encoder         : Lavf55.19.104
  Duration: 00:01:47.16, start: 0.023220, bitrate: 273 kb/s
    Stream #0:0(und): Video: h264 (High) (avc1 / 0x31637661), yuv420p, 320x180 [SAR 1:1 DAR 16:9], 192 kb/s, 25 fps, 25 tbr, 12800 tbn, 50 tbc (default)
    Metadata:
      handler_name    : VideoHandler
    Stream #0:1(und): Audio: aac (mp4a / 0x6134706D), 44100 Hz, mono, fltp, 74 kb/s (default)
    Metadata:
      handler_name    : SoundHandler
File 'out.webm' already exists. Overwrite ? [y/N] y
[libvpx @ 0xc4bd00] v0.9.0
[libvpx @ 0xc4bd00] Failed to initialize encoder: ABI version mismatch
Output #0, webm, to 'out.webm':
  Metadata:
    major_brand     : isom
    minor_version   : 512
    compatible_brands: isomiso2avc1mp41
    encoder         : Lavf55.19.104
    Stream #0:0(und): Video: vp8, yuv420p, 320x180 [SAR 1:1 DAR 16:9], q=-1--1, 200 kb/s, 90k tbn, 25 tbc (default)
    Metadata:
      handler_name    : VideoHandler
    Stream #0:1(und): Audio: vorbis, 44100 Hz, mono, fltp (default)
    Metadata:
      handler_name    : SoundHandler
Stream mapping:
  Stream #0:0 -> #0:0 (h264 -> libvpx)
  Stream #0:1 -> #0:1 (aac -> libvorbis)
Error while opening encoder for output stream #0:0 - maybe incorrect parameters such as bit_rate, rate, width or height

Is my CLI wrong? Do I need to specify more commands.

This is an issue with your ffmpeg installation.  You have a mismatch between the version numbers of the libraries you are trying to use.  Most likely, your version of the webm libraries is not built on the same version of ffmpeg as you are using.

So I need to rebuild mweb?

@FrankThornton - I'm not 100% certain as I don't have a lot of ffmpeg or webm experience, but that appears to be the case.  The error you are getting refers to a mismatch of build versions somewhere.


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Tools to combine a video with an animated logo
I'm wondering, what tools would you suggest that I use to create an animated logo like the following.
Say I have a logo that represents a roaring tiger head. I would like to have an intro video that would show the tiger walking and suddenly open his mouth to roar.
It is at this precise moment that I would like to paste the logo on top of the tiger head with a fading effect. So in the end only the logo is displayed with its slogan. The point is to show where this logo design came from.
It would be a nice effect and I can only imagine it's a very simple task for experienced video editors, but for me I have no clue where to start.

If I were you, here is my solution. I separate your video with animated with 3 parts: intro video with walking and roaring tiger, fading logo and logo with slogan. As per your mentioned that you may be a green hand for video editing software, therefore Premiere or After Effects may be too complicate for you. You can try some simple video editing software like I answered here.

Step one, find a walking and roaring tiger YouTube video like this
One:

, then download it
via YouTube downloader, Google it, you will find some free
Downloader (because it's not friendly to YouTube, you may need to
take caution)
Step two,  cut/edit this video with the simple video editing tools
You picked above, only keep the useful scene, i.e. walking and
Roaring part, save it to your pc first.
Step three, Google tiger head cartoon, you will find multiple
suitable tiger head logo, but you may need to touch up before use it
as your logo. If you already have one, perfect, you can just import
to that video editor, drag and drop to the timeline, applying fading
transaction, save it to your pc again.
Step four, at this point you need PIP function (make sure the
software you picked up has this function). Import the two video clip
and drag and drop the first one(made on step two) to video track and
drop the second one to PIP track, adjust the size and position of
your second video, which can be positioned above the tiger head,
fading at the same time, that's the PIP value.
Step five, import logo to that video editor and them drag to
image/media track (this logo should be put at the end of the
previous video), add text with the slogan you need.
Last step, export and save them to your pc, your video with animated
logo completed. All those steps can be achieved by my software (you
can check my profile), which is very simple to use and will be
suitable for green hands like you. Good luck for you!

Thank you so much for this very detailed answer that will not only help me but others as well. Thumbs up!

The big trick is just finding the right source clip that will fit with the logo, though it also depends on how closely you want it to match up.  Simply layering the logo over top of a video clip and fading it in is trivial with any editing or compositing software package (such as Premiere or After Effects).
To get a little more advanced you can actually build the logo off the video clip so that it is an exact match (if you don't already have a finalized logo that you have to use).  If you do, you can try making an animated logo using either vector graphics or 3d graphics that will start at the way the video looks and transition to the way the logo looks, but that is far more complicated.  You could also try to use morphing software which might be able to do it for you, though I don't know of any good, current morphing software as I haven't done any morphing in a while.
Finally, the most complex would be to do the entire thing in 3d animation software, but that would require a lot of time and resources to do.  Really, any of the things involving 3d animation are going to require an experienced professional to do, so your best bet is probably going to be either the basic position and fade or trying to find a video morphing program that can handle the transition.

Hi AJ Henderson and thanks for your advice. I googled morphing soft and found morpheus photo animation suite which seems to provide the possibility to save as .avi format. To make my transition, I will make a print screen of the tiger in the video and use it for the morphing. But then how do you suggest me to combine the tiger video with morphed .avi video so that everything is smooth? Thanks

@JulianLivin'inChina - that is just basic editing.  Play the video up until the frame that you start the morphing, then play the morphing clip, then put a still image of the logo positioned and sized to the same place as the end of the morph video.  It should be a trivial thing to do in whatever editing software you choose, but the exact details depend on the software you use.


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Recording a gaming console onto my computer from my TV
So I have a TV with two types of inputs. Composite (just mono), and coaxial - yes it's a pretty old TV. I play a video game that I want to record some matches of onto my laptop so I can edit the clips and stuff.
My gaming system is hooked up to my TV via composite (just mono). What type of parts do I need to buy to be able to record from the TV onto my laptop from the gaming console?

You will need a USB Video Capture Device to connect the game to your laptop.
In order to also be able to view the game on the TV, you will need 2 splitters for the video and audio and an extra composite cable.
You would run the yellow and white game console outputs to the splitters and attach the splitters directly to the Video Capture device.  The red cable goes into the Video Capture device directly.  Connect the yellow and white connectors of the extra cable between the splitters and the TV.
I'm not sure how much the video and sound quality will be affected by splitting the signal, so you may need to buy a better splitter to get it to work without any loss.


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Amateur orchestra recording/post-processing
I play in an amateur university orchestra, and I just recorded our last concert this weekend. This was a very simple setup: just a Sony PCM-D50 recorder, set to record at 96/24 through its internal mics, on a tripod a couple of meters away from the orchestra.
I set the recording level low enough that the internal limiter never triggered, while getting peaks at around -3 dB when the orchestra was really loud (and 0 dB during applause, of course).
Now with an orchestral program (especially in this case where we played movie soundtracks, so you get a solo violin in Schindler's List, a small woodwind ensemble in Harry Potter (Nimbus 2000 theme), and full-tilt brass/percussion in Star Wars) there is an enormous dynamic range to cover. It seems that modern productions use heavy dynamic range compression to "lift" the soft passages, and while I'm quite happy with the sound quality of the recording as-is, I'd still like to try and "equalize" it a bit so it's more in line with other CDs.
My problem is that when I use the pre-set Dynamic range compression settings in Sound Forge Audio Studio (for example 2:1 compression from -18 dB, or 3:1 from -15 dB) and then add gain (say, +6 dB), I find that the recording starts sounding quite muddy.
I don't think that that's because of a bad algorithm (I find the same problem in Audacity) but probably because I'm using a sledgehammer instead of a fine screwdriver to adjust the sound. Do you have any tips on how to lift low volumes without muddying the middle dynamic and high peaks?

The real answer: make sure your input level is OK every time you record something. Make sure that the loudest passages are just hitting the head (I try getting to > -1dB FS while not clipping.) , so the soft passages have enough detail. Also remember that dynamic range is a musical ingredient in classical music, even between different pieces. If things are soft in the hall, you don't want them as loud in your recording as things that are loud in the hall, you will lose a bit of musicality.
So: never ever compress classical music to solve your dynamic range problems, unless you use it for professional broadcasting purposes only. (And even then, don't compress the master, but use compression in the broadcasting chain.)
Instead, if you still want to fix things because you are turning the volume up and down between the pieces: slightly adjusting the overall levels of the pieces a bit is in many occasions the right thing to do. To do this, edit all pieces so that they fade in and out on the beginning and the end. (With a piece, I mean, if you record a Beethoven symphony, those 4 movements are related, so only fade the beginning of the first movement in, and the applause at the end of the last movement out. Don't fade in between the movements and don't adjust the volume for the individual movements!) If you do this, you can make slight adjustments to the overall level of the pieces. Don't normalize to 0dB FS though, and don't make the changes too big. A few (e.g. 3) dB could just be enough to solve your problem.
If you want to go this path, make sure you always record in 24 bits so you have more detail in your audio if you increase the volume in the master. (Sample rate is of less importance, but to record in 96KHz or in 88.2KHz is always good.)
My personal tips:

Adjusting the volume of a classical mix changes the accoustics of the hall; all sustaining noise from e.g. the audience is louder as well as the reverb it creates.
Adjusting the volume of a classical mix/master is almost always an excuse for having too much headroom on your recording and will result in dynamic detail getting lost. Therefore, always record in 24 bits if you decide to increase it.
As mentioned: dynamic range in classical music is a piece of the music itself, even between the different pieces. Getting rid of it is destroying part of the musical contents.
As a rule of thumb: never touch the volume of a part of a classical recording if the difference in dynamics is so bad that you can't listen to the recording in the living room without touching the volume button.

If it sounds good, don't change it. You could try to change it to 44.1kHz-16bit and see if it's really that off from a CD. Otherwise leave it as it is. The whole loudness war is lame anyway. http://productionadvice.co.uk/dynamic-range-day/

+1 That video is a really good illustration of the loudness wars problem. How many recordings have been destroyed with this kind of treatment? There's no telling.

Please do not destroy the beautiful sound of the instruments with compression. Classical music is some of the only music that still has a large dynamic range, and it's very very very nice.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/


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Difference Matte Keying software
I would like to know if anyone out there knows of any free software, or software not as expensive as Adobe After Effects, that can do Difference Matte Keying? I have searched the web a little and have not come up with any promising results. Note: Chroma Keying is not an option. I am on a Windows 7 computer.
Thank you in advance for your time, and possible help.

Blender, which is free and open-source, can do difference matte keying.
I don't know if it's better or worse than After Effects' keyer because I haven't used it before.

Thanks. I've used Blender alot, but never thought about that. Your's is my favorite answer so far.

Seems like Cinelerra can. Haven't checked how well it works though, I've been wanting to install it for quite some time but never got around to doing it yet.

You don't have to convert your computer, it's no problem to install a Linux parallel to Windows (assuming that's what you're using now). Do it, it's worth the effort! — Cinelerra might even run under Windows with Cygwin, though getting that to work tends to be rather difficult. — I don't mind if you don't accept this answer, but you should add something about the operating system to the question body, especially since you write "free software" there, which at least to me suggests a preference for Linux.

Ah, sorry about not mentioning the OS. I am on windows (7). And the converting my computer was somewhat of a joke. :D

Check the blend modes of your video tracks. Almost any actual editing and compositing software, has blend modes for "Difference". So i'm nearly sure, you don't need a separate software.

Yes, but that's not the same thing. Difference blending just combines two images, while difference matte uses one image to create a mask for another one through which it can then be combined with a third image.

Sure, but create your difference-blend node (assuming a node-based compositor), feed it into a keyer, and there you are, a difference keyer.

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


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Cannot mark my video with CC SA licence because Youtube Content ID found 3rd party soundtrack which itself is CC SA licensed
It seems, I'm in a catch-22 situation. I took a song from Free Music Archive website. I was careful to find a song which does not contain No-Derivatives rule. The licence of the song says:
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License.
My video is not being used for commercial purposes, so as far as I understand, I'm good to go as long as I add the same licence to my video, right?
And here is the problem. When I uploaded my video, Youtube immediately recognized the correct author and title of the song and said that my video contains a song from a 3rd party, thus I might have trouble:

Your video has copyrighted audio that may affect its availability. You may be able to fix this by removing a copyright-claimed song below.

I decided to ignore it and just change the licence setting for my video from Standard Youtube Licence to Creative Common licence to comply with the Share-Alike rule of the soundtrack. Surprise! Youtube seemed to ignore the licence setting. When I looked for more info I found that I cannot change licence for videos which have been marked suspicious by Content ID:

You cannot mark your video with the Creative Commons license if there
  is a Content ID claim on it.

This means, that I cannot mark my video with proper licence to comply with the song author's licence, thus I'm violating the licence because Content ID doesn't let me change it.
What should I do? Is it enough to just add a note in the description: "Please ignore the licence setting - this video is actually licensed under CC SA NC licence"?
Of course, I could find another song, but what if Youtube Content ID will recognize every song from Free Music Archive and again mark my video as suspicious and prevent me from setting the correct licence for it?
What's even more strange is that Youtube says:

Ads may appear on your video due to the presence of this song.

Hm, isn't Youtube itself then violating the NonCommercial rule of the song author's licence by adding ads to it?

I am not a laywer, but my limited understanding of the situation is this.
I see two issues here:

When you upload a video to youtube you need to grant them certain rights. As Youtube is without any doubt a commercial plattform, beyond others you have to grant them the right to commercially use your video.
Unfortunately, as your soundtrack is CC NC, you didn't have the right to do so yourself. That's why Youtube is correct in complaining about the song.
"SA" means you have to share your work also as CC SA NC. As Youtube doesn't allow you to select that exact license, it's technically impossible for you to comply with that condition.
(When you select CC-BY in Youtube, an additional license claim anywhere else, e.g. in the video description, would probably not legally binding)

So after all - if you want to upload a video to Youtube, it must contain only material that

has been created or licensed by you
is under CC BY license
is public domain or CC-0

Youtube is said to generate $5.000.000.000 revenue. No chance for any "NC" licensed material ;-)

This is what you sign when uploading to YT:When you upload or post Content to YouTube, you grant: to YouTube, a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable licence (with right to sub-licence) to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform that Content in connection with the provision of the Service and otherwise in connection with the provision of the Service and YouTube's business, including without limitation for promoting and redistributing part or all of the Service (and derivative works thereof) in any media formats and through any media channels

If that is incompatible to CC NC SA (and from my perspective it is), you have no right to upload such media.

Thanks for posting the relevant bits.  Didn't have access to Youtube at the moment to check.  Might be worth adding that as a quote in your answer too.  I'm not sure if that specifically allows them to monetize it or not, but I'm not familiar enough with a few of the terms they use to be sure.  It certainly does add even more ambiguity though.

If YouTube recognizes the music, they may be licensing it through a traditional music rights organization, which the music's owners could be using in addition to the CC licence.  Then YT would have the right to run ads on the video (forbidding it from being licensed as CC-NC) as long as they pay the music owners their cut.

This is hitting an automated filter.  There should be an option to contest the finding and it should then make it up to the copyright provider to identify if it actually is a violation (which is sounds like it shouldn't be).  I would also suggest adding a note in the description that it actually is CC SA NC since Youtube won't allow you to specify it.
As NWSP pointed out, it may also be possible that the Youtube TOS may be incompatible with NC licensing.  It isn't 100% clear from checking around the internet and seems to be ambiguous.  Certainly monetizing is ruled out, but it may be possible that YouTube requires commercial use to be allowed by the upload policy in their TOS and I don't think that has been tested in court yet.
As for the thing about displaying ads, that would go to the license holder.  Just because the copyright holder released it under a NC license doesn't mean THEY can't use it for commercial purposes.  They don't have a licensed copy, they own their work.  The trickier part would come from the fact that if you release your video under share-alike, then they can't derive commercial use from your work either, so display of ads would actually be in violation of your rights, unless you don't mind the original author getting some money for their efforts.

YouTube takes a cut of the ads, so they're still violating the NC clause if they run them.  (On the other hand, the music might be licensed through a traditional music rights organization in addition to the CC licence, which is how YouTube usually handles music.  Then YT would be within their rights to run ads and give the music owner their cut; but at the same time, that would interfere with putting the video as a whole under a CC licence.)


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How to make rendering loop selections work in Movie Studio Platinum 13?
I want to render just 10 seconds of my 1920x1080 movie to create the best quality preview for a demo. But rendering process takes the same time as rendering the entire movie (35 minutes).
Why is it taking so long?
A guess - is Movie Studio rendering the entire file and then just cropping away the unselected part? How do I render the selection only?
Here is what I do:

select a 10 seconds region in the timeline
go to menu -> Project -> Make movie
pick option Save it to my hard drive
pick format mp4
enable the checkbox "Render loop region only"
click Advanced options and pick Sony AVC/MVC encoder
pick my preset of choice (1440x1080@30p, 1.333 pixel ratio for anamorphic aspect ratio, 25 FPS, 26 Mbps bitrate)
render

Make sure that a loop region is highlighted when you click on Make Movie. When you render, are you viewing the render preview? How fast is the output progressing?

Yes, the loop region is highlighted. I just tried to select a region further in the video and render it again with the checkbox enabled, but the preview window shows as if it is rendering the video from the very beginning of it! Maybe there is some hidden setting which forces it to render entire video even for loops?

Oh, I found it myself and leaving the answer here in case someone else will get confused by this because the solution is not obvious.
I was setting the checkbox here:

but if I use "Advanced options", Movie Studio ignores this setting!
I have to select it deeper in a hidden dropdown in the "Advanced options" window like this:

And later when rendering the full video, it is important to remember to open that dropdwon again and turn off the region rendering.
Oh, Sony, this is so confusing - two things doing the same, but effective only under specific circumstances.


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Simple editing without re-encoding from the GoPro AVC codec?
Im looking for a fast workflow, where i can take my gopro video files, make simple cuts (no transisions, no effects, no audio manipulation), and cut them together into a clip and then export that edit out without having to re-encode/compress it.
Im shooting in their lowest HD setting (1280x960)... but would be open to switching formats if it helped.
In looking at this Final Cut Tutorial, it says i could edit without re-encoding if the project format matched the source material. The problem is, my Final Cut doesn't have the exact format my gopro records in... any ideas? Can i install the gopro codec somehow into final cut?
GoPro codec specs:
GoPro AVC H.264
1280x960
29.97

One Idea:
Use QuickTime to set in/out and keep copy/pasting clips into a single clip then SAVE. This works without re-encoding and saves fast, but the the workflow is not that fast. The other downside to this is Quicktime saves all the audio tracks into separate tracks, so the file chokes on youtube/vimeo unless you do an export with re-compression.

Have you tried GoPro Studio?

I know for sure that Corel VideoStudio version 7 and up can do straight cuts in AVC-encoded HD video, and then output without re-encoding. You must be careful to use exactly the same output format as input format. I don't know whether it can do the same with 4K. You can download a trial version and see for yourself.

There are two freeware-tools (for Windows) I know:
LosslessCut
Free Video Cutter Joiner
They both work fine, but remember that you can't make exact cuts where you want, as they can only cut at keyframes (Avidemux ignores this, so the Video is always destroyed at the beginning). But this accuracy depends on the keyframe interval of your video.

Use ffmpeg: http://www.labnol.org/internet/useful-ffmpeg-commands/28490/
First cut at your desired in and out points:
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -ss 00:00:50.0 -codec copy -t 20 output.mp4

Then concatenate the files you cut:
ffmpeg -f concat -i file-list.txt -c copy output.mp4

Hardly a fast workflow. Without a gui, determining the in and out points is an arduous effort is flipping from the player to a spreadsheet or text file every forty seconds. Not to mention, precision is broad, as you can only see the player to the full second, but if this is fast camera work, you'd want down to at least tenths.

This is a reliable solution. A GUI front-end, if exists, would be better, but this answer shouldn't be downvoted for this.

Precision problem is non-existence. You can get millisecond point using a pro editor. Nevertheless, without re-encoding it will only be accurate to keyframes.

My recommendation as a fellow Mac user: LosslessCut

The most efficient and free tool for your requirements which comes to my mind.
Just press I O   I O   I O   ...  all the time to set in and out points while watching. One can operate:
either inclusively: Keep everything between all in-out points and export the result.
or exclusively: Throw away everything between all in-out points and export the remainder.

Pros

Playback and operation is super fast and efficient.
Export is lossless and super fast — Concatenation without any re-encoding. But the cuts will occur at keyframes (which can be up to ca 1 sec away where you set the in- or out-point)
Uses ffmpeg under the hood, and that understands basically every video/audio codec and container format this world has ever seen.
Operate by mouse or hotkeys. Very efficient.
Suits both beginners and advanced users well in one UI.
Free!
Cross platform: Windows, Linux, Mac.
Exclusive/inclusive mode can also be toggled any time. But ofc you should decide on your approach at the start of your cutting efforts and then stick to it.
With this you can easily create one export with "the good stuff" then simple swap the mode and then export "all the rest" into another file. If you need it as a backup. Maybe in a second pass you go through the "all the rest part" and have some takeouts there again. Until you have the "very very rest" which you may simply delete and not bother keeping at all.

Cons

Not frame-exact cutting (hh:mm:ss:ff), that would require to losslessly re-encode the portion from the last keyframe to that frame, but they look into implementing Smart Cut.

Note that QuickTime can do this already (keep it lossless where possible and only re-encode the portions from keyframe to cut. But with these downsides:

❌ Either thumbs or waveform, not both. LossLesscut has bove.
❌ No zooming into timeline. Exact editing de facto not possible for everything longer than 30secs. That dynamic zoom in (UX paradigm taken from iOS devices) is in-precise and unpractical.
❌ No fast operation. In LosslessCut this goes very smooth with keyboard shortcuts and also mistakes are corrected VERY quickly.
❌ Only neighboring clips. In Lossless cut you can have multiple clips with in/out points and gaps (throwaway or keep) inbetween. In QuickTime you have to manually delete the clips inbetween. Often you confuse them. Forget fast and precise batch cutting here.


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I changed the .mp4 extension of my video to .mpg and it still opens and plays fine (in VLC and in Windows Media Player). Why is this so?
I'm uploading a file to an external system that accepts only mpg or mpeg extension files. I had a mp4 file so I changed the mp4 extension to mpg and I was able to upload the file into the system. Would other using the system who have access to this uploaded mpg file be able to view my video correctly?
Why is it that I can change the extension from .mp4 to .mpg and the video still plays fine? Should it not give me an error because the extension is not correct?

The .mpg and .mpeg extensions are typically associated with MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 files. The structure of these files is different than the .mp4 format used for H.264 video, part of the MPEG-4 family of formats.
I suspect VLC and WMP can play the file because they must not be using the file extension to determine file type, they probably parse the file with all the supported parsers until one works. To prove this point, I took a .wmv movie and renamed it to .mp4. When I played it in my Windows 7 PC with WMP I got a warning window saying that the extension did not match the format, but I told it to proceed anyway and the file played just fine.
If this online service requires MPEG-1 or 2 then you should transcode your video to one of those formats before uploading. Unless the online service transcodes all uploaded videos to some standard format. In that case it does not really matter what the format of the uploaded video is, as long as the service can read it and transcode to its own favorite format.
Good luck.

I think this a good explanation from iOrgSoft:

MPEG-4 is method of defining compression of audio and visual (AV)
  digital data. The MP4 file format defines the storage of MPEG-4 audio,
  scenes and multimedia content using the ISO Base Media File Format.
  MPEG4 is one of the most popular variants as it found prominent use in
  mobile devices.

So essentially your MPG video is packaged as a MP4, but inside there is still a MPG (or MPEG) video. So both extensions work (because inside is the same format)
I dont know of any other situations where you can do this. eg If you were to change the extension to something like .WMV or .MOV you wouldnt be able to open the file.

I did with WMV. I change the extension of my WMV video to MP4 and it works with all common media player, and also accepted when uploaded to YouTube. Is this enough to convert such as video file from WMV to MP4?

I imported a dvd using nero video and instead of exporting/downmixing as mp4 which takes about an hour per dvd i just located the saved video file in nero folder and dragged the file to desktop. From there i just rename the video file to the movie name from 001.mpg to (movie name).mp4
The file still plays perfectly fine from my usb hdd to my lg smart tv. Such a time saver


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Which technology do YouTube and Vimeo use for processing 1080 HD Video?
For me personally seems youtube videos crisper in 1080 or "original size".
Vimeo seems a little fuzzy when HD is on.
What technology does Youtube use, and why is it apparently better? What is the difference between the two technologies?

As it stands, the title of your question could be on topic, but the body of the question is definitely off topic.  Please edit the question to better fit the guidelines in the FAQ

@FriendOfGeorge: I edited the last sentence to conform to the title. Is the question now on topic?

@TomAu: since this question was closed over 3 years ago,  it is probably best to ask a new question.

They both are powered by flash, which can read most file types, so I think it really has to do with the way and speed it is buffered.


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JVC Everio GZ-MS90E aspect ratio is 5:4 instead of 16:9
I am working with an JVC Everio GZ-MS90E which is configured to produce a 16:9 video. But my aspect ratio is 5:4 instead of 16:9.
Width: 720
Height: 576
Width/Height = aspect ratio
720/576 = 1.25 = 5:4
Does anybody have similar problems or probably a solution how to fix that?
I am really annoyed because I don't know the right preset for my Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5 sequence. I have already some clips and I would like to use them without transcoding.

Your video is 16:9, you just need to create a sequence at widescreen square pixel (1024x576, P/A of 1.0). If you drop the footage on that sequence it should appear 'correctly'.

Now I found the right way for my footage. It was simple: Just right click on the footage, and select Ändern » Filmmaterial interpretieren. This is probably Change » Footage or something like that.
Then I fored premiere to use the aspect ratio D1/DV PAL Widescreen 16:9 and everything is fine.

Please select this as the accepted answer so that it will no longer show up in the unanswered questions list.


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Metal particle Hi8 tape degradation
Recently I was playing a Hi8 tape from 1998, when I tried rewinding and rewatching a part (stopping the tape, before rewinding).  The part of the tape I had just watched was highly distorted and black and white.
So, I've learned the hard way that old metal particle tapes are prone to being erased, when watched.  Presumably, the 'MP' on the tapes stands for metal particle?  These tapes have been stored in a safe place.  How many years before this problem arises with MP tapes?
Is there a better alternative than playing these tapes into a capture card?  If not, I realize that I only have one chance to capture this video.  If this is the only option, I'll expect to capture until the read head becomes too affected by residue, and then stop and clean the head, and repeat.  Any advice would be appreciated.

Edit
Unfortunately, I've found out the hard way there are consequences to over-using a cleaning tape.  The head is either dirtier than before, or damaged.

You do need to play the tapes onto a capture card, yes. And the sooner the better. You don't just get one attempt, but you will get a slight degradation of quality every play, so you are best off aiming to do it in one pass if possible.
First think about cleaning any metal particles from the read head, and then look at this technique archivists use where they bake old tapes when they shed is.gd/LxdRGH - thanks @stib.
I recently captured about 50 tapes from the late 80's to the mid 90's and I did about half of them then cleaned the head then did the other half. Degradation wasn't noticeable, but I just thought I should do it just in case.
As to how long you can store them - is the safe place shielded from EMF, heat and humidity, then they can last for years, but due to the nature of magnetic tape, the magnetic field strength of particles affects adjacent particles, so quality will degrade no matter what.
When configuring your capture, set it for the highest quality you can afford - as there are utilities which can clean up some noise and speckle once the signal is digitised.


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Burn a single HD video into a DVD without losing quality
I created a video (slideshow of 14.2MP photos and music) using Windows Live Movie Maker. The video's resolution is 1440x1080 and is as WMV with 840MB.
Now what I want is to burn that HD video (no menus, no other videos) into a DVD so it can be playable on any DVD player and watchable on a TV. Is there any way to burn it without losing quality? I tried Nero, Windows Live Movie Maker burn dvd option and Wondershare DVD Creator. The video quality got worse in all of them (Nero's being the worse and Wondershare's the better) with loss of sharpness, sometimes minor jpeg artifacts and some color changes.
I believe there must be a way to do it because:

the DVD still has 3.80GB free, so why compressing it?
the movie DVD's image quality is great so what are they using to do it?

Is there any software to burn the video without losing the original quality? Should I compress the video to 720x480 using specialized software /which one?) before burning it?

Try freemake
, and an answer here
http://avp.stackexchange.com/a/7018/3552

The short answer is "No."  DVD by definition is limited to 720x480 video with a fairly low bitrate, compressed specifically with MPEG-2.  There is absolutely no way to make your HD video look just as good with those constraints.
Some DVD players do let you play .mp4, .mkv, or whatever files that happen to be stored on a DVD, but that isn't a standard function of DVD players in general.

That last info about .mp4 was precious, thx ;)


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How to fix Sony Vegas 12.0 blank screen render?
I've got video recorded from my phone and I use Vegas to edit them, when I play the video back in VLC player the video orientation is ok, but when I import into Sony Vegas and it asks if I want to set project preferences to match the media, I have

allowed the Vegas to match the project settings and the orientation changes to portrait.

when this happens I change the project settings to make the project settings to landscape and then use track motion to straigten the video. But when I render, its always a blank screen with the audio playing in the back ground.

not allow Vegas to match the project settings and the video shows portrait with the black strips on the side.

I then use track motion to straighten the video but the render produces the same result. Blank screen with audio.

I do not know why this is happening, how would I set up the import and project preferences so that the movie renders properly?
Note: All videos are mp4 format. And the media offline checkbox doesn't make a difference, checked or unchecked.

I do not know the technical reason behind it, but it seems once I import the file into the project media box, I right click the video and go to orientation and change it to 0 (original), seems to work without any error.

Import the file into the project media box,
I right click the video and go to orientation
change it to 0 (original)

Should render without any problems.

Use VLC to get the actual frame size. You can go to Tools/media information and from there navigate through the tabs to see what the frame size is.
Then enter that information manually into vegas. When you drop your clips in everything should be good to go.
If you are still getting blank frames in the rendered video then I would guess that to be a render setting. You may want to render to a default setting to see if that helps.


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How can I crop a video with ffmpeg?
I have an MP4 file of a screen recording that I need to crop. How can I do this with ffmpeg?

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

Where the options are as follows:

use "-vf" or -"filter:v" - depending on your version of ffmpeg/avconv
out_w is the width of the output rectangle
out_h is the height of the output rectangle
x and y specify the top left corner of the output rectangle (coordinates start at (0,0) in the top left corner of the input)

Original image

Original 320x240 image
How out_w, out_h, w and h fit into the picture

Example 1

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

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

Example 2

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

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

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

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

Example 3

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

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

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

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

crop filter documentation

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

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

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

This works with 'avconv' now.

I have an 1923x1080 and want 1920x1080. This the the commend I tried: /Users/kukodajanos/Workspace/ffmpeg -i /Users/kukodajanos/Desktop/video_640x480-2.mp4 -filter:v "crop=1920:1080:0:0" -c:a copy /Users/kukodajanos/Desktop/video_640x480-4.mp4 but the original movie is returned.

@Joce JFYI avconv is part of libav — a fork of ffmpeg

worth to mention this technique (with the crop filter) re-encodes the video, see https://stackoverflow.com/questions/33378548/ffmpeg-crop-a-video-without-losing-the-quality if re-encoding matters for you

edited to change the outdated -filter:v to the more up to date and simpler to type -vf. Cheers!

I'm getting some automatic scale somehow. I guess it comes from the aspect :/ For instance, when I do "crop=80:60:200:100", my final video ends up being 97x60. I tried adding setsar=1:1 next to crop, but then it seems to scale it before crop, so the final size is 80x60, but the contents are the wrong aspect.

If you're trying to remove black bars around your video (piallarbox, letterbox, windowbox etc.) use cropdetect first to have ffmpeg print cropping parameters for you: ffmpeg.exe -i vid.mp4 -vf cropdetect out.mp4

For those who wonder, -vf is an alias for -filter:v.

When I use this solution, my output video has a much lower bitrate. Any idea why?

You can adjust the output audio/video bitrate with the proper parameters. Please refer to this answer to see a procedure: https://superuser.com/a/521684/83875, basically you "use the -b:v and -b:a options, respectively. You can use abbreviations like K for kBit/s and M for MBit/s.". Credits to @slhck.

If your video is long, you might want to let ffmpeg sample a passage with cropdetect to give you optimum values before you encode. Here's an example that gets the crop value for a 14 minute passage starting at 33 and a half minutes into the video: ffmpeg -ss 00:33:30 -t 00:14:00 -i video.mp4 -vf cropdetect -f null - 2>&1 | awk '/crop/ { print $NF }' | tail -1

This crop filter works great! In order to determine the bounding box needed to crop a video, I exported a video frame to an image with ffmpeg. Then open the image with GIMP where I can draw a bounding box for the area I wanted to crop the video and then I can get the X,Y,W, H info from the pointer window. Ask if this is not clear enough.

@GeppettvsD'Constanzo You could consider starting a new question if any particular part that is not clear for you.

would it be possible to do the crop just for a specific duration in the video?

@Alex, sure. You just need to insert the proper parameters in the command line. See this answer for information: https://askubuntu.com/a/59388/9598

Basically you add -ss 00:00:30 in order to say the  point where to start the cut, and -t 00:00:05 to say the duration you may wish.

Does this remove the cropped data, or is the data recoverable? I want to crop sensitive data.

The process will deliver a new video file which will contain only the portion of video you cropped. No additional recoverable data will be available in that file. Nevertheless, you will keep the original video file alongside with the new cropped file.

-c:a copy isn't included in the first command presented. What do they do?

how would i convert the result to gif?

@Kong, you can either use ffmpeg -i VIDEO-ORIGINAL.EXT IMAGE.GIF or convert VIDEO-ORIGINAL.EXT IMAGE.GIF, in both cases VIDEO-ORIGINAL is the source file name and .EXT is the file extension. The IMAGE.GIF can be anything you may wish but keep the .GIF (lowercase perhaps) to get the results. Please have in mind the ffmpeg will be faster but the convert will provide you with a high quality GIF animation. Additional parameters can be used to improve the final gif animation performance.

Your answer has mixed terminology. At the top you say that crop has x:y at the end, but later you define w,h at the start.

@AaronFranke, yes, you're right. X and Y are for coordinates, W and H is to clarify on Width and Height respectively. Thanks for pointing that. The answer has suffered additions, updates and corrections from the community. Nowadays is quite different from what I answered first.

Sorry in the second image the variables are wrong. w should be swapped with out_w and h should be swapped with out_h

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


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How can I crop a section of the video screen in Premiere Pro?
Hi I've taken a 1080p screen recording on my desktop but only want a specific crop of the actual recorded screen in the final video. How can I do this in Premiere Pro CS4?

You want to use an effect that's called a 4 point garbage matte.  It allows you to set 4 points which create a box and everything outside it is removed.
Here is a link to a tutorial on how to use the effect 4 point garbage matte.

how do I get rid of the black border?

If you make a sequence that is smaller, say 720x480 (sd) then the original, then  you can scale down your original capture to fit with no black border.


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Will multiple radiomic sets conflict with one another?
I use a single radiomic (Sennheiser AVX) but now need a second one. Will the second conflict with the first one in terms of frequencies? Or would they automatically find different frequencies to operate on?
Update: now operating two Senn AVX sets, and they work together perfectly.

These wireless microphones specifically designed not to interfere with each other. They will automatically find their counterparts but can only send a signal to one receiver.
You should be OK.

Recent digital wireless products are more likely than not to have automated features which both search out available channels, AND to automatically pair transmitters and receivers.  However, legacy analog kits are much more vulnerable to problems of interaction and interference with other similar wireless kits being operated in proximity.

In most cases you can choose a frequency for the sender / transmitter to operate on. Interfering with another wireless mic is only one problem which might make switching frequencies necessary. You can also encounter other radio interference, not caused by other radio mics. Apparently the Sennheiser avx does this automatically for you, but I would assume there is also a manual way to select frequencies if that process fails.


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How should I encode my 4K video stream?
I'm capturing uncompressed 4K video from my Sony A7R II via a video capture device, and am using ffmpeg to save the video.
My problem is I don't know what codec to use. The two options I tried are:

Uncompressed: this takes up too much space, something like 1Gb every few seconds.
h264: this very quickly starts skipping frames. I've tried libx264, nvenc and qvx and they all essentially fill up the buffer and then start skipping frames after less than a minute of shooting.

I'm doing all of this on a laptop, so I have little scope for adding hardware encoding, especially considering that Intel's and Nvidia's solutions - at least on my machine - are clearly insufficient for 4K.
My requirements are that the codec allows:

About 4-5 hours of captured footage reliably fit on a 500Gb SSD
Encoding can happen in realtime without frames being dropped
The codec is postprocessing-friendly

Just in case it's useful, my laptop has an i7-4710MQ and 32Gb RAM.
Update: some clarification: I record at 30FPS, my capture device is INOGENI, sampling is 4:2:0. And no, I don't want to lose more quality than I have to. If I have to spend 100Gb/hour for recording, I'm OK with that.

What ffmpeg command(s) have you tried? Are you capturing audio too? Do you know what chroma sampling the camera outputs? I assume you run a HDMI from the camera to your laptop.

In addition to the chroma sub sampling (4:2:0 or 4:2:2 or 4:4:4) please precise the frame per second number.

Please also add your priority between loosing quality or decreasing recording capacity

@RawBean added clarifications

@Mulvya I've tried things like ffmpeg -f dshow -rtbufsize 2000M -video_size 3840x2160 -i video="2318-INOGENI 4K2USB3":audio="Digital Audio Interface (2318-INOGENI 4K2USB3)" -c:v nvenc -preset slow -loglevel info r:\4k.mp4

A few things: I assume direct recording on SD cards is not accptable - the camera saves XAVC-S as a 100 mbps stream on SD cards i.e. 5 hours in ~225GB.  More pertinently, you've applied the slow preset - ffmpeg needs to be able to consume packets fast enough. Use libx264 with veryfast or ultrafast preset, and profile main or baseline.

@Mulvya ha! direct recording on SD is impossible because of the terrible 30-minute limit. that just kills the whole thing outright.

@Mulvya veryfast appears to work, anything slower does not

As mentioned by @Mulvya, I think the issue is the "slow" preset.
One option is encoding a compressed stream that is also lossless. For example, the x264 encoder can do this using "-preset ultrafast -qp 0". This will probably result in failing your 3rd requirement (compatibility), but since it's lossless, you can transcode later onto cheap spinning disks. You can also look into using the huffyuv lossless encoder, which might be better supported. There are some gotchas with this method, so you definitely want to test your workflow from beginning to end. In particular, see this question:
Using h264 in loseless mode brings small unexpected results
If you do go this route, I would also experiment with dropping subsampling and encode at 4:4:4. It may not increase your file size by that much and will help you if you plan on doing any post-production work.
Another option, depending on your budget, is purchasing an encoder. I love FFmpeg, but it's meant to work everywhere, not to take full advantage of your hardware. Mainconcept isn't too expensive and will better be able to use that i7 processor you already shelled out for. (See https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/using-the-intel-media-sdk-within-mainconcept-h264avc-encoder-for-intel-quick-sync-video for example.) They also offer an HEVC encoder which would further shrink your file size. I can't vouch for the quality, however, as my experience is with Ateme. But I believe you can at least evaluate it out for free.

x264 does produce lossless output. I added an answer to the question you linked to.


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GH2 HDMI out on MX02 & Black Magic (Need for studio recording)
I have the following gear:

2 x Lumex GH2s
Matrox MX02
Black Magic Intensity
XLR Shotgun Mic

My problem....
I have a studio where the cameras do not move, I use the HDMI out on the cameras in to the MX02 or Intensity. I am running 23.9 frames per second output from the cameras. When I use the video in Premiere Pro, the video is all jittery. I get the issue on both capture cards.
I use a studio with a white, green background however maybe I only need cheap camcorders. The audio is coming via XLR input on the MX02.
I have asked Matrox http://forum.matrox.com/mxo/viewtopic.php?p=41114#41114
I have asked GH2 forum http://www.personal-view.com/talks/discussion/6495/recording-out-of-gh2-hdmi-out-without-pressing-record-on-mx02-black-magic-intensity#Item_7
So I am stuck and I am not sure what to do to address the stutter. I have spent over 1800 for 2 gh2s.
I have also tried filters and plugins in Premiere Pro to make it smooth. but no joy...
Can anyone provide any insight into this...

It isn't really clear what you are asking here.  The 23.9 frame rate is most likely 23.976 which is the more accurate standard frame rate for 24fps.  This shouldn't result in a stutter.  It is possible that your computer is simply not powerful enough to play the video smoothly.

It isn't really clear what you are asking here.  The 23.9 frame rate is most likely 23.976 which is the more accurate standard frame rate for 24fps.  This shouldn't result in a stutter.  It is possible that your computer is simply not powerful enough to play the video smoothly.
Are you trying to capture from both the Intensity and the MX02 at the same time from different cameras?  This is going to put a pretty extreme load on your system's ability to store the file and will almost certainly not work without an SSD and even that might be pushing it.
Is there a particular reason you need to be capturing the input live?  If you simply want to do uncompressed capture, I would recommend recording to Black Magic HyperDecks and then syncing in post.  Alternately, if you need to be doing live editing, you could get the Black Magic Studio ATEM Production Switcher which would handle what you need.

Hello AJ, The capturing is fine, I have 2 system which are i7s with 2 ssd RAID 0. The reason for capturing out from the camera, quality and XLR audio from the MX02 input.  I am asking why is it jittery... it does not make sense. I have exported the video as mp4 and still the same... So i do not understnad what is going on??? Have i missed something.. are the GH2 no good to capture HDMI out?

Please have a look at this video...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmYKFCD_vwc
It shows what I am on about regarding the judder

That appears to be a drop frame issue to me.  It might be a pan judder issue, but I don't think so based on how slow the pan is.  It really does look like a problem with the system keeping up with the uncompressed HDMI data rate.  What is your CPU usage and disk I/O like during the capture?  Am I correct that you are capturing direct to the PC live?  I guess it wouldn't hurt to also check memory usage.  Look for any kind of bottle neck.  A buddy of mine uses GH2s all the time for video and has no problems, so it is most likely something with your setup.

I would normall agree with you however. I can read an write at 400 Megabytes sustained (2 x SSD Raid 0), When capturing, CPU Usage (25%), Memussage (3.2GB (I have 12Gb in total). You stated that your friend has a GH2, does he record from the HDMI Output of the GH2. Thanks

@Arthor - hmm, that's a good question.  He may not be using the HDMI output directly normally, so it could be something specific to the HDMI port.

I stated in the post, but I do not think I was that clear... A frustrating situation. The MX02 is not a none professional system. Are there any trick on PrePro to framebled realyl well.

@Arthor - I meant the HDMI port on the camera.  I know that both the Intensity and the MXO2 are very nice pieces of hardware.  I'm personally a very long time Matrox fan having used the RTX and the RT2500 in the past.  One last thought, have you tried a different HDMI cable to see if there is anything wrong with the data rate supported by that particular HDMI cable?

Indeed I have, I have used a 1m cable HDMI 1.4v and 6 other different ones. My only next option is to look for a fix in PrePro... But I am not sure what to classify the fault as... THere was a mention of 4:2:0 which the GH2 output and it should be 4:2:2, But I am learning that stuff now...

Ok. It look like the GH2 is a not go. A mangled gamma :(... So I have to get a new camera. More money.. Just a note... Would this be ok  Panasonic AG-HMC41 ?


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Recording video and audio with external input to computer with Canon 600D
I like to do drum covers, but the process always takes ages. I have to record my sounds from my electronic drumset (TD-9KX) to Cubase via a Tascam US122-MKii interface. Video is captured with a Canon 600D. Afterwards I have to export the audio from Cubase and insert it in Adobe Premiere together with the video and make sure both are in sync. That takes a loooooooong while!
Because the 600D has an "external mic" input that supports stereo, I thought it might be very well possible to record from my external drumset, to the interface and via its output to the 600D to the PC. This would mean that everything is in sync. Is this correct?

It should be.  You might end up with impedance mismatches that have to be dealt with, so it might take a few other (relatively cheap) steps to get there (devices called pads, which bring down the level), but it should work.  The quality might not be quite as good though.

Why would the quality be worse? I suppose you are talking about the audio quality.

@BramVanroy - it depends on what the quality of the analog to digital converter in the camera is vs the quality of the audio interface you are using.  If you are actually capturing as Midi data, then it would be lossless.  Also, if there is an impedance mismatch, then the quality will deteriorate compared to not having a mismatch.

Yes, that should work. Be sure you adjust your interface for the lowest latency without audio dropouts. You will need to measure and compensate for the latency in your audio interface.
Once you know the latency value, you can easily adjust the A/V sync in the video editor. Good luck!


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Where to start Transcoding with FFMPEG?
I would like to learn a lot about Transcoding video files with FFMPEG from any format to mp4 (hH264/AAC) format. We have a large repository of video files ranging from 1 MB to 2 GB of various formats like mkv,mp4,avi,wmv,mov,m4a etc including both HD and SD.
After converting we will be uploading the files to a CDN from where we stream it through JW player.
So, the goal here was to attain a maximum quality with reasonable file size and has to stream faster.
I am planning to use FFMPEG for transcoding.
Please point me to the articles where I could learn about efficient transcoding.

This is really kind of a loaded question.  There are companies whose sole business is encoding/transcoding.  We might be able to direct you towards some introductory resources, but you are jumping in to a very deep, very detailed field that can be done as simply as using presets for your format and resolution or as complex as custom encodings fine tuned for individual videos relying on in depth knowledge of the codec being used.

A good start would be the FFmpeg and x264 Encoding Guide. You can add -movflags faststart to your ffmpeg command so the videos can be viewed by the client as they are being downloaded.

@AJHenderson Yes, I've worked with Mediacoder, Handbrake and few other tools, but my vision here is to learn and use FFMPEG and deign my own transcoder


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How to trim a video with frame precision using ffmpeg?
I need to trim videos with a precise end frame, however, ffmpeg seems to cut the video at the nearest first key-frame. So I don't have enough control over the ending frame.
I try to insert key-frame before trimming, but it doesn't work.
These are my command lines:
ffmpeg -i <sVideoFilename> -force_key_frames 00:00:1:520 -vcodec wmv1 -acodec wmav2 -q:a 0 -q:v 0 <sVideoFilenamekf>

ffmpeg -i <sVideoFilenamekf> -ss 00:00:1:520 -to 00:00:3:640 -vcodec wmv1 -acodec wmav2 -q:v 0 -q:a 10 -r 30 <sVideoFilenameTrimmed>*

What's wrong with my command line ?
Thanks for your answer

I updated the question to reflect that you are looking for frame level precision rather than millisecond precision.  That may pull in more answers.  I don't personally know FFMPEG all that well as I always use other commercial encoders.

You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of how video works.  Video is composed of frames.  You can't have millisecond precision because video doesn't have millisecond precision.  If there are 30 frames per second in the video, you can only stop after one of those frames.  That means your options are only every 1/30th of a second roughly.
If the format is group of pictures based it may be limited when it can end as well depending on the formats ability to end a group of pictures early. (A group of pictures is used in formats where some frames are stored as changes from other related frames rather than full images.)
What are you trying to accomplish that you need this precision for?  Perhaps there may be an alternate way to accomplish your goal.

I need to synchronize the video with another machine. The video is too much longer and i need to trim it (just need 2s). I don't have 1/30th of a second precision (~=33ms). I cut between 1062ms and 3640ms but i get a video length of 2130ms (not 2578 as planned). I can send you the video if you want to test it. Thanks for your answer.

@RMI - Maybe I'm not reading your command lines correctly, but they say a start point of 1520ms, not 1062ms.  This makes the output of 2130ms correct.

If i trim with the first parameters (1520 to 3640) i have an length error too > than 1/30. I try with another video, it's the same problem. Perhaps the problem is the video codec.

@RMI - what is the result with the first parameter at 1520?

2s197 with or without keyframe

@RMI Hmm, so it looks like you are getting one extra frame.  Bizar.  I'm out of ideas right now, but I'll post back if I can think of anything else.

Can't agree with the "fundamental misunderstanding" part: a movie is a stream of audio frames and video (image) frames. The audio frames are typically very short. Assuming that it's about the audio sample rate is reasonable. (Though relying on that assumption is probably not good in general.) We trim to very high precision, and that's trimming the audio stream. Video frames either fall inside of the range of interest, or they don't. The audio is usually much more important to trim accurately, because a single video frame is hardly visible, but a few ms of audio can contain (un)wanted sounds.

@Evgeni Sergey - describing an audio sample as a frame isn't accurate. A sample is more similar to a pixel than a frame as it holds essentially no data without surrounding samples. While you are correct that audio can be trimmed more closely, the question was about video frames, not even necessarily an audio video file. We don't trim video based on audio. Video and audio are independent streams that are synchronized. You can't have a video file with a partial frame, it has to end on a full frame, though some formats can alter frame rate mid stream.

@EvgeniSergeev Audio frames are usually 1000 samples for PCM and 1024 samples for AAC, so on the order of 21-25 ms. Not much different than typical video frame duration. Perhaps you are thinking of individual audio samples.

@Mulvya - interesting, I've never heard of audio samples being grouped in to frames, though I suppose it would make sense for synchronization purposes.  I don't do a whole lot specifically on audio for video though, so that isn't too surprising that I've missed that little technical detail.

Every one understand video framing because pixels have two presentation properties on which they can differ i.e. time and space. So all pixels that share same timestamp but differ in spatial position are naturally grouped into a single frame. Audio samples only differ along the axis of time but they still have to be grouped (packetized) for interleaving and transmission purposes. At the user or NLE level, that info is useless, unlike pixel grouping. so not widely known.


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Automated aligning audio tracks with timings for dubbing screen casts
We have some screen casts that need to be dubbed to various languages for which we have script for the target language like:
Begining Time | Audio Narration

0:0           | blah nao lorep iposm...

1:20          | aqzao dok dkjv  dwv....

...

We can record each of the above units separately and then align it at the proper beginning times as mentioned in the above script.
Is there a tool or system which allows us to align these audio units based on the times provided?
EXAMPLE:
Input:
Input the N time values: 0:0,1:20 ...
Then input the N audio recordings.
Output:
Audio recordings aligned to the above timings while:

Overflow should be detected by the system individually
Underflow is padded by silence

If there was a solution, it would probably have been pretty well known, because you'll need to make a program that can partially transcribe speech in many languages, which is a huge project.

I find it very simple thing to do and can become a plugin to audacity

For a human, yes, but for a programmer no. If I've understood you correctly, you provide a transcription file that tells the plugin what text should be played when. The problem is that you need an advanced program to be able to figure out what is said in each clip. You have a coordinate system with x seconds. And y is the position of the microphone membrane. And then you have if's and else's and loops to figure out what is spoken. It's a huge project, and how many programs like that work in any language other than english? Not many, so it's a big project, so IF this kind of plugin existed, it

would be well known.

No you got it wrong, I dont want that , please read the question carefully , its  a simple system that Inputs N recordings and N timings and outputs a single time aligned file  @FriendofKim

Okay, but what then is the problem?

You can just use a program like Adobe Premiere Pro, easy and fast. If you don't know how to do it, I can post an answer :)

Did you understand that it would be helpful to dub in many languages?. I can see it to be a simple programming Job, before doing it myslef was checking about existing solutions

Yes, if you use Premiere Pro, it's a breeze. I can show you if you want.

Sure do show me , I mean can we input N timing values and N recordings to get them aligned into a single file?

There we go. Good luck :)

Linux command line solution might be acceptable?

sure it would be ! @EugeneS

@EugeneS Infact a commandline solution would be the best solution

This question has an open bounty worth +100 reputation from wordtext ending in 22 hours. @EugeneS

Yep. I've noticed. Trying to think something out using cuebreakpoints and shnsplit. No luck yet though..

I guess a simple perl\python script can do the JOB

@EugeneS ANY LUCK?

Unfortunately, couldn't work it out..

Add your video to your timeline. Then you play the video from the beginning. Now you are going to insert a marker every time you want a new clip to be inserted. If you have CS6, the shortcut is M, otherwise it's * on the numpad.
When you've added all the markers, you should delete the video track (since you only want the audio. If you want to render the video with the dub directly from Premiere Pro, just delete the audio.)
Then you import all the audio files you want. Be sure to name them alphabetically so that Premiere knows which order to place them in. Then you have to make sure that the Project pane is selected. Then you go to the menu and choose Project->Automate to Sequence... Choose Sort order and At Unnumbered Markers. Now they will be placed one by one at the markers you've placed. If one audio clip is too long , it'll just be clipped where the next one starts.
Hopefully this will solve your problem. Now, you can use the same markers for every language you are dubbing.
Good luck! :)

I dont have adobe premiere but I dont see any way to input timing values, this is must for me

and its waste of time to name it alphabetically too more ever I have to place the markers manually , I want it to be aligned to the timings I input

Yes, and you input those markers easily by pressing M on your keyboard. And then this becomes the template you can use for every language. Set up the markers once, and then you're done for that one movie.

After what you have explained, this is a perfect solution to your problem, and if it is not, you have to describe your problem more carefully.

No  I want to input the timings directly like copy pasting it , not even PRESSING M each time, Its all about mass poduction

e.G: 0.12,2.15,3.3,4.3 etc would be input and then align them as simple as that. I saw the demo of adobe its too bloated and overloaded for this task

Well, if you don't want to accomplish your task, that's too bad for you. I gave you a working solution to easily align the dubbed material with the actual video. The only difference is that you need to press M to set it up. You have to name them alphabetically no matter what you do...


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Export video has different resolution Adobe Premier Pro
I try to export video in Adobe Premier Pro CS5 but it export the video using another resolution.
So for example the original video (.mov) has resolution 1920x1080, but exported video has resolution 720x560 (something like this, I don't remember it is rough resolution).
I tried to adjust size of vide in export window but the size video was another then I expected in this case as well.
Maybe you can advice some good tutorial import/export video. Many thanks

Post a screenshot of your export settings.

@DrMayhem - it's probably more than just that, the sequence settings also have to be adjusted or it will have already been scaled down before getting to the export.

Exports will be set to the resolution of the sequence you are exporting.  You need to adjust your sequence settings to match your file input and then export.  You can do this from the sequence settings.  It should have also given you an option to update the sequence when you initially added the 1080p clip to the sequence, but you must have chosen not to update your sequence at that time.
The other, more rare, possibility is that you are using a demo codec that doesn't support 1080p for export and it is trying to export at the maximum supported resolution.  If this is the case, choosing a different codec for export should allow you to resolve the problem.

The most likely explanation is that either your sequence or export settings don't match the imported resolution. My recommendation is that when you begin your project, your do NOT select a sequence preset but instead create a sequence from the imported video settings.
In addition, you may also be modifying your export settings to something different from your intended resolution. If your sequence is 1920 x 1080, simply find the appropriate preset, or you can even export a video that has the same settings as your sequence.