text:
How can you fix color banding from VHS video tape in post-processing?
Old VHS tapes often have horizontal lines/bands that slowly scroll up or down the video during playback. This video is already on DVD, so I am trying to remove the banding in post-processing.
The Tools I'm using include:
VirtualDub, AviSynth, Premiere Pro CC, Davinci Resolve.
Are there any techniques, plugins or scripts that can help remove this?

Those are usually "hum bars" caused by the difference in rate between NTSC video vertical (59.97) and US AC power (60.0). It would be a great trick indeed to build a plugin to find and track those. I've never heard of such a thing and would be surprised to find one -- but I'm always being amazed by what people accomplish. Good luck

"Bah Hum Bars!"

Neat Video has been working miracles on footage for us so far, you can give the trial a go! We've never tried it on this specific artifact (that I know of) but it does have features for restoration/archival type damage, and I highly recommend it.

Caused by not enough back pressure on the tape as it goes to the head try cleaning the head if that doesn't work the machine needs to be checked by a tech.
dca productions

This video is already on DVD, so I am trying to remove the banding. < so I don't think this will be useful to the OP. But I'd be interested if these types of pre-processing techniques are discussed elsewhere on Video.SE


text:
Can you change the duration of a video in Handbrake?
I have a 1h25m 25fps video file that has an audio file that is 1h29m. I want to change the duration of the video from 1h25m to 1h29m.  Is this possible with Handbrake?
I tried setting the duration to 1h29m up near frames/duration but Handbrake didn't change the video. I know how to change duration with Sony Vegas but I lose quality in the conversion, so I want to do this with Handbrake for higher quality.

user89940 - as comments are not for discussion or further questions here, I'll delete all these comments and suggest if you have other questions, just ask new ones using the Ask a Question link. You can make reference to this one if necessary, but please just one question at a time.

As AJ said, your problem appears to be interlacing so focus on that here, and ask a separate question regarding export profiles (but you'll need to describe what you want, as "best" means different things to different people)

Yes, you can select the desired length by chapters, time or even frames.
BUT this only works properly when Audio and Video have the same length (video is always cutted correctly, audio not).
So you have to either
1. cut the audio track with Audacity or any DAW (Tracktion is really good and free) to the correct length and mux it back together afterwards (Yamb for MP4, MKVToolnix for MKV) or you can
2.add a chapter mark at the end of your video and put the video into fre:ac (the best audio converter I know), check "encode to a single file" and unselect the last of the appearing titles (everything after your chapter mark). Now you can convert your audio into anything you want. fre:ac only detects mp4 chapters, you can edit/add them with Drax and you have to use fre:ac alpha version to use this feature.

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


text:
Why Camtasia always produce video with a low quality, even if I record in 1280p, for example?
I spent some time learning this tool, but I'm disappointed because I cannot produce video enough quality. Look for that, firt I have a screen snippet of the video still inside the Canvas on Camtasia, it have a nice quality, and below that I have the same snippet of the video yet produced by Camtasia, in MP4 format - low quality.
I'm not referring to the size of the screen, you can see the difference in the quality of the video, it have blurry and a bad color... If I'm not wrong, I've recorded and produced in 1280p or 720p at least.
Someone can help? Or at least, say to me that "it is just a problem with my PC and Camtasia are not that bad guy, Camtasia CAN PRODUCE IN HIGH QUALITY!". I spent most of my time learning it.

The quality of the images you posted look completely normal to me for what you are doing. You're taking a screenshot and scaling it down. That means that anything drawn as a single pixel in the user interface is going to become less than a pixel wide in the final video, making it seem soft.
You have a few options to deal with this. You can set your screen size to the final video size, or set it so the area you're recording is the final video size. Or you can leave the screen at full size and pan it around as the user moves the mouse. You'll still get some softness due to the compression, but it should be considerably less if you aren't scaling the video.

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


text:
How can I render a 720x480 clip to playback from YouTube in 1080p?
I'm working on Sony Vegas Pro 14 and I'm editing AMV. The anime clip's resolution that I'm editing is 720x480 - I saw the same clip edited on YouTube and on the settings it was showing that I can watch it in 1080p so I want to know what setting I must use to render that kind of video.
I tried rendering it on 1080p but the effects that I added did not work. I tried to render on 480p widescreen and many more but when I posted it on YouTube it was not showing that I could watch it on 1080p like the other was.
Is there some render setting that I can use to do such a thing?

This question is not clear at all. Let me explore how many assumptions it has.

I saw the same clip edited

You are assuming that the other person is using the same clip. He probably had a better resolution one. But here I am assuming the other clip looked better than yours.
He could have just imported a similar resolution clip, let's say extracted from a DVD, and probably it was simply resampled on a FullHD project.
So, no way to respond to that part.

But I will answer this:

1080p so I want to know what setting I must use to render that kind of video

Prepare a project of the resolution you intent, in this case... 1080p

I tried rendering it on 1080p but the effects that I added did not work.

Here are again on the realm of "what are we talking about?" What effects?
Again. Simply prepare a project of the intended resolution you want to deliver from the start.
It has two advantages

The "effects" or elements will render at the real resolution. If you prepare a project smaller, this simply will produce a blurry or pixelated project.
You do not force your equipment making a project bigger. If you prepare a project bigger, your workflow could simply get slower, less fluid.

But if there is a chance you actually need a project bigger at a future time, yes you can prepare it that way and deliver the first version resampled down.

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


text:
Adding date/time information on video for ffmpeg
I am using FFmpeg for live streaming with RTMP to YouTube.
My ffmpeg command is like this:
ffmpeg -ar 44100 -ac 2 -f alsa -i plughw:1,0 -f v4l2 -codec:v h264 -framerate 30 \
  -video_size 1920x1080 -itsoffset 0.5 -i /dev/video2 -copyinkf -codec:v copy -codec:a aac \
  -ab 44k -af 'highpass=200, lowpass=3000, volume=1' -g 4 -f flv \
   rtmp://a.rtmp.youtube.com/live2/8b35-vkye-476f-xxxx

I want to add date and time information on live stream video.
How can I do this?

My camera is H.264 camera

Can I add time-stamp H.264 stream from camera ?

I think adding:
-vf "drawtext=fontfile=/usr/share/fonts/dejavu/DejaVuSans-Bold.ttf: text='%{localtime\:%T}': fontcolor=white@0.8: x=7: y=700"

should work. See Adding time stamp overlay to video stream using ffmpeg

I did, but does not work properly.

I think that is why the frame format from camera is H.264 format. so, it can not rendering to H.264 directly.

Worked for me. I just needed to adjust the coordinates.

The Text Expansion section explains how strftime is used so you can replace %T with any strftime format

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


text:
Premiere Pro issue with preview?
I'm not a pro when it comes to Premiere Pro and just wanted to cut a training video for my job (without bigger animations or something like this).
The finished video is displayed correctly in the preview. But as soon as I export it, or create a new partial sequence from the whole video, the following happens:
The individual clips move in their cutting, or in other words — at some points a few frames are removed at the front, and at the back a few additional frames are shown (the length etc. remains the same). This of course shifts the whole sound and I can see frames in the video that should not be visible.

I think you need to add a bit more info: what frame rate and format are the files you're bringing in?  add a screen shot of the sequence settings, and tell us what frame rate and format the files are that you're exporting.

Change your export setting
and use the "frame sampling" option.

Thanks for your comment, unfortunately I used it already and it isn't working...

I don't use Premiere Pro, so I don't provide the step-by-step instruction, but I know the basis of your problem.
In your original (compressed) video they are so-called intra-frames (aka keyframes), which contains the full info about the particular frame, and other frames (inter-frames) which contain — simply said — only differences from the previous intra-frames.

In other words:

every intra-frame is independent of others frames, while
non-intra-frames are dependent on the nearest previous intra-frame
(and — maybe — from other frames, too).

Let suppose there is 1 intra-frame every 10 seconds (i.e. at time stamps 0 s, 10 s, 20 s, etc.),
and the “other” frames are between them.
Now, you want to cut the 20 s video from the time 13 s (i.e. the range 13 s – 33 s).
The frame at the position 13 s is not an intra-frame — it needs the previous intra-frame (at position 10 s) to obtain the full picture.
So your software simply adds the 3 s part from 10 s in front of your request, and cuts-off the last 3 seconds. The result will be a clip in the range 10 s — 30 s.
But the situation is not so desperate. You have to force Adobe Premiere Pro to re-encode the 13 – 33 s part of original video, i.e. to first compute the frame at position 13 s, then mark it as intra-frame, and make subsequent frames dependent of this new intra-frame.
How?
As I told, I don't know the exact answer. But you have to avoid enabling properties as “Direct Copy”, “Fast Copy”, “Without Re-encoding”, etc.


text:
Outputting 1x3 Video Wall at 5760x1080
I'm looking for the simplest way to create a 1x3 landscape video wall. Where the animation plays at 5760×1080 across the three screens.
The orientation is like this:
I've seen PiWall and that might do what I need (although seems to max out at 1920×1080 total resolution) but if there was some sort of HDMI splitter solution that works like this it would be great and could just run off a laptop. But I feel like a lot of them just clone screens as opposed to the video wall effect?
The screens are three consumer LG 55UK6470PLC TVs. I see there is an LG SuperSign software to do with WebOS for creating video walls but can't get hold of anyone in LG to confirm or deny that it would work with our screens. And I can't find it to download anywhere.
Any advice or help would be appreciated.

Depending on which kind of animation you want to run, the "simplest" solution would be to build a Linux or Windows PC with 3 graphics cards and hook these up though 3 HDMI cables and then anything that runs on that PC can be shown on the 5760x1080 video wall...
As the TVs are 4K-ready, the above solution would also work for a 11520×2160 video wall.
If you need something small (a laptop would be too small), you can go for the MicroATX form factor with 2 Graphics cards for 2 screens and the on-board Intel graphics for the 3rd, but depending on the kind of animation that could limit you to maximum 5760x1080.

You can run more than one display from a card. Something like an Nvidia Quadro K1200 and three mDP -> HDMI adapters + HDMI cables should have no issue running 3 4K 60Hz screens. Just make sure the mDP -> HDMI adapter support 4K 60Hz (I think it’s HDMI 2.0, but I’m not positive)

@NoahL As the OP was mentioning "simple", "HDMI splitter", "laptop" and "PiWall", I'm assuming as cheap as possible into "simple"...  Second-hand nVidia and MicroATX and Linux should suffice.  If he has more money a new small-form factor Windows 10 PC with a second-hand Nvidia Quadro K1200 should work as well.  :-)


text:
Help with FFmpeg keyframe command
I just discover FFmpeg, and I was using it to find keyframes.
I lost the command line due to the power outage.
I'm searching for a command line that produce the following output.
Can you help me with a command line that would generate this test.txt file?

frame|key_frame=1|pkt_pts_time=1.441711|pict_type=I
frame|key_frame=0|pkt_pts_time=1.483411|pict_type=B
frame|key_frame=0|pkt_pts_time=1.525122|pict_type=P
frame|key_frame=0|pkt_pts_time=1.566833|pict_type=B
frame|key_frame=0|pkt_pts_time=1.608544|pict_type=B
frame|key_frame=0|pkt_pts_time=1.650244|pict_type=P
frame|key_frame=0|pkt_pts_time=1.691956|pict_type=B
frame|key_frame=0|pkt_pts_time=1.733667|pict_type=B
frame|key_frame=0|pkt_pts_time=1.775378|pict_type=P
frame|key_frame=0|pkt_pts_time=1.817078|pict_type=B
frame|key_frame=0|pkt_pts_time=1.858789|pict_type=B
frame|key_frame=0|pkt_pts_time=1.900500|pict_type=P
frame|key_frame=0|pkt_pts_time=1.942211|pict_type=B
frame|key_frame=0|pkt_pts_time=1.983911|pict_type=B
frame|key_frame=0|pkt_pts_time=2.025622|pict_type=P
frame|key_frame=0|pkt_pts_time=2.067333|pict_type=B
frame|key_frame=0|pkt_pts_time=2.109044|pict_type=B
frame|key_frame=0|pkt_pts_time=2.150744|pict_type=P
frame|key_frame=0|pkt_pts_time=2.192456|pict_type=B
frame|key_frame=0|pkt_pts_time=2.234167|pict_type=B

I have some of the command line, but it is not complete, so if anyone can help me to complete it, it would be much appreciated.
ffmpeg -i input_file.m2ts frame=key_frame,pkt_pts_time,pict_type (missing option directive ?) > file_output.txt


text:
Picture degration when importing into FCP
When I Import from computer or download from camera into FCP program I am experiencing degration of the quality of film, and that includes analog, and digital 1080p down or up loads.  What am I doing wrong?
Details, I am uploading old video footage from VHS which looks pretty good when uploading to computer, but loses quality when imported into FCP. I am also uploading digital footage at 1080p from my Sony camcorder.
Both lose picture quality when loaded into FCP. When I up-load into FCP I always import at highest quality, no proxy quality.
My computer is a Mac, Processor 2x3 Ghz Quad Core Intel Xeon Memory 4 GB 800 MHz DDR2 FB-DIMM Graphics ATI Radeon HD 5870 1024 MB. I am using Elgato to up-load VHS footage.

Welcome! We'll need some more details in order to help you out. First, in order to figure out what you might be doing wrong, can you tell us exactly what you are doing? What artifacts are you seeing? Can you share samples of your source files or screenshots before and after?

To give you reliably smooth playback in FCP the preview quality is often lower. You can set the preview to higher quality, but it may affect the performance depending on your machine. https://support.apple.com/en-au/guide/final-cut-pro/ver2fd7a8b94/mac

It doesn't affect the final quality however.

Please append details from your comments directly into your question (click Edit at the bottom of it, then copy/paste from your comments).


text:
Filming Theatre During Pandemic
I am teaching a course in Spring, along with a musical theatre class, to film a production of Spring Awakening using Covid restrictions.  This would not be with an audience, but more like a film version.
I believe this will be a valuable course for my students moving forward, as theatre is becoming more and more film friendly and there will be work out there.
What would you suggest as "tips" for filming production numbers?
Updated: What we are doing is filming a musical, with Covid restrictions(masks and no audience, 6 feet apart). This will be a non-live set up. The crew will be rehearsing with the actors, as this is a class. We have a 3-4 camera set up with a jib and tracking. We are using Panasonic UX180's. I also have a 4 screened monitor so I can see what everyone is doing on the stage. It is experimental and it should be very fun and interesting. I was just looking for anyone who might already be doing this type of work and how they are fairing.

What do you consider "normal" filming?
I've filmed a lot in theatres with audiences, usually in performances that are primarily for the audience, and the video recording is a secondary consideration. Usually the camera in this scenario is back far from the stage (behind the audience, so you're not in anyone's way), and the camera positions are fixed. You're capturing the performance live, and don't know exactly when/where the performers will be, so framing is usually paying attention and a bit of guesswork. The focus is usually fixed in the right general area, which is fine for wide shots from up the back of the theatre. If anyone on stage has a mic, usually there's a clean audio feed to the camera of that, as well as any music (although you can also re-dub anything from a pre-recorded source later). Other than that, there is also usually an auditorium mic for the camera, to pick up any other audio (non-mic voice/singing, any other live sounds). Lighting is also usually for the "live" show, and from a camera point of view you're just having to adjust on the fly, and cope with whatever you're given.
There are various pros and cons to filming without the audience.
Pros: From a visual perspective, with no audience you can bring the camera much closer, which will give you a better (sharper/detailed) image. Your perspective is usually more in line with the stage (level) than what you can get from further back. You can also start choosing from more camera angles - if the material calls for it, and depending on how much editing you want to do. During COVID, I saw a few people film more in the style of TV production - you can block out exactly where everyone is going to be, and get in close (even on stage) with DSLR setups, different lenses, etc. It's a whole different look than what I normally do with video cameras from the back of a theatre. You can also control the lighting to be camera friendly, and make sure lights/colours that are unfriendly to cameras aren't in use. Being up closer means better sound recording also, and no audience sounds getting in the way.
Cons: DSLR filming is a different skillset to using a Video Camera. I'd be comfortable guiding anyone on video camera setup for a live show, if you handed me a DSLR to film a non-live setup, I feel it would be like starting with almost no experience - I'd need some guidance myself! Remember to consider that the two scenarios are different, so if you train someone only in filming up close with DSLR setups, they can't directly just swap over to filming a live show with a video camera, and vice versa. Secondary to that is the lack of audience - if you film without any audience sound (applause, laughter, reaction, etc), your performance will sound dead. If you break items up into scenes, and then re-dub your audio track later, it won't sound like it was recorded in a theatre "live". It will depend on whether you want it to still look/sound like a production that was recorded "live", or if you're happy for it to look/sound like it was performed for camera only. I filmed some dance numbers without an audience - the director decided that with no audience they could therefore give stage direction during the items, because I could just use the music audio track only, and didn't need to use the live mic sound - to me the final product looks like it was filmed in a theatre, but doesn't sound like it - it sounds like a studio recorded track, not a live theatre performance recorded track - any sound of any footwork is lost, etc.
Hopefully that gives you enough to consider. As always there is no "correct" way to do this, it's largely a bunch of trade offs to consider, which affect what the finished product looks and sounds like versus what you want to achieve.


text:
How to reverse Ken Burns effect?
If some videos created by other people have a Ken Burns effect, is it possible for me to remove it and get static full screen view?
From Wikipedia:

The Ken Burns effect is a type of panning and zooming effect used in film and video production from still imagery.
The feature enables a widely used technique of embedding still photographs in motion pictures, displayed with slow zooming and panning effects, and fading transitions between frames.

In theory you could take screenshots and stitch them together. Any photo editor that has a panorama stitching feature can do this. The question is how sharp are those individual screenshots? It may be necessary to go frame by frame to find the sharpest.


text:
Rendering video with custom data provided by user
I want to create a website where the user could input some data like texts, images, and based on that the video that contains that data will be rendered and downloaded.
Is there any services that could generate such a video based on project created on, for example After Effect, which will be display some user data in that film. The service must communicate via http in order to receive the data that will be presented on that video?
I thought about the rendering farms and After Effect scripts but I don't know if I will be able to do this using these tools?
Any suggestions?

The most sensible thing to do would be to host the service on your own. If you want users to input text, images and maybe even videos, you need a storage-unit which writes and reads these files incredibly quickly. An SSD-based server with a raid security would be appropriate. For the rendering: You could set up a standard After-Effects or Nuke Project. For After-Effects, you would need to do a lot of scripting to change the individual elements from your comp, but for Nuke, it should be easier, since Nuke is entirely in python and deals well with custom python-scripts. You'd then have to automate upon request that, first off, the Nuke-Script gets duplicated for the running instance, then replace the contents (text, images, etc.) accordingly, and render out. For rendering, I would recommend a GPU or CPU-based rendering-cluster with as many gpus or cpus as you need.
There probably are services that kind of do something similar, but they are either crazy expensive and not adjustable, or deviate from what you want to do.
Just don't expect this ordeal to be cheap and you won't run into bad surprises.

Templater Rig can link text and files from Google Sheets and CSV files into After Effects comps.  So if you can build your web service to feed data into one of these formats, you can get Templater and After Effects render engine combined to create video files.  Whether they will look any good is a significant question, as the layout of a good video is dependent on the length of text and content of images in the motion graphic.


text:
Lossless HDCP stripper?
Is there a product that allows you to strip HDCP from HDMI and that does not loose quality?

Yes. The companies Spatz-Tech, HDFury and Faroudja have products with that functionality in their portfolio. But there are selling restrictions in many countries.


text:
Software to create nice presentations/infographics
I need to find some software that will help me create a nice and user friendly presentation, like this one :

I prefere to use better effects and transition between objects but powerpoint needs lot of work to do that, and it is very hard to get it done with good precision.

I think you would like to take a look at this free online presentation editor:
Prezi.com
It might not give you results as "fancy" as in your provided video sample but you might be satisfied by it's simplicity of constructing your presentations in a dynamic way. Here is some presentation sample to check it out if still wondering before signing up.

A graphic like this would have most likely been made using Adobe After Effects. The style of this graphic is a mix of Kinetic Typography and Infographics.
Googling around you can find tutorials on creating infographics and kinetic typographic videos. Though as a warning, generally creating a video like this takes a number of days for an experienced user.

i know about after effects and its capabilities, but it's more complicated and time consuming than PowerPoint.

thats the trade off for custom graphics I'm afraid :p

Whether you do this in Powerpoint, Flash, or After Effects, it's still going to require a bit of prep work to get all the elements ready. I don't know what your skill level and experience is at this kind of thing, so please excuse me if I'm saying things you already know, but it may be best to carefully storyboard the entire thing then collect all the assets you need. This will go a LONG way towards simplifying the process in the long run.


text:
Replicated circles are blurry in Motion
I'm animating a circle in Motion. I'm using the Sequence Replicator and the Scale setting to make the circles become larger towards the end.
When I do that however, the circles get blurry, much like if I would use a pixel graphic rather than a circle from Motion. Does anyone know how I can prevent that from happening?
I would have assumed the circles stay crisp and sharp no matter what scale they're applied to. (Preserve scale is ticked on)

This effect occurs if the cell is screened as bitmap. It should be able to avoid it if you activate 3D Rasterization. Click the "3D" checkbox in the Replicator Controls.

Sure, here's the example. I was trying to make a WIFI-Signal animation.
Replicator Example

Ah, i see. I slightly missunderstood your description. So i've changed my answer.


text:
The cable of the tv antenna lies on the heater
It might be a silly question, but the cable connected to my tv antenna is lying on my heater in my room.
The heater isn't particularly hot, but I was wondering if it might damage it in the long run.
Thanks

It is very unlikely this would damage it - if it is a standard co-ax cable, then it can withstand much higher temperatures than your room heater will cause.
Mechanical failure is generally much more of a problem if you move the antenna a lot (wear on the cable as it enters the connectors is quite common)


text:
What is a good lossy format for storing DV
I have 60Gb of DV footage that I need to store, but 60Gb is WAY too big. I need to transcode it to a lossy format, but I need the resulting video to be robust such that it can be easily edited with a NLV editor later on.
By robust I mean: able to chop it up easily without losing sync. I suppose this has something to do with the regularity of keyframes.
I am on Ubuntu, so tools at my disposal are ffmpeg/avconv, Handbrake, and various other NLVEs.

For DV footage, anything below 4.7 minutes per gigabyte is going to start being sub-standard for editing.  That's the standard data rate for lossy compressed DV footage.  Each generation of compression and the lower quality you make the compression, the less suitable for video editing it becomes.
If you use a highly lossy format to store the video, after you edit it and try to encode your final video, you will have a sloppy mess because the source video is too low quality.  It will make you have to increase the settings on your final output to preserve any kind of quality and will mean you have a larger final product than you could have otherwise gotten away with.
By modern standards, 60GB is about $4 of HDD storage or $5 of optical.  Just buy the extra storage if you need it.
If you still want to compress it more (or if you aren't yet at 4.7 minutes per gigabyte) then any standard DV format would work well.  It isn't quite as ideal for editing, but a high quality (high data rate) h.264 high profile VBR 2-pass could be used as well.  Using 3500 KBPS (I'd probably also try all I frame and see how it goes) should give you a good high quality compression.  It is worth noting that h.264 is more demanding for editing with though.  That's still not going to give you any lower than the 4.7 minutes per gigabyte though, so if you have around 5 hours of footage, 60GB really is as small as you want to go.

I appreciate the angle you're coming from, but I am not interested (for this particular footage) in quality, but I do need av sync to be maintained after I chop it up a bit later on.e.g. there are intermediate formats, e.g. ProRes, which offer editability with compression because each frame is preserved, however these do not offer enough compression for this job.

h.264 with all I frame should preserve each frame.  Adjust quality level to your liking.  Motion JPEG formats can also work fairly well if you want frame by frame compression rather than cross-frame compression.  Note that formats that store all frames are inherently much weaker compressions though and will result in further quality loss at a given size since they can't make use of frame to frame similarities.

How would you do h264 "all I frame" with ffmpeg?

@artfulrobot - that I don't know.  I don't generally use FFMPEG.  I'd expect Handbrake should have an option for it though.

Not that was clear to me. Checked handbrake first!

I'm using ffmpeg -i input.dv -strict experimental -c:v libx264  -vf yadif  -keyint_min 1 -x264opts 'keyint=1' -refs 0 -qp 25 output.mp4

Making h264 all I-frame is kinda knobbling it, because it gets its efficiency from all the intra-frame compression. I doubt it would perform that much better than motion JPEG. What's your hourly rate? Storage is so cheap these days you'd have to look at whether it is worth your time scratching around to squeeze a few more MB out of your footage, when you can go and buy a couple of terrabytes for less than a hundred bucks.

@stib - yeah, agreed on the assessment about all i-frame, I didn't know if ffmpeg handles mjpeg or not though.  Also, thanks for concurring that it's really not worth saving the space since 60gb is really a throw away.


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

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

Here's a guide to get you started by the way. It covers the hardware aspect pretty well.

Does the guide cover (part) of your question? If not, please specify which part is not clear. If it does I guess the guide is your answer and I can post it as such.

Generally, I would expect that just about any solution will work pretty well now.  The capabilities of even cheap modern hardware so far outpace the capability of laserdisc that you aren't likely to lose much.  Certainly a professional quality capture system similar to the ones Matrox sells would do a superb job, but I'd hazard that even a cheap $30 USB to composite capture device would do the job sufficiently well.  You should be able to use whatever software comes with the capture device.
You will want to capture using the composite output rather than the S-video output since the Laserdisc is natively Composite.  I would capture to a standard DV codec if you have the option for one.  If not, a basic h.264 file is also a fine option.  You may also want to run a 2 pass h.264 compression from your DV capture to minimize the file size while keeping quality high.  (DV files are rather space consuming, but they are very high quality SD files.)  You can use FFMPEG or Handbrake for the transcoding if you want a free option.  x264 is a highly popular h.264 codec available in both.
Truly the most lossless way would be to use an actual lossless format, but that is excessive given the highly limited quality of Laserdisc to begin with.  That's why I recommended DV as a balance of space and quality.

A lot of these answers seem somewhat misleading unfortunately.
Forget about getting a capture card.  Practically every one has AGC.  AGC is very similar to macrovision, except it's superimposed onto any video source.  It's impossible to disable unless you use Linux and know your way around hacking drivers.  Some cards on Windows have third party tools to disable AGC, but the quality is extremely questionable and they all seem to use scaling and sub-sampling.
Think your best choice is finding an external device like a Panasonic DMR DVD recorder (these have a very decent comb filter).  If you could somehow find an external device with USB or firewire, I think this is your best bet.
I think 4:1:1 subsampling should be kept away.  I think 4:2:0 is actually better.  4:2:0 is most compatible and least problematic with transcoding and quality loss.  If you get a device with 4:2:0 chroma, make sure it oversamples before subsampling; these seem to give the least quality loss after subsampling, and might be considered transparent sometimes.
For a laserdisc player it's hard for me to answer.  You could stick with a player that doesn't split the composite or audio signal.  These will have a single composite and audio output, with no RF or additional svideo or second composite/audio outputs.  These also have missing features like digital still mode on CLV discs, and probably more common as very simplistic industrial players.  People may recommend something like the HLDX0 or similar, but these are very expensive and actually pass the composite video through various noise filtering and splitting stages; these players are so huge and expensive I think because splitting analog signals introduces immediate quality degradations, which these players supposedly avoid according to their owners.
Avoid scaling at all costs.  You'll get scaling artifacts immediately which isn't usually noticeable.  Instead of 4k output, you should stick with whatever native resolution your capture device uses (usually 720x480).  Let your software or hardware scale later, instead of the encoding and capturing.  Same thing with audio.  If you capture audio, make sure it's bit perfect digital stereo (LD calls for 44050khz according to wiki).  Analog audio should be captured at 192khz 32-bit float at least, and can be compressed later.
Laserdisc video is actually pure analog AFAICT.  RF is passed to a custom modulator and cut-off filters, which send the result to a TBC.  TBC produces the composite video which is an analog signal.  The composite signal can be routed directly to a composite video jack, but almost every player will split this into UHF, comb filter with svideo, and/or secondary composite output.  The only players that avoid that are like those I mentioned previously (LD-V4200 I believe is one, and with a strong signal, albeit with noise).
Laserdisc video quality is a love or hate thing IMO.  The quality is actually very high and with a high end system can be considered better along with its sound, vs DVD.  Only LD's that may seem inferior are widescreen, or those improperly mastered.  Quality is basically 425 TVL always with good chroma.  DVD by comparison is considered 525 TVL before MPEG2 compression.  Unfortunately MPEG2 reduces DVD video quality considerably, and the only advantage DVD has in this situation is a pure digital path with consistent quality (no analog difficulties like noise and interference).  MPEG2 reduces DVD TVL resolution to a variable of maybe 250 to 500 TVL lines at best with considerably less chroma by comparison.  Mpeg2 quality greatly varies depending on the movie, and the movie length unfortunately.  Only exceptions might be "Superbit" DVD releases which are very small in number.  See a DVD and downscaled HD-TV source for resolution and chroma comparison here: [url]http://www.cornbread.org/FOTRCompare/[/url]
I hope I may have been of some help.  I think your best bet may be an external device with firewire or usb.  AGC is the biggest problem you'll have to avoid, especially with computer capture devices (USB, PCI, PCI-e, etc).

The Domesday Duplicator is by far the most accurate way to transfer a Laserdisc.
https://www.domesday86.com/?page_id=978 says,
Domesday Duplicator Overview
Overview
The Domesday Duplicator is intended to allow high-quality back-ups of the analogue information contained on the BBC Domesday laserdiscs by bypassing most of the 30-year-old electronics in the Philips VP415 player. Direct RF sampling also allows all information on the laserdiscs to be duplicated (unlike conventional RGB sampling of the video output). Since the BBC Domesday AIV laserdiscs are a combination of video, pictures, sound and data (as well as numerous VBI streams), direct RF sampling is the preferred method of preservation.  The Domesday Duplicator is not limited to duplicating just Domesday AIV laserdiscs and can be used to capture any type of laserdisc supported by the attached laserdisc player.

The capture format will be dictated by the abilities of your capture hardware.
Many models of DV camcorders from the 2000's had a transcode capability - they will encode something sent to their analog inputs into the DV format, and send it over firewire to the computer, and you don't have to record to tape.  Different models had composite and s-video inputs, s-video would be a little sharper. I've done this with the original iMovie - it plays well with the cameras and decks from that time period.
A professional capture device would give you the ability to capture to less lossy and higher data rate formats, possibly Apple ProRes. This would be as good quality as could be managed in my opinion. LD is a nice stable digital source and outputs a very clean analog signal. Given the SD format's limitations, I would consider this option overkill.
I see no advantage to using a higher resolution than the source - there's only so much data in the signal. Adding resolution would increase storage and rendering requirements to absurd levels to no benefit.
Either way you would convert to H.264 for viewing later.

@TotalForge- sorry to down vote, but your answer is currently incorrect (though with the same mistake I made on an earlier question.)  Laserdisc encodes a composite video signal, so to get to s-video requires going through a comb filter in the Laserdisc player which from that time period are far lower quality than current hardware will handle.  The best quality is actually composite out and then let the modern comb filter work it out.

Also, it seems like the question is asking for advice on what hardware and formats would do the best job.  The DV camera trick would work if she happens to have one, but most modern USB capture devices would probably do a better job unless it was a pretty decent camera back in the miniDV era.  Otherwise, I agree on the rest of your answer.  I would agree that capturing to DV format is probably ideal for max quality without too much wasted space though, but atleast some direct capture devices support capture in DV format.

Do not capture to DV.  NTSC DV has a 4:1:1 color space.  If LD has something better then you are losing information.  Vertical resolution is not the only resolution you should be concerned with. Consider depth also.
Also, why is your goal DVD with a relatively terrible MPEG2 compression?  These days we are approaching erasing the need to distinguish from mastering formats and delivery formats. MPEG2 is a lossy, delivery format. Since your source footage is only 425 lines why not store it near-losslessly for best presentation?  You can convert for VC-1 Advanced LC2 ad 20mb/s and get a near lossless compression and play that back on VLC/XBOX/PS3/PS4, etc.

We're talking about LaserDisc's here, they were an analog medium that required comb filtering to separate the color and luminance information and had super low precision to begin with.  I couldn't find any information on color space of LD, but I can't imagine it extends out of 4:1:1 unless you have a source of info that indicates it does.  Also note, his goal was NOT to use MPEG-2 because he isn't sure he'll ever put it on a DVD.


text:
Minimising image noise within the recording of indoor office environments
Background
I have a Panasonic HDC-HS700 camera that I am using to record indoor office scenes. The scenes are illuminated predominantly by fluoro lighting, with little natural light, however there are substantial lighting variations between corridors and offices/cubicles.
So far, my recordings contain a fair amount of image noise. The video will be processed using image processing and computer vision techniques, so I need to keep image noise to an absolute minimum for the algorithms to work best. However, upstream noise removal (i.e. within the recording process itself) is much more desirable than downstream noise reduction (i.e. image processing algorithms).
Question
I am a novice when it comes to video production, so I am unfamiliar with the "tricks of the trade". What is the best approach (and/or camera settings) to minimise image noise given my recording scenario?

The first thing is to make sure any gain is off.  Gain on a video camera is like high ISO on a digital still camera.  It increases the noise floor significantly and causes much more noise in even a good image.  This should make the camera make other adjustments to try to preserve the exposure with a lower noise floor.
If there is still too much noise, it may require that the dynamic range of the scene be reduced with properly placed lighting to eliminate dark shadows.  If you have particularly bright and particularly dark areas, the camera may attempt to get detail in the dark areas and result in noise.  Reducing this dynamic range will allow the detail to be captured clearly in all parts of the image.
It is also possible that there simply isn't enough light.  It can be very dark inside buildings.  Our eyes are exceptionally good at adjusting to a wide range of lighting intensities so we don't really notice it much, but outside is hundreds of time brighter than inside.  An average office hall lighting is about 80 lux.  A typical sunny day is over 10,000 lux with over 30,000 lux in directly sunlight.  That's a HUGE variation.  The camera you mentioned seems to have good low light performance for it's price range from the CNet review, but if you still have too much noise after adjusting the gain to 0 or have too dark of an image, then your primary option is to throw more light at it.  Good strong studio lighting should allow the sensor to clearly pick things up in such a way that the images will be suitable for computer vision with low noise.

The answer is always "More light". The higher the illumination of the sensor (within obvious limits), the less noise or grain. If you must deal only with ambient light -- you can't supplement or fill in -- then open the iris. However, in doing so you trade off depth of field, so it's a balancing act.
Generally, avoid increasing preamp 'gain' to compensate for low light. It will increase the noise as much as it increases signal.

It isn't always just as simple as "more light".  It's a common mistake to turn on the gain to get a brighter image when it's dark and then the setting persists to when the camera is in brighter conditions resulting in the camera dropping the shutter speed to compensate.  Often, simply adjusting the gain down is sufficient to correct without losing depth of field.  Similarly, if the gain is on, more light isn't going to help with the noise since it will still be gained up and will just make the shutter even faster.

Aren't we saying the same thing? For any given amount of illumination, opening the iris to attain higher output will generally increase S/N ratio (and decrease depth of field). Increasing the gain to achieve the same output, while leaving the iris closed, will decrease S/N ratio.

The full extent of our post says the same thing.  I'm just disagreeing with the first sentence.  The answer isn't always "More Light".  I was clarifying that you can have plenty of light and still have too much noise if settings are wrong.


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How can i achieve the effect of this video, focused in the foreground with a blurred background?

What type of camera or software, do I need to achieve that?

You need a camera with a relatively large sensor and a fast lens.  What you are seeing is actually a property of optics called Depth of Field.  Only a certain distance from the camera can be in focus at any given point for a given aperture and focal length.  The degree of how out of focus it appears is also relative to the size of the image being projected (thus the distance from the point where the image inverts) and thus, larger sensors show more blur.
Cheap cameras often use very small sensors and thus have a hard time getting a shallow depth of field, however any DSLR will achieve it quite easily, as will any more professional video camera with a larger sensor.  Shoot with the aperture as wide open as possible and try to have the camera relatively close to the subject with the background as far away as possible.
Technically, increasing focal length will also decrease the depth of field, but then you have to move back from the subject which will increase it again.  You want a small depth of field close to the camera so that the background can be significantly out of focus.  If it is too out of focus, you can adjust the aperture or the ratio between the camera, the subject and the background to make it less blurry (by expanding the depth of field).
You can also use many online Depth of Field calculators to figure out a shooting situation with a particular camera prior to trying it in real life.  They won't visualize it for you, but they will give you an idea of what distances will be in focus and which will be out.  There are also lots of great articles on depth of field over on our Photography sister site, though they don't deal with video specifically, but the principal is the same.
In a pinch, you can fake it as well using masks and blurs, but that's really not an ideal way to do it.  In camera always looks better.

If you can't change cameras, then making sure your aperture (aka Iris) is as wide open as possible will also decrease your depth of field, as mentioned. In some situations a neutral density filter will help, by decreasing the light going into the lens, meaning that the camera will open up the aperture to compensate.

The simplest way i suggest is to blur the background with video editor after shot by your recorder. It's not hard to operate, check this tutorial about  How to blur Something out in a picture or video with Adobe photoshop.

Welcome to Audio/Video Professional and thanks for taking the time to answer.  Unfortunately, this does not accomplish the look from the question.  A depth of field blur needs to vary based on how far away something is from the focal plane and needs to keep things sharp.  There are post processing depth of field blur filters available, but they all do fairly poor jobs as they lack the necessary depth information to properly apply the blur.  For a fixed video shot, it could be approximated with a depth mask, but that would have to track anything moving in the shot) in order to update the mask.


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Framerate wagon wheel effect
In this video a bouncing water droplet is filmed at what appears to be a very high framerate. However at 1:43 the narrator explains that he used the "wagon wheel effect" to achieve an apparent high framerate with a regular DSLR.
The filmed droplet vibrated at 40Hz while he filmed it at 40.06Hz. How does this result in a super slow motion video?

Great question!

That is some pretty cool footage!

Found on this blog which is filled with awesome fluid dynamic phenomena.

This requires a repetitive motion and good lighting.  You expose the position of the droplet on successive oscillation, but capture it at a slightly different spot on each.
Thinking about it from the perspective of a ball bouncing.  On the first photo, I take a quick photo of the ball on the ground.  The ball bounces up and then back down.  I then take a photo on the second bounce of the ball just a bit off the ground.  The ball goes up and down again.  I then take a photo on the third bounce of the ball just a little further off the ground.  That's why it is key that the oscillation of the object and the framerate be so close.  Each photo is only .06 hz worth of movement away from the previous at the time the photo is actually taken.
When I finish, I end up with a slideshow that shows a ball bouncing very slowly, but in reality, it was well timed photos of many bounces.
This is referred to as the wagon wheel effect because the gaps in the wheels could make it so that things would seem to move slower or even backwards because of the interruptions in vision and where things were positioned when vision was restored.  Our brains then would fill in the in-between bits in the wrong direction or assume it was the shortest distance instead of seeing what actually happened.


text:
How do I film a friend's wedding?
My friend asked me to video tape his wedding. I have minimal experience behind a video camera but I'm comfortable with technology. I'm mostly looking for composition and logistical advice on filming a wedding.
I think my friend's expectations are low but if I'm going to do this I want it to be at least worthwhile. Thus I have read that besides keeping the couple in the viewfinder the next most important aspect to shooting a wedding is to have a mic on the groom for the ceremony. I don't have a wireless mic but I figured I would put an iPhone in his pocket with the headphone mic pinned under his lapel and sync the audio in post. Is there anything else I'm missing?

A few of the points may be a bit dated, but http://www.bealecorner.com/trv900/wedding.html has a lot of good advice for shooting a wedding.

I have never filmed a wedding, but here are some tips on shooting video in general.
1. Get a good tripod. This is critical if you are doing panning shots. I use a 3-way fluid pan head.
2. Don't zoom or pan too fast. If you feel like you are panning too slow, that is about the right speed. Even though it feels really slow, it won't be when you are watching it later. When zooming, make sure your zoom are even and steady (no bursts of zooming). I usually set the camera's zoom speed so that it is not variable. Don't zoom in, then immediately zoom out to correct the zooming in, unless you have two camera angles.
3. Get two (three if you can) HD cameras if you can. HD makes post much more flexible as you can make minor in/out changes. Two cameras makes also makes post "easier". If you are only using one camera and you accidentally bump it, it's hard to correct. Two-three angles make filming much more reliable.
4. Use 16-bit audio on the camera(s) that you are recording from. The default setting is usually 12-bit, which can slowly drift out of sync towards the end of the video.
5. Film in 16:9.
I hope this helps you out.

Thanks for the tips. Unfortunately the wedding has come and gone. I ended up bring a normal tripod and a gorilla pod and ended up setting up the gorilla pod on the sound booth in the church which worked well. I'm not in charge of post, the groom is doing that.

Yeah, I was kinda thinking that it was over.


text:
Brightness and contrast ratio, inversely proportional?
I'm comparing the features of 2 projectors, which are very similar between them. They both have 1300 lumens.
However I was surprised to see the following values:
Projector 1
Brightness (lm) 3000
Contrast ratio 2000:1
Projector 2
Brightness (lm)*1*2 1300 (Max)
Contrast ratio*1  3600:1
What does this mean ? They are both for home videos, but is the second one more suitable to darker environments, because it has less brightness ? But it offers better color quality, with more contrast ? Is this analysis correct ?
Also, not sure what "*1*2" means, and why they wrote (max). Probably it provides less brightness on average.

You should provide more info, ideally the model of each projector or a link to the Tech specs, as the language used could mean a range of things. Also, both will be 'Max' unless stated otherwise, as marketing will want the highest value to be published.

@Dr Mayhem Mitsubishi HC4000 vs HC3900. You can see both specs from here: http://www.mitsubishielectric.com/bu/projectors/products/home/hc3900.html#DnT

On that particular specification page the *1 and *2 mean look further down the page at notes 1 and 2, which are as follows:
*1: Varies depending on conditions
*2: All brand names and product names are trademarks, registered trademarks or trade names of their respective holders. Lamp life specification is an estimate based on verification under proper conditions and is not the duration of the warranty. Lamp will shut-off automatically when usage reaches the specified estimated maximum lamp hours. Service life may vary widely depending on usage and operating environment and conditions, as well as users' adherence to the maintenance and cleaning procedures provided in the user manual.
In terms of which one is best - it will depend on your needs, but the second one has higher frame rate and better contrast, which for most applications will be what you need, however if you do need the extra brightness for displaying in brighter environments, the first one may be more appropriate for you.


text:
Kdenlive rendered my MP4 as a white screen, no sound
Kdenlive users.  I am brand new to editing. I'm using version 22.12.3.
I had a 17 minute MP4 that I'd edited down to 11 minutes + added a jpg at beginning and end. Rendered, and the new MP4 is completely white - no sound, nothing. Is it just ruined? Do I have to do all the editing again? I'm also having trouble understanding what the .kdenlive file is. It just seems to have my original 17 minute video, so I'm guessing I did not save the project after rendering.

I found some info on another thread that helped tremendously. Haven't had the problem since - and have created several MP4s successfully.  The main thing was:
Don't add a JPG clip.  Use PNG.  It doesn't like JPG for some reason.
Another was to name everything you add with one word.  Instead of naming the MP4 your importing into your project "My Video.MP4", name it MyVideo.MP4. Spaces can cause issues.

My Kdenlive was recently updated to 24.02 - and it did NOT render PNG, I needed to replace them with GIF-s.
It did not render - nor allow editing - it's own titie frames created in a previous version of the program. Nor to create title slides at all.

I just had this issue, saved my project, reopened it and it became clear what happened, because Kdenlive prompted me to relocate a file.
What happened was, I changed the name of the directory where my source video files resided, used as clips in the Kdenlive timeline.
The issue was solved simply by redirecting Kdenlive to the newly named directory.
Use the 'locate clip' and 'replace clip' buttons to point Kdenlive to the correct file or directory locations.
I suppose if you renamed one video file outside Kdenlive, or several, you could run into the same issue.
Once I did that, the video played fine on VLC, but after uploading the video, it was white again in the browser.
I rendered the video again with parallel processing disabled and now all is good.

ok so i figured it out. basically the simple solution is that this is a random glitch, and you need to restart the whole project.
just restart. start new project, import a clip or two, make some quick edits,
and do a quick test render. should work from there, worked for me.
i was unable to figure out how to fix this glitch, on a current project.

I found some solutions.  See my comment.

I basically did what you suggested (hadn't seen your suggestion yet).  And, yes, it works, but when your video is 17 minute long and has been clipped and edited a lot, that just means you basically have to start all over again...  I found a few simple things that prevent the issue.


text:
Mpeg file not playing to the end - how to fix corruption
I have a 3.6gb mpeg2 video file the length should be about 25min but the file is corrupt after about 13 minutes and it stops there.
This is the result I got when I tried to correct it:
Z:\Recovery\bin>ffmpeg -i BrokenFile.mpg FixedFile.mpg
ffmpeg version 5.1.1-full_build-www.gyan.dev Copyright (c) 2000-2022 the FFmpeg developers
  built with gcc 12.1.0 (Rev2, Built by MSYS2 project)
[mpeg @ 0000022832230440] stream 0 : no PTS found at end of file, duration not set
[mpeg @ 0000022832230440] stream 1 : no PTS found at end of file, duration not set
Input #0, mpeg, from 'BrokenFile.mpg':
  Duration: N/A, start: 0.685389, bitrate: N/A
  Stream #0:0[0x1e0]: Video: mpeg2video (Main), yuv420p(tv, progressive), 1920x1080 [SAR 1:1 DAR 16:9], 15000 kb/s, 25 fps, 25 tbr, 90k tbn
BrokenFile.mpg: corrupt decoded frame in stream 0
frame=23478 fps=505 q=31.0 Lsize=  340586kB time=00:15:39.04
bitrate=2971.2kbits/s dup=2 drop=0 speed=20.2x
video:294684kB audio:43989kB subtitle:0kB other streams:0kB global headers:0kB muxing overhead: 0.564961%

Can anyone suggest me how to fix the problem?

Though not a free solution, I have had quite a bit of success upconverting to MP4 using AVS Video Converter; even when the data source was not in perfect shape or completely corrupted. My initial thought on this is that your headers may be corrupted.  I am not super-familiar with FFmpeg (save that it is included with the K-Lite Codec Pack!), but I would assume that there is a way to submit the repair sans headers.
Hope this helps!


text:
AME doesn't export the right opacity
My picture layer background color was set to white, so in AE it appeared to be light. But in AME it used a black background color instead, so it appeared to be dark. I fixed this by adding a white solid layer under all other layers.
It's so confusing for a newbie like me.
In my AE it appears like this

but in AME it renders this

if I choose Render Alpha Channel Only, it appears like this

I'm wondering how to make the rendered one look like the one in AE

Media Encoder is notoriously unreliable for correctly rendering anything out of Premiere or After Effects. I would only use it for very simple comps and sequences.  Anything else seems to confuse it.
If you need to automate a lot of renders, you could try rendering them from the command line instead?
https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/automated-rendering-network-rendering.html

I tried using render but without the encoder my video turned out to be hundreds of GB, which made my disk full.


text:
How to render with graphic card in Cinema4D?
I have a powerful graphics card so would like to use it for rendering, rather than my cpu. How can I do this in Cinema4D

Cinema 4D is constrained to CPU rendering. You'll need to look at other products if you want to use GPU.


text:
Create a fast moving plant overlay for driving scene
I have footage of someone driving a bike along a street in side view. I´d like it to appear more fast moving, like I filmed it through plants and trees which are moving swiftly across the screen. Kind of similar to 3:10 - 3:12 in this video

I was thinking of a stock video of cut-out vegetation that is moving swiftly and blurry across the screen and overlaying it on my footage. What would be your suggestion on how to do this? I have access to storyblocks, perhaps also enavto elements later.
Oh and I´m using premiere pro.

I would do this in After Effects, not Premiere. It's better suited to compositing video effects (which is what this is).
You might get away with a lot of static foreground imagery of trees as a matte which flies past quickly, assuming the shot is as short as the one shown in the youtube video.
You would need to overlay the matted tree images over the footage, and keyframe its position, so that it moves across the screen rapidly and convincingly with the motion of your camera.  Make sure motion blur is switched on, and that it matches how the footage looks, both in terms of motion, but also colour correction.
Another compositing tutorial here.

The vegetation in the video is real.  There’s no substitute for that.  If you can’t re-shoot with real plants in the foreground, then the next best thing would be to shoot them on their own, matching the camera movement, lens attributes, etc, and composite that over top. Since plants are green, a blue screen would be ideal, but you might get away with a luma key, or shooting against a blue sky.
It’s highly unlikely that you’ll find stock footage that matches your original conditions, lighting, time of day, etc.


text:
Title has "invisible border", so not whole text is seen (DaVinci Resolve)
At the beginning of my video (I'm working in DaVinci Resolve), I want to add a table of contents. I thought about using a title to do that. But when I paste the text and then increase the line spacing, the text seems to be cut off. It seems like there's an invisible box, so the text just isn't allowed to get over that border and therefore it gets cut off. I searched in the settings, watched several videos, but I couldn't find a answer.

Usually, the text gets created inside of “canvas” with the dimensions of the timeline.  So, if you have a 720p timeline, and scale up the text enough, it’ll get cropped when it runs out of room on the sides.  So be sure you’re scaling up the canvas, not the text.  Btw I put “canvas” in “scare quotes” because it’s not the terminology Resolve uses. A compound clip or fusion clip are two container types you might actually be using.  Also, I say “usually” because I think there may be exceptions, such as the legacy title tool, but I’m not near a machine to check.

I had the same issue.
Just to put it as simply as possible: In the title's 'settings' section, zoom in,
and then in the title's 'title' section, reduce the font size until you're back to roughly the same size as before.
Hope that helps!


text:
How can i do overlay subtitle with ffmpeg like in the links provided?
I need a script for ffmpeg to do this:

Background color (drawbox) for all words like this:

The idea of having a box with text is to use the FFmpeg filter i.e
-vf "drawtext=fontfile=Arial.ttf: text='%{frame_num}': start_number=1: x=(w-tw)/2: y=h-(2*lh): fontcolor=black: fontsize=20: box=1: boxcolor=white: boxborderw=5"

drawtext

fontfile: The font file to be used for drawing text. The path must be included. This parameter is mandatory if the fontconfig support is disabled.
text: The text string to be drawn. The text must be a sequence of UTF-8 encoded characters. This parameter is mandatory if no file is specified with the parameter textfile.
x,y: The expressions which specify the offsets where text will be drawn within the video frame. They are relative to the top/left border of the output image. The default value of x and y is "0".
fontcolor: The color to be used for drawing fonts. For the syntax of this option, check the (ffmpeg-utils)"Color" section in the ffmpeg-utils manual. The default value of fontcolor is "black".
fontsize: The font size to be used for drawing text. The default value of fontsize is 16.
box: Used to draw a box around text using the background color. The value must be either 1 (enable) or 0 (disable). The default value of box is 0.
boxcolor: The color to be used for drawing box around text. For the syntax of this option, check the (ffmpeg-utils)"Color" section in the ffmpeg-utils manual. The default value of boxcolor is "white".
boxborderw: Set the width of the border to be drawn around the text using bordercolor. The default value of borderw is 0

Hi, thanks for your reply. I need  to do this subtitle effects with ffmpeg on subtitles.
Example 1: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=498980114517638
Example 2: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=3985582161542560
How can i do it?


text:
Dot matrix with depth cloud transition effect
Could someone point me in the right direction to reproducing this effect which takes an illustration, breaks it into circles of color similar to what an inkjet printer would do, and randomizes depth of each circle so you can watch the illustration dissolve as you zoom into it.
I'm using Premiere CC and have experience with Maya and 3DSMax.

The 3d package doesn't matter, you can simply use a particle system and distribute the particles based on an image or its alpha channel. This is one of the basic concepts and is supported by all particle systems. For blender see: http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/26205/emit-particles-from-a-plane-based-on-the-alpha-channel-of-its-texture

Ok this is pretty theoretical since I haven't tried it, but I think it's fairly easy to do this in AE only, using the sampleimage Function and expressions . You basically scan the "original" image line by line and for every samplepoint you create a dot in a random size but same color as the sample point as a spacial representation of that sample point. Depending on the size, you move it backwards on the z-axis to give the impression of an even size from the starting perspective. Then you just start moving the camera through the "dot field".
http://www.motionscript.com/design-guide/obscuration.html

poor's solution makes sense to me. Use Blender or equivalent to create a basic particle system with a distribution based on the illustration. Give the particles some jitter within z-space, match your shot between edited sequence and Blender and just move the camera along the z-axis into the particle field in Blender.
I was hoping for something built into After Effects, but while I think there would be some tinkering to get the initial settings looking good, this effect could be reproducible relatively easily across illustrations.

Mhh. I don't think that there is a built-in solution, but seems possible via Trapcode Particular: http://www.trapcode-content.com/help/particular/layer_emitter.html

This could also be done in After Effects by combining multiple 2D layers of dots in 3D space.
I would create a template outline of the cartoon, use a pencil or brush with a wide spacing and hard jitter applied, and paint maybe 15-20 layers.
When stacked in 3D space in AE, if you've created enough layers with dense enough dots, it would combine to create a fully black shape.
Then animate the camera through the layers in 3D space.


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Burn MKV with subtitles on a DVD
I have a movie on an mkv file, the movie has video, audio and the subtitles all in the mkv file but I cannot find a way to burn it to dvd including the subtitles. I need to get VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS files out of the mkv file so I can burn those on dvd with a program like ImgBurn.
Please tell me which program I can use to get those VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS files (including working subtitles) out of my MKV file, I would like to keep the quality the MKV file has, and I need a program that is 100% free, I don't want a free trial.
I am using Windows 8.1

Use Freemake Video Converter, it's 100% free and you can just burn MKV files on dvd, on the dvd, the subtitles also work if you set that up properly in the Freemake Video Converter program.

It is not free. You have to pay to remove the watermak.


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Build linux render farm in order to render adobe premiere projects
I edit my videos on Adobe Premiere (or even Edius) and I want to build a linux based render farm for rendering my projects.
The concepts I've found in my research are 'render manager' and 'frame serving' which won't do a cross platform stuff in the way I desire or please tell me that I'm mistaken!
How do I set up a render farm for this task?
Note that I have a linux server which means it doesn't have a Graphical User Interface.

Perhaps that is because that I have not got my answer and unfortunately not so many people had opinions about the topic.  by the 'not possible answer' is not really believable . I don't know ,may be developers have not accomplished something that does it!

Don't take it personal. Sure, undestand it. But the idea / rule of stackoverflow is to point out duplicates. As I said, might be better to edit your first one. I'd like to help but I don't have so much time now. BTW: opinions are off-topic ;) Good Luck!

You can do this by using ffmpeg. Here are the steps:

First do steps of the second method ("Use a frameserver") here.
Beginning this step you should be streaming your Premier timeline through Debugmode and Avisynth on a specific IP and port. Now open a command line and run this ffmpeg command:

ffmpeg -i frameserver.avs -f mpegts  tcp://[IP address of your server]:[open port on your server]
By running this command, you are sending the Avisynth output (streaming) to a destination machine (your Linux server) through ffmpeg.
After this step all you have to do on the client server (where you edit your videos) is done. Next, set up the server side.

On the server (your Linux server), make sure you have ffmpeg installed and run the following command:
ffmpeg -i tcp://[your server IP]:[The same port you entered in step 2]?listen -c:v libx264 -preset medium -crf 23 -pix_fmt yuv420p -c:a libfdk_aac -vbr 4 output2.mp4

Through this command, ffmpeg will be listening on a specified IP and port and receiving sent packets and encode them with your favorite options!


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Mix Voice to Video without losing video quality
I have recorded video from Canon HFR 36 camera and recorded voice separately to computer using a clip on mic. (The video camera does not have mic input) Now I want a simple software to remove original audio from the video and add the recorded voice. When I make the edited file, the video quality should not be decreased dramatically.
I am using windows 8 Operating system. My video files are in MTS format (AVCHD). I recorded audio using windows voice recorder so that voice files are in wma format.

As you're in a hurry it's helpful to give as much information as possible such that people can help you fast and don't have to guess. What OS are you on? What is the format of the video file? What is the format of the audio file? How did you sync the audio and video recording?

sorry... I have edited the question.

You could use ffmpeg. Here a similar question is asked only with another video and audio format.

If you merge audio and video in Adobe Premiere, you can output in h.264 format and choose "match source".  The output file will (should?) be just as high quality as your original, according to what I've read online.

You can use tsMuxer to simply switch out the audio in the MTS without re-encoding the video or audio. MTS is just a container format, it's the "housing" for the video and audio streams. Though your audio has to have the exact same length to be in sync with the video and the audio format has to be supported by the M(2)TS file format.


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MJPEG Compression
Does a video stream compressed with MJPEG have a less variable output bit rate than others.
If I make a little list, start with YUYP420, MJPEG, MPEG2, MPEG4, MPEG4_Part10HEVC(h264), SNOW? Given the same test input content consisting of some highly complex still scenes, some extremely simplistic still scenes, some high similar temporal shifted frames, some extremely dissimilar temporal shifted frames, what's the variation in bitrate for each codec. The point of this is basically when you put the datastream on the LEO transponder, I bet you 50% 60% of the bandwidth is MUXED WITH NULLs anyway so....why would I care if the bitrate for x264 is highly variable.

@SlimSCSI Including, but not limited to, the above representative scenarios. In a general sense, does it, have, less variable bitrate, than any other temporal intra-frame compression scheme.

temporal intra-frame compression scheme sounds like an oxymoron. But MJPEG is intra-coded, so as content changes, so will the instantaneous bitrate. But it also depends on the encoder and how much it can and does vary quantization.

@Gyan I think I got my terms mixed up.  Nomenclature notwithstanding, can you separate MJPEG from the bunch by confirming it has less variable bitrate?

I edited some comments into the post. Andyz, can you please edit updates into the question to fix the nomenclature problem.

MJPEG doesn't perform any compare between frames, or "interframe" compression.  Does this make it's bitrate less variable?

I have seen MJPEG produce highly variable bitrate, when you encode 1000 frames of a banner screen, all white background with big black blocky letters, you get 1000 encoded frames at about 2MB/s.  When you get more complex content, a leopard standing, a static rainbow, a silhouette of a mountain, static clouds, you'll get 1000 frames out at about 8M/s.
So the bitrate is actually very variable with each 2000 frame sample.
Now if you do the same thing with H264, you'll get one keyframe at 1MB/S super burst, then you'll get 999 frames out at 400 KB/S. And then you'll get 1 keyframes at 1MB/S super burst and then you'll get 999 frames out at 700 KB/S.
So it is very variable, even over a two frame sample, if you look to the first keyframes and the next delta frame.
So I guess it could be said MJPEG is less variable, but not really, all you have to do is look a little further back and forth in the stream and you find just as much magnitude of variation.  I would say, in conclusion, the "VARIATION OF THE VARIATION" the VARITION of the first derivative, the instantaneous velocity vector of variation, will VARY MORE in H264.


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How to import SVG file into After Effects
I am trying to import an SVG animated file to an After Effects project.
It is not importing right now, so are there any solutions or any alternate ways to do that?

What have you tried so far? Can you be more specific about an SVG "not importing"? Are you getting an error message?

Yes I am getting an error message stating i cannot import unsupported files

Where are you saving the svg? I know that svg will work up to version 9 from illustrator.

Turns out We cannot import svg inside HTML . so I directly used illustrator .ai file instead.

Open in Illustrator.
Save as .ai (sorting the layers according to your needs)
Import into Ae.
Mind with the 'Import Kind' upon importing, suggest 'Composition' if you sorted the graphics into numbers of layers.

Am talking about animated SVG's

It's worth noting that .eps files are acceptable. In my case, I own Sketch but not Illustrator so exporting .svg to .eps was more accessible than .ai
Also be aware when you import them they might look blurry when transforming. In order to scale properly:
Right-click the layer and hit Create > Create Shapes From Vector Layer

Open SVG File in Adobe XD
select your paths
Menu "File" -> "Export" -> After Effects

Now you have the paths in AE :-)


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convert audio to libopus with ffmpeg
I'm totally new to ffmpeg and use it on windows.
I want to encode the audio from a mkv video to opus, using
ffmpeg -i abc.mkv -map 0:v -c copy -map 0:a -c libopus -b:a 128000 xyz.mkv

but I get the error:
invalid encoder type "libopus".

What am I doing wrong?

Just -c on its own will set the encoder for all types of streams: video, audio..etc. libopus can't encode video, obviously. You need to attach a stream specifier to limit it to audio, so
ffmpeg -i abc.mkv -map 0:v -c copy -map 0:a -c:a libopus -b:a 128k xyz.mkv

See the section on stream specifiers and also this answer on how multiple codec settings in a command works.


text:
Motion RAW Videos possible?
Sorry for the rushed question I don't have time.
So my good old DSC W610 could  shoot MJPEG but I always wanted an RAW video so I could make wallpapers from the scenery videos I Shoot.
Is this possible? I want to shoot FHD 30FPS Raw video.

Let us continue this discussion in chat.

This camera can't shoot RAW for still, not talking about video. And according to the specifications this camera can shoot 640x480x30 which is not very much by contemporary measures.
For shooting RAW video you should jump to much higher class cameras.
About DSLRs I found on this site sample table with cheapest DSLRs for RAW video:


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Background size for 4K UHD Shooting
I would like to create a background/backdrop for a video, but I am having quite a hard time deciding on the best dimensions for the backdrop. I will be shooting at 3840 x 2160. Is there a way to determine the dimensions based on the resolution? The idea would be to have a backdrop that completeoly 'fills' the frame of the camera, if that makes sense.
I tried playing with different options in Photoshop and Illustrator. i.e. I created a document with the dimensions 3840 x 2160 at 300DPI (since it's for print), determined it would come out as roughly 32.51 x 18.29cm, and then multiplied until I got a reasonable set of dimensions (i.e. multiplying 8 times = 260.8 x 146.32cm). But somehow, it seems wrong because I would need to place the camera at a certain distance from the background to capture it all.
I'm quite sure there's no rule or anything like that for this, but I would really appreciate any help/pointers on this one!

There is a rule for something like this, however, it has nothing to do with image resolution.  To calculate the area of a scene a camera will cover, you need to know a few things:  A) Distance to subject.  This one's easy.  B) the focal length of the lens, and C) the sensor size, also sometimes called "film back" or "gate".  If your image width to height ratio is the same as your sensor's you probably won't need to know D) aspect ratio, but for some cameras you will, so I'll include it for good measure.
From there, you should be able to use any number of online FOV calculators to tell you the area of your image.  Here is a link to one I found with a Google search.  The website also explains most of this better than I can and includes the mathematical formulae.
If you've ever used a magnifying glass to focus light onto a point, you're probably aware that the shape of the light it creates is circular.  The same phenomenon happens inside a camera.  Your camera's sensor sits inside of this circle.  Now, if you imagine your sensor divided into many tiny pixels, you should get an appreciation for why resolution does not affect this equation.  It doesn't matter how finely you chop up the rectangle -- whether it's 3840, 1920, 960, or eight pixels wide -- the sensor doesn't grow or shrink.  It always fits within the image circle.


text:
What are a Gimbal and Tripod used for?
I'm a beginner in film making, and trying to take footage with my smartphones. To make it more professional, I'm thinking of using a Tripod or Gimbal stabilizer to create non shaky video.
I think gimbal will be more beneficial as I can take sliding shot, left to right movement and bottom to top etc movement with smooth footage. I think I can use it in all aspect of video production without shake. But I guess I can't use Tripod the same way, it is fixed in one position thats it?
I only have enough funds to buy one, but I don't know about the difference between these tool. Please help me to understand which one to use for which purpose.

I'm closing this as there is no right answer as to which one to buy as a beginner. It's entirely up to you and what you want to do.

@DrMayhem, I believe there is pretty clear answer to this question: both tool designed for different purposes, so we shall tell the difference. It is not like question is about two similar things.

Unfortunately, that wouldn't answer the question asked. If the OP can edit the question to describe the type of material they want to shoot, then I think the question can be reopened and answered.

@DrMayhem I did a after post comment. Please check and let me know if i am good or not.

I have edited to make this work and reopened - please let me know if this wording is not suitable for you.

Gimbals are good for adding movement without shake, they're brilliant for run-n-gun documentary work where lugging a tripod slows you down. They're perfect when you're in the thick of things, using a wide lens to shoot close to the action.
They take a bit of time to master, you need to practise steering them and think about the movement. You also need a camera with good autofocus and you probably want to shoot with more depth of field; while you can focus-pull on a gimbal-mounted camera, particularly with a remote motor driven follow focus, it's challenging.
A major disadvantage of a gimbal is that you're limited in terms of the weight of the camera. Unless you're shelling out a lot, the cheaper gimbals are limited to something the weight of a DSLR. So if you're looking at using a cinema camera or shoulder-mount style video camera you're also going to be spending more on your gimbal.
A gimbal is fairly useless if you're shooting interviews, unless you're a fan of the camera-always-needlessly-moving style of interview shooting, and if you are, damn your eyes, you're a disgrace. For static interview set-ups a tripod will win hands-down.
You also wouldn't take a gimbal if you were trying to get shots of snow leopards in the wild, live sports, or candid long-lens documentary footage. You can't really stick long lenses on them, not just because of the weight, but also because even with the stabilisation the constant movement is still too much.
Another consideration is ergonomics. Even though the average video tripod weighs more than the average gimbal when you're lugging it to the gig, once you're there you put the tripod on the floor. Because you have to hold it while shooting, shooting for extended amounts of time with a gimbal can be exhausting. Also, the batteries on a tripod never go flat and the software doesn't ever need resetting.
Finally, a bottom of the range gimbal is going to cost you the same as a pretty good tripod. Worth considering if money is tight.
TL;DR Both are useful parts of the kit, but they have different uses.

Hi @stib thanks for your detailed answer. I'm not going to take interviews and wild life leopard videos.  I'm planning to take a travel short film and music videos. Am thinking to buy gimbal for iphone or just buy gopro action camera. Can the above work for music video or travel short film?

Sure, sounds like a good set-up for travel. I'd recommend the phone+gimbal. GoPros are good for action footage but you're limited to wide angle shots, which don't always work for general purpose filming.

thank you for your help.  This kind of music video is my ultimate destination. I can understand they have used lot of expensive equipment. But I want to get started with what I can afford. So Iphone or gopro or good DSLR which one you would suggest?

The DSLR if you can afford it. But that will also mean a bigger=more expensive gimbal.

It depends on the video that your are going to shoot. I suggest you to analyse what video you want to shoot and then select the tool accordingly.


text:
No sound in Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2017
I'm importing .MP4 file which has music in it, but in Premiere there is no audio track at all.
I have restarted PC, installed K-lite codec pack, Quicktime codecs but why? Why is it so hard to simply import an .MP4 file with music to the video editor?
I searched the internet a lot but only find useless advice

Ok, here is answer.
Quote:

Please clear the Media Cache (keeping Premiere Pro closed). Find
  instructions here: FAQ: How to clean media cache files?
Navigate to the Media Cache location as specified in the Premiere Pro
  preferences and rename the folders.
   MAC: Premiere Pro menu>Preferences>Media
   Windows: Edit Menu>Preferences>Media

Please reply if your issue gets resolved after trying these steps.
NOTE: Premiere Pro will conform all files after opening any/all
  project(s) and will generate the peak file for the audio. This might
  take long depending upon the number of Media used in the project(s).

Hold Alt when starting Premiere. It will ask you if you want to reset your settings. Click yes.  This worked for me.
https://forums.adobe.com/thread/2126506

Telion's answer was helpful to me in the past, but today it took me an hour to figure out that after some copying and pasting from other projects, my audio track had some Track Keyframes (notice the difference from Clip Keyframes) that were causing the volume to be 0.
So, I switched into the Track Keyframes mode and then used the Pen tool to highlight all of those keyframes, and I deleted them.

I used to solo the tracks, and then the audio would play and that usually does the trick. This time, that didn't work. After several restarts and quitting Premiere, I gave up and duplicated my project. Now audio works!


text:
Is there any way at all to use a microphone with Canon SX720 HS?
Note: This is a question camera, the ability of the camera in question, and help into deciding whether I need a new camera. This isn't a question about just "Video".
Is there any way at all to use a microphone with Canon SX720 HS? I sometimes make review videos or record videos of family/friend gatherings, and I would love to have the ability to use an external mic with this camera. Anything?
The question is also posted here: https://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/62728324

I have removed that final sentence. It is on topic here, but always worth reading a particular site's scope before posting - click on the ? at the top right.

No - while this is a well featured point and shoot, it is not designed to accept external accessories other than those detailed on page 146 in the manual


text:
How to create the text effects in short videos like this
I would be very glad if someone could put me in the right direction as to how to achieve text effects like this:

I've researched and still can't make out how to create them easily on OSX.

You need tobe a bit more specific. What part of the process do you need help with: pre-production, shooting, editing, sound mixing, motion graphics, colour grading, etc.?

Google for "kinetic typography" or "text-based videos".

I wouldn't really call that a kinetic typography video though. It's just some supers on a video background. But googling is probably something the OP needs to be doing anyway.

Which effect do you want to achieve? Do you want to know how to shoot this style of video? How to make it a square? How to make the text? How to make the logo on the top right?

I was mostly interested in the text effects. Thanks for input everyone. :)

You will be able to create something similar to this with iMovie on your Mac.
You will simply gather all of the video clips you want to use, the music you want, and then plan out your text (in a storyboard if it's easier). Make sure your video and music is licensed for you to use (not stolen from someone else or used without permission).
You can find lots of resources for stock videos, like this.
You can find lots of stock music here.
You can research about lower thirds for the text effects at the bottom.
Of course, there are lots of other ways to achieve this, and tonnes of resources. But this is where you can start to achieve something like the video you provided.

Thank you so much!! This answered my question. I was mostly interested in lower thirds text effects :)


text:
Vox-style dynamic charts in Final Cut Pro X
I am wondering how I could replicate dynamic charts like those made by Vox in Final Cut Pro X.
For instance, like this dynamic graph found here ("The big lesson from South Korea's coronavirus response"):

I tried the FCPX Charts from Pixel Film Studios add-on library but it is not quite there yet.
Any suggestions?

You are better served with Motion 5 or similar programs for something like that.
Here is a good example from Ripple Training what might work as starting point for you.


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How can I combine these ffmpeg commands into one step?
I have a task to label video frames. I need to mark all odd frames of a video with green pixels and even ones with red pixels. I do this in two steps:
ffmpeg -i video.mp4 -filter_complex "drawbox=x=0:y=0:w=5:h=3:color=#ff0000:t=fill:enable='not(mod(n,2))'" green.mp4
ffmpeg -i green.mp4 -filter_complex "drawbox=x=0:y=0:w=5:h=3:color=#00ff00:t=fill:enable='mod(n,2)'" greenred.mp4
Can you please tell me how to combine this into one step?

Hi Dmitry - please post future questions in English, as this site is English speaking only.
I used google translate for you this time.

Simply chain the filters in a sequence.
ffmpeg -i video.mp4 -vf "drawbox=x=0:y=0:w=5:h=3:color=#ff0000:t=fill:enable='not(mod(n,2))',drawbox=x=0:y=0:w=5:h=3:color=#00ff00:t=fill:enable='mod(n,2)'" greenred.mp4


text:
Crop and increase speed of videos using FFMPEG
I usually edit school videos using FFMPEG, using this command to crop the video
ffmpeg -i  "02-BC101.mp4" -vf "crop=1690:900:0:100"  -s hd480 -strict -2  "02-BC101xy.mp4"
then use this command to increase the speed
ffmpeg -i 02-BC101xy.mp4  -filter_complex "[0:v]setpts=0.625*PTS[v];[0:a]atempo=1.6[a]" -map "[v]" -map "[a]"  02-BC101xyD.mp4
They consume too much time to finish in long lectures. Can I merge them into 1 command, and is there any way to reduce the time taken in this task?

try → ffmpeg -i "02-BC101.mp4" -vf "crop=1690:900:0:100,setpts=0.625*PTS" -af "atempo=1.6" -s hd480 "out.mp4"

authors: Баяр Гончикжапов


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How can I choose a specific track in Adobe Premier Editor panel?
There are several tracks in the Editor panel. I would like to choose one of the tracks and delete it. Is there any method such as a shortcut or button that I can use to do it easily?
How can I choose a specific track?

Hi - you need to add a lot more detail - exactly what are you trying to do, and what's going wrong?

There have several tracks in the Editory panel. Then, I would like to choose one of the track and delete it. Is there have any method such as  shortcut or button that I can do it easily?


text:
Are there Tripods to film the bottom when writing on a paper?
I would like to make some short movie clips explaining how algorithms work. To do so, I would like to film how I write / scribble on the paper.
Are there tripods which support filming what is directly below the camera or should I tinker such a tripod myself? In case you recommend building it myself: How is this standard "mount" at the bottom of each digital camera called? (So that I can buy something to fixate the camera.)
(I have a Lumix DMC TZ41 digital camera. Do movie cameras have other "mounts" for tripods than digital cameras?)
Some online courses (Udacity, Coursera) make something similar / exactly what I would like to do. See Programming - CS101 - Udacity for example:

Do you have an example of a video which does this ?

Some online courses seem to make something similar. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBtIs_AVueY for example. I'll add this to the question in a second.

That looks like the user is using a digital pen which is why there is an overlay. some people have used Glass or Perspex screens in front of them and use Whiteboard markers to write and wipe off. other option would be to make or look online for a rig which allows the camera to hang over your hand while you write

The standard "mount" for consumer cameras is called "quarter twenty" aka 1/4-20.  The slightly larger mount found on pro cameras is 3/8-16.

There are a number of photo tripods that allow you to invert the center column.  When inverted, the camera sits between all the legs and can be pointed down.  Another tripod design has a center column that can also be shifted to a horizontal position.  This allows greater flexibility in terms of distance from the subject (and it also means you only have to shoot between the front two legs, rather than inside all three).

Another option that is ideally suited for this is a digital enlarger mount or a digital overhead mount.  Both of these are effectively the same thing and are designed to hold both a camera and lighting in an ideal manner for capturing a document placed on a flat surface.  We used a setup like this for capturing note writing for distance education at my college when I worked in the distance education program.

I have a tripod that allows you to remove the tripod head from the top of the column and screw it into the base of the column where the counterweight is typically hung (to stabilise cameras in windy environments).
It is a WeiFeng FT-6663A http://www.amazon.com/Aluminum-Digital-Professional-WeiFeng-FT-6663A/dp/B00974UXA2
Be aware that the legs of the tripod can cast shadows when you run the head inverted looking down.


text:
proper handling of tracking masks in Premiere
I’m using the current version, 12.0.0 “Haberdasher” on 64-bit Windows.
The auto-tracking feature did not do anything.  I suspect that it only looks at the content of the clip it appears in, rather than the whole image.  So, examples use it to blur a face (mask attached to an effect on a clip), while the common example of using masks to punch holes in a clip via the opaque control is silently ignored, and that is always illustrated without any tracking.
This seems like a common thing to do!  So is there a different technique that I should be using to achieve this, or some trick I’m missing to make it work usefully?
A specific problem
My video of a band performance did not record the projected background slides very well, as you might expect.

So, I imported the media that was being projected, and layered it on top of the recorded video.  I used rotation, position, and scale of that clip to put it where it belongs.
That looks great, and I’m happy with the effect.  But at the end of the performance:

The top of the pipa blocks the screen as they take their bow and start to walk off.  (See blue circle annotation on image above)
So, I added a mask to the opaque control for the screen, inverted mode, roughly outlining the incursion.
However, it would not automatically track.  My guess is that the tracking logic looks at the layer or clip it is a part of, not the complete composite: the hole is in V2 and needs to track the object in V1.  Or, perhaps it’s because the clip in question is a “basic graphics” thing, with the blank screen being a drawn rectangle.
For whatever reason, I had to do it completely manually.
Recap
Is there a better way to have done this?


text:
How to batch cut a folder of videos with a list of timestamps
What I would like to achieve is that a script runs through a folder of video files e.g.
001.mp4
002.mp4
003.mp4

and cuts these video according to a .csv or .xls or .txt with the timestamp e.g:
001.mp4, 00:00:00 - 00:00:03, 00:05:01 - 00:09:56,
002.mp4, 00:03:00 - 00:04:01, 00:06:01 - 00:08:00,

I would also like this to be as accurate as possible and wonder what the best approach is to get frame accuracy. I don't fully understand this, but some research suggests that the best would be to force keyframes at the edit points before cutting it.
The output should be named according to the video file name and cut times.
New folder:

001_000000_000003.mp4
001_000501_000956.mp4

so in pseudo code I would think the following:
for i in *.mov; do
   ffmpeg -i "$i" - force_key_frames-at-all-cut-points-according-to-csv file outputfile.mov (same as start file ?)
   ffmpeg -i "$i" - cut-video-according-to-cut-points "$i"+startpoint+endpoint.mov

In a next step it would be great to create these timestamps (with any software, ideally ffmpeg) by clicking and creating markers for in and out.
Any idea how I could achieve the first step would be great.
Also if there is already a ready script/software(open source) that can do this it would be great.
Thank you for your help.
Update:
I now have a .txt file with timestamps that I can extract automatically (every line a value in second like this):
timestamp0 (00:00)
timestamp1 (3.3 seconds)
timestamp2 (10.2 seconds)
timestamp3 (16.7 seconds)

Now I would like to parse always two pairs (e.g. timestamp0, timestamp1; timestamp2, timestamp3 ) and cut them from the larger video file and save them in a file with the seconds like this:
ffmpeg -ss timestamp0 -i inputfile.mp4 -t timestamp1 -c copy inputfile_time0_time1.mp4

How can I iterate over all the files in the directory, apply the cuts and save them to file ? Or if that is too difficult, how can I do this for one video ?
Thanks again

You almost invented EDL files. It can be rendered with almost any NLE editor.
If you want cut out part of file, you can use ffmpeg:
     ffmpeg -ss 3:00 -i file.mp4 -t 1:01 -c copy file_00300_00401.mp4

As you can see, here -copy option, so cut points will be only on keyframes. No quality loss. If you want more precise, you must reencode whole video (and possible move -ss option after -i)
To achieve your text format/file naming style, you must write script in any language. Just parse input data and paste it as ffmpeg's options.

Thank you. That solves part of my problem I guess, still have to test it, but how can I batch cut pieces from the a larger video based on seconds. I will update my question to explain this.

Just learn any scripting language. .bat files is very hard or even now usable with complex processing. I prefer to use Perl for this.


text:
Video style where multiple videos play as one video
There are a few videos I've seen where the same person, or multiple people, record their portion of the video and all videos get played back simultaneously often times in some grid usually 3x3. Most videos label themselves "medleys" and example is here
QUESTION: Is there a proper name for this type of video? Is there an easy macbook tool to use to create this type of video?
I'd do more research on it but I can't figure out what it's called in order to do that research

Try video montage or collage grids