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Special effects/post processing to make a black-colored light
I had this idea for an effect and I wanted to know if something like this has been done and if so how to do it:
Goal:
I want a lighting effect for an action scene where I will have an area start lighting up, while I would like to simultaneously have another area start darkening in a similar manner, all in a (relatively) lit environment. I want an effect that looks basically in all ways like a light, but its something like a black-colored light that paints its surrounding black in a light-like way.
Idea:
Basically I wanted to know if there is any way I can do some kind of post processing where I can use an LED as a green screen of sorts for the darkening effect. So wherever the LED is shining more or less maps to some kind of darkening effect/transformation.

That's a really cool effect idea! They did something like that in the second half of Hellbound: Hellraiser II. Here's a pic of it:  http://i.ytimg.com/vi/yilQ25Wr-S8/maxresdefault.jpg . I'll try to think of a way for you to accomplish it, and I'll post it as an answer if I do. :)

I've got another idea, but it's a little kooky.  You light the WHOLE SCENE with spotlights - the fewer the better.  On the key spotlight, you add a gel that has an opaque black circle on it.  Then as you move that around, that section of darkness will pass over parts of the set/props/actors.
For a more focused spot, you could use a bright digital projector to project the image of a black circle on a white field.  Focus it based on the parts of the scene you're moving it across.

What you're talking about is essentially a negative light. (There's a scene in the Simpson's where Moe doesn't want his fancy customers seeing Homer and the guys, so he unscrews a lightbulb and it casts negative light over them, leaving them in total blackness.) Unfortunately, they don't exist in real life. So your options are:

Light things in such a way that the area you want to be black is not lit (either directly or by reflections)
Use CGI for the various elements and use negative lights to light the "black" ones. I believe most 3D packages will allow this, even though there's no real-world analog
Film the two parts separately and use post production compositing techniques to mix them together with the appropriate lighting

Fake it.  Use your preferred compositing application to turn down the exposure value over a specified region.  For example, if you're talking about a round spotlight affecting a flat region, create an appropriately shaped ellipse, feather it to taste, and turn down the exposure.  If instead you're talking about volumetric lighting (like shining a light through fog or smoke), you'd use a cone shape, again feathered appropriately.  If your light/darkness cone intersects objects at various distances, you'll need to model those shapes in a 3d app, matchmove the camera, and use the volumetric light source from the 3d app as your exposure mask in your compositing app.
If you'd rather not fake it, then you're limited to the real world behavior of light.  In real life, "negative light" is shadow.  So the trick is casting shadows where you want your negative light to appear.  If it's important that your negative light appears as a beam, you'll need to introduce particles such as fog or smoke into the atmosphere, and as brettfromLA pointed out, use a "black circle" to mask out your beam.  In lighting parlance, these optical elements are usually called gobos.  I would guess that a single diffuse light source with a gobo would work better than brettfromLA's suggestion, though.  Maybe a single china ball with a gobo, but this would definitely require some experimentation.
Remember, darkness is just a relative lack of brightness.

One option, similar to what you're describing: use a green spotlight. In post production, create a chromakey using that color green.  You can then replace it with black, dark gray, or any color you want. It will work best on white walls and clothes, and not very well when it's over something that changes its color (like a purple shirt or a vase of orange flowers). But even that might still produce a cool effect.
Depending on the effect you want, you also might animate (in post production) a "beam" that leads to the patch of darkness.


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How to make a film in black and white and add color to some objects?
How is a movie made to show selective colors. For instance, in Pleasantville a sister and brother are transported to the universe of an old black and white TV show, and the movie switches to being B&W. Then, as the protagonists cause the inhabitants to have 'real' emotions, like fright, anger, or love, things (people, places, etc.) start having color. In the middle of the movie, many objects are still B&W, yet many more are now colorized.
Sin City also used this effect (the whole film was initially shot in full color, and was converted to black-and-white. Colorization is used on certain subjects in a scene), for example.
How is this effect achieved? Is it post-production editing? What techniques might a director employ to do this?

As you suggest, the scenes are shot in color. There isn't much of a special task for the director, it's almost completely a post-production challenge. In some cases a high contrast take can be made to assist in masking. This would be unusual for scenes involving actors, since the high-con pass wouldn't be well registered. It may also be possible in some scenes to shoot green screen (chroma key) to aid in separating some objects or actors.
The color portions are selectively revealed through masking, and possibly using some green screen and high-con elements. Using a combination of a full color layer and a mono layer derived from it, an artist paints masks that hide or reveal the appropriate layer(s) on a per-object basis. Computerized tracking and tracing can be a great help in this, but in the end it's up to the artist.

Jim Mack's answer hits on most of it, but you will also want to look at the term rotoscoping.  Generally speaking, this kind of thing is a highly manual effort to get best results.  If you can separate layers using green screen, then you can place distinct color elements in your black and white shot (or vice versa) but if they are all on the same shot, then someone generally has to go in and mask it out, frame by frame, by hand.  This is a time consuming, but not unheard of process.
Movies like Waking Life also make heavy use of rotoscoping.  The one nice thing about rotoscoping is that good rotoscoping software allows you to make use of the same principal of video that any modern video compression also makes use of.  That is, one frame is most likely going to be very similar to the next frame.  Thus, the rotoscoping software can start out with the mask being placed the same way as the previous frame and the artist only has to make adjustments to the mask to account for movement.  Some amount of automation may be possible for following strongly defined edges, but this often needs to be verified by an artist to make sure the edge tracking is good.

source: Stack Exchange

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

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Linux command-line option to do video lens correction?
Is there a Linux command-line option to do lens correction on videos?  (Either as a tool, or a collection of tools)
Specifically, GoPro videos?  I know I can do correction in GoPro Studio, but I need something that I can incorporate into a batch process.

On the Photo.SE site a very similar question was asked and answered (by me). While not directly applicable to a video file, I think you should fairly easily be able to convert video to a series of images (with e.g. ffmpeg), apply the correction to the images and combine everything back to a video again.

Possible duplicate of http://video.stackexchange.com/questions/14772/correct-lens-distortion-with-ffmpeg which provides a possible answer.

See Is there a way to remove GoPro fisheye using ffmpeg.

Frei0r effects has a lenscorrection module:
https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-filters.html#frei0r-1
this is an example to remove the fisheye distortion of a samyang 7.5mm

-filter_complex 'frei0r=lenscorrection:0.5:0.5:0.16:0.6'

this is the docs from the mlt framework for frei0r lenscorrection
https://www.mltframework.org/bin/view/MLT/FilterFrei0r-lenscorrection

Based on an an answer to Correct lens distortion with ffmpeg it is possible with the OpenCV toolkit
(That may also mean this is a duplicate question)

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


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What is the best software to do color pass effect for a film?
I want to select a colour which the computer picks up on and then only allows that colour to be viewed on the video, hence turning the rest B&W.
(for example like Sin City)
What is the best software to do color pass effect for a film?

Mostly any commercial video editing software should be able to do this. Premiere Pro would be my go-to option, there are different ways to accomplish a color pass effect with it. You can set the color you want to be passed, the tolerance, chose if you want softened edges ... Premiere basically can do everything you can wish for regarding color pass. But then again, you should be able to do this with most prosumer-level editing programs.

Davinci Resolve Lite (link at bottom of page) is a free, fully functional version of professional colorist software.  It runs on both Mac and PC.  The most notable restriction to the lite version is that it's limited to 1080p output, which should be fine for most folks looking to upload videos to youtube, or show them on a standard HD TV.  Because Resolve is purpose-built for color correction, it provides a toolset that standard video editing software can't match.


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Ingesting professional sony beta and sx tape into iMac thru Canopus ADVC 110
I'm trying to capture sony beta and sx tape into my iMac. I know I need a device between the deck and computer. I believe that device is the Canopus ADVC 110 converter (have yet to purchase this.)  Will I be able to cable from that converter directly to the thunderbolt port on the iMac? There are no firewire ports on my iMac. Pretty confused on this process. thanks!

The Canopus ADVC 110 will output DV video which may or may not be desired.

If you have firwire device but no firewire port you need an adapter. Apple offers one:
http://store.apple.com/us/product/MD464ZM/A/apple-thunderbolt-to-firewire-adapter
If you tape deck is offering an output that the Canopus supports you will be able to capture your tapes that way.
Alternatively you might want to look for a USB based solution that might be cheaper than using this device with an adapter.

ok thanks! So the adapter carries both audio and video from the Canopus converter? Will I need any to download any program if I'm capturing directly to an external hard drive plugged into the iMac?

Also could you recommend a usb solution? thanks!

No, if your hard drive is internal or external makes absolutely no difference when capturing with any sort of device.
I can't really recommend you anything as I dont know what you are playing back from but all you need really is a device that can capture analog video, like the Canopus.
A cheap capture stick can do the same but maybe not with the same quality. Though that can be delectable if you dont plan on further editing the footage and just want to save some home videos.
http://www.amazon.com/Elgato-Video-Capture-Device-10020840/dp/B0029U2YSA/

I would suggest looking for an interface that offers SDI inputs (as I suppose both your SP and SX players have SDI outputs) with which you will have better results than with a composite inputs as is on the Canopus product.
SDI interface will allow syncing your interface with the player, and get embedded audio directly in the SDI stream.
An example of such interfaces is https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/ultrastudiousb3, other products might exist.


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

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

paid options are also possible, I have a small budget available.
Do any of you have a suggestion for an appropriate codec for my specific application?
Thanks!

There is a rule in compression, quality, size and speed, pick two of three.  Video compression is an incredibly complex process that requires a lot of resources on either the CPU, GPU or both.  You can get around that one of two ways, you can either reduce the level of compression (with lossless being the fullest extreme) or you can reduce the quality (making larger approximations means the video has more artifacts, but is simpler to compress).
Unfortunately, in the case of video games, this problem is compounded as the game itself requires the same resources that the video encoding requires.  This means that your best (and really only) option for high quality, high compression encoding of video games is to move the processing off the resources that the game is using.
Most simply, this generally means using specialized real time encoding hardware that is optimized for making real time, high quality streams.  Such hardware is unfortunately not particularly cheap and generally runs around $100 on the low end to over $1000 on the high end, with $200 to $500 being around the point at which it becomes "professional" hardware, depending on the features of the device.  Unfortunately, this solution doesn't help your scenario at all other than suggesting that you may want to include support for some of the most popular real time encoders to be used with your game natively.
You can also try doing it by capturing uncompressed on one system and streaming that data over a really fast network connection to another computer and have that computer do the encoding.  This can be a bit cheaper if you already have a second powerful computer and a fast (gigabit or higher) network, but if you have to build a computer for it, the real time encoder is a better option as it is cheaper than a dedicated PC for the job and will do a better job anyway.  You might consider building your own client that could simplify this process for users.
One thing you can do is use the encoder support built in to some more recent graphics cards.  Some cards have started including their own consumer level encoding support for doing things like streaming.  If you tap in to this functionality, you would be able to make pretty good quality encodes on the fly.
Overall, your best bet though, is probably to capture to a lossless or near-lossless quality file and then encode it after the fact.  You can include an encoder of your choice and batch things up to run during free cycles that the game isn't making use of.  After compression finishes, you can get rid of the full size file.
I'd also suggest at looking at some of the codec options used by software like FRAPS to determine what might work well for that high quality, high speed codec that would make the files a bit smaller, but always keep in mind that the more compression you do, the more it will impact the performance of your game.

x264 would be a good option, its an extremely fast and efficient h264 encoder, probably the best on the market and its open source.
I has several good presets/profiles f.e. the ultrafast profile which can encode FullHD with several 100FPS on a modern multi core cpu. I made good experiences with it regarding capturing real time rendering applications.
Its available as an either standalone encoder or through FFmpeg.
x264 is under the GPL but can be licensed under a commercial license. YouTube is using it aswell.
http://x264licensing.com/

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

There are far more options than just h.264 that will play on mobile.  Webm and any number of other formats also play well on mobile.  h.264 is simply not the only option, nor is it necessarily the best one, particularly if they can do a transcode after capture.

On IOS any other codec will be in software, so to decode you are using high CPU and hence battery. Sure you can do it, but I would not recommended it.

that's still a far cry different from being "the only codec that can play on mobile".

Its a difference between practical and possible. I assumed he wanted to make a product with good user experience. But you are correct, I should have clarified.


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Premiere CC Button Editor Unaligned

Above is the Screenshot of the results of adding new buttons using the the Premiere CC button editor. For the life of me I cannot get these buttons to align to center or align to anything at all. It's just arbitrarily looking like crap.
Any tips?

Buttons will automatically allign to other button ontop or under existing buttons.
Right now they are not aligned because you are missing a spacer after the first two button in the bottom row. Or remove the spacer in the top row by dragging it into the editor window.

I have the same problem, and I can't center them as well. No matter where I put a new button, they just arbitrarily push the other buttons in the row in one direction. How did you get them to be centered perfectly?

I just drag and drop them to the place I want them to be, just make sure you don't touch the button next to it.

Hm I tried this a while ago and it didn't seem to work, but I'll try it again later, thanks

Sadly they do not seem to align under each other no matter what I do. It seems like it is haphazard randomness at best and a bug more likely.

What you have to keep in mind you can't just place them anywhere, they will either snap to the left of an existing button or to the right depending on where you drag it to. When there is no button in the row yet it will place it always in the center.
But yes, they could definitely improve this "editor".


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Connecting camera to computer to film
I am not sure if this is the right area for this but anyway: I want to hook my camera (Pentax K-R) to my computer to give me a live preview of what the camera sees. Then for the camera to save straight onto my hdd. Similar to PK tether.

Are you trying for photo of video.  For video, it seems likely that this functionality is not well supported.  I took a look at the code for Pentax K-R and it is simply grabbing a buffered image from the camera for display, but this doesn't work well for video as it a) doesn't have audio and b) doesn't have reliable frame rates or updates.
If you simply want to capture still images, then using PK Tether as it currently is would work fine.
If you want video, your best bet is likely going to be to use HDMI out if it has it available and capture that output on your computer using an HDMI capture device, such as the Matrox MXO2 or Black Magic Intensity.  Alternately, if quality isn't a major concern, you could us AV out functionality and capture a lower quality feed.


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Final Cut - split clip into separate clips
Is it possible to split long clips in several short clips?
Now I can open clip in timeline and edit, split, delete, rename parts of clip. But when I go back to project how can I use sub parts of this clip or how can I make separate clips?

I'm not familiar with FCPX specifically, but on pretty much every NLE ever made, you either use the razor tool to split the long clip wherever you want or set in and out points on the source window and drag in the clips already shortened.
If you want to be able to use a preset portion of a longer video as a source that you can just drag on, it will need its own timeline.  Put it in a timeline by itself along with any effects or anything you want to apply to it and then you can use a nested sequence in another timeline.


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Recovering severely underexposed video
I need to recover some badly underexposed video. The video is virtually black with no detail at the moment.
I don't need it to be perfect but I would like some ideas on a process I could follow to recover some of the image. It will be OK if it's grainy and I don't really mind if the white balance is off.
It was shot on a DSLR using f11 ISO100.
If anyone could suggest a good program (free or trial) I could use and a process to recover something out of it then that would be fantastic.

Can you post a sample frame of the video?  This will help us let you know if it is salvageable or not and possibly suggest some settings to try if there is enough detail there to expand.

The biggest problem you are facing is that a DSLR typically records to the H.264 codec. That codec tries to minimize the file size and the only way to achieve that is to throw out negligible information.
Sadly human eyes are not sensitive to black parts of video, so dark areas are highly compressed. That means you will have a really hard time brightening your footage, since most information is simply lost.
Had you had access to a RAW or lossless recording codec, you might have been able to recover a reasonable amount of your footage, but that would have cost much more storage space and meant more post production work.
If you would like to learn more about codecs, there is an in-depth explanation on Phillip Bloom's Blog.

You are almost certainly up a creek with no paddle.  Since video is less than 8 bit color, what you see when you watch it is what is there.
If there was some small amount of detail but it was just really dark, then you could alter the white point and get something minimally usable out of the darkest part of the image.  This can be done with any decent video tool, including most free ones as it is basically just a brightness boost (make everything medium grey) crossed with a contrast boost (make the darker greys black and the lighter greys white.)
If, however, it is almost solid black like you said your video looks, then there is no (or very, very minimal) detail to expand out.  There is no "hidden details" like you have in a 12 bit or 14 bit raw image that are hiding outside the visual range of the image.  This is also why color correction on video footage is so much more of a challenge.  It is also why the ability to shoot RAW video, which does capture 12 or 14 bit images for frames on cameras like the 5D Mark iii is such a big deal in the DSLR video world right now, because such functionality used to only be available on $30k+ cameras.

Neat!  Does it use some kind of lossy compression when recording?  http://www.cinema5d.com/shooting-raw-canon-5d-mark-iii-2014-magic-lantern/ says 25min on a 128GB card.  14bits*3components * 30fps * 60sec/min * 25min * 1920*1080 / 8bits-per-byte / (128*1024^3) = 3.05, so they're getting a compression ratio of only 3.  So probably lossless.

Yes, raw video is lossless normally, there are some ways to compress raw in a lossy way but the 5d doesn't have the specialized hardware to deal with that.

You could use the 30 days trial version of Premiere Pro (most editing programs will be able to perform the following options).
The best way to make the video viewable depends on how badly the video is underexposed. If some areas are literally pitchblack, there is nothing you can do about it.
First, try to use the brightness and contrast effect and raise the brightness till you see a difference. Play around with the contrast value as well.
If that does not work, deactivate or delete the brightness and contrast effect and try adjusting the luminance curve. Try raising the curve, so that minimal differences between the shades of gray (lol) will be increased to make them visible. That way, the video won't look really good, but it might be viewable at least.
Try adjusting the luminance curve to something like this:

Or maybe:

(Not really sure if the second one would work as intended in this case, but it's worth a shot)
If that still doesn't work, you could try playing around with RGB curves and color corrections. However, if you didn't see any improvement after performing those steps, I don't think you'll be able to perform these steps.
If one of the above steps works, you might be able to even get some color in it using RGB curves and/or increased saturation, but I'm not sure if this will do anything if your material is really that highly underexposed.

Premiere is overkill for this. Any tool has basic color correction necessary for expanding the luminence space of the video, however if there is as little detail as he is claiming, it is unlikely to make any difference in the first place as there is nothing at all to expand.

Well yeah, but that's no reason to not give it a shot. Worst case it doesn't work at all and the 20 minutes needed to do this are wasted.
I pointed out that most video editing software should do the job. I recommended Premiere because it offers different advanced approaches to color and tone correction which may or may not work better than others and because I know the program and thus was able to give specific directions on how to approach the problem as well as offer screenshots.
He asked for a free program or a free trial anyway ...

+1 That's fair, I don't mean to detract from your answer, just want to make sure they understand that if there is enough there to extract, they don't have to buy a $600, $240 a year program or $30 a month program to do it.  It's also probably worth pointing out that if they want to go super advanced, either Speedgrade, After Effects or Divinci Resolve would all offer even more advanced options (though I understand that you were explaining what you know.)

Fair enough, no hard feelings! I just wanted to explain my answer, though you are of course right saying that there is no need to buy a commercial product!

Like others have said, just load your video in anything and play with the brightness effects.  Even a gamma curve could do the trick.
Or save a frame of the video where you can see anything at all, and play with that in a still-image program like imview, and play with the brightness / contrast / gamma to see if there's anything still there worth looking at.


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Video rendering time is measured in man-hours. How is that calculated?
I know that man-hours are used as a unit to measure time in things like modelling and other work actually done by people, but I also hear man-hours used to refer to graphics rendering time.  How is that measured?  If a video takes 200 man-hours to render, for example, what is that measured against?  Obviously a person could not be expected to perform the mathematics necessary for rendering an image, but all definitions of 'man-hours' that I've been able to find refer to expected output of a human worker in an hour.  How is that measured for things like video rendering which simply can't be done by a human?

I've never heard that term used for rendering before, but it is most likely referring to the number of hours of computation needed for a single CPU or GPU to process it.  In most video and 3d applications, it is possible to parallelize the rendering of the video itself (though not necessarily the encoding.
Thus, a job that would take 200 "man hours" (more often called CPU hours when I've heard it used) would only take 20 hours if you had 10 CPUs working on it.

CPU hours is metric.  Man hours is imperial.  ;)


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Razor all clips in timeline underneath in/out points
I've just synched a lot of clips using PluralEyes, and imported this in PPCC. Since I'm relatively new to this program (using Vegas earlier), I wanted to check if there is a way to automatically razor all clips in the timeline underneath my I/O selection?
Now I have to set the I/O points (or just go straigth to the razor tool), select the razor tool, hold shift and use the IO points as reference to cut all the clips underneath my mouse cursor.
I want to find a way to quickly make rough selection and cut out all the surrounding stuff. It was quite easy in Vegas by just making lots of regions, and using a Vegas script to cut out all the surrounding stuff ... is there a workflow like that in PP?

shift+ctl/cmd+k will add a cut right across all cuts in your timeline, so you could do shift+i, shift+ctl/cmd+k, then shift+o, shift+ctl/cmd+k to quickly add cuts at your in and out points. But listen to @AJHenderson and use multicam instead.

Don't even try to do it this way.  For what you are trying to do, take a look at the multi-camera editing mode.  It is designed for doing precisely the kind of thing you are trying to do in a much simpler way.  You can find more detail about the multi-cam features in Adobe's own documentation here.


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How to get Youtube Editor spotlight annotations to show up once uploaded on Vimeo
I have added spotlight annotations to a Youtube video by using Youtube editor. I tried uploading it to Vimeo and the spotlights disappeared. Can someone please tell me how to get the annotations to show up in Vimeo after being made in Youtube? Thanks.

You can't. Vimeo doesn't support such a feature like the YouTube annotations.
You also can't export your YouTube annotations, YouTube doesn't offer any method for that.


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How to shoot a party scene with few people?
I have about 7 people and need to give the feel of 20. I'm using a long lens, any tips or solutions?

I came up with another idea. This works if there is one main character in the scene.  Let's call him/her Chris.
1) Start with an exterior shot of the house where the party is. Party sounds emanate from it (muffled of course). It sounds as though there are 20-30 people in the party.
2) Start in one room of the house, with the camera on Chris.  Chris walks through the other 5 people in that room who are busy partying, then passes through a doorway.
3) In another room (the kitchen?), Chris walks through 5 "more" people partying. It's actually the same 5 extras.
4) In the final room where the scene will take place, Chris pushes through 5 "more" people partying and finally starts the conversation with the other person in the scene.
In each of those rooms, the party-goers are disguised.  They're wearing different costumes, wigs, hats and glasses.  Some are on high heels; some are squatting to appear shorter.  The camera only catches the sides of faces and the backs of heads, so no full faces are recognizable from shot to shot.  And in each room, the audio is layered to sound like there are 4 times as many people in the room.

I agree with @DrMayhem, but I have a few things to add.
You only need one or two establishing shots that show the whole group.  The audience will continue believing that you're in a room full of people after you show it to them once.  For the establishing shot(s), you can shoot the same people, wearing different clothes & accessories, in front of a green screen.  Make sure the lighting and the height of the camera will match with the lighting and camera height in your party setting.  When shooting the group in front of the green screen, position them closer to the camera.  Then shoot the same people again in the actual party setting, farther from the camera.  In post-production, layer the green screen footage of the people over the actual party setting, and it will give the impression of twice as many people.  You can also do 2 "layers" of green screen footage, with the same actors 5-10 feet farther away from the camera, in front of the green screen (and wearing different clothes, hats, glasses, wigs, etc.).
For the rest of the scene, you can use medium and close-up shots.  Include people on the edges of the shot, and passing through the shot, and behind the main actors, to make the audience feel as though there's a whole party going on outside the frame they're looking at.
For the end of the scene, you may want to show the establishing shot (green-screened) again, to "bookend" the scene.
The scene's audio will help "sell" the illusion. Layer additional voices (not more than the number of party-goers!) and various party noises.
I did a cheaper version of the green screen trick in the middle of YouTube video, to make a conference room look full of people even though I only had 3 actors. The establishing shot only lasts for a second, and the action draws the viewer's eye away from the fact that the "people" in the chairs around the table are actually just still pictures I overlaid in post.  Here's the link if you want to see the vid.  The effect shot comes shortly after the 32-second mark, but it's more convincing if you start watching at 0:32 (or at the beginning).

I have 3 possible options:
You can do this in post-production.
Alternatively, if you can keep a tight shot (ie head and shoulders of one or two foreground individuals) you can use your other cast members in the back/foreground - as layers. As long as you don't stray outside that area, you should be able to imply a few layers of party goers.
And my preferred option - ask some folks to be extras. Round up a bunch of friends/acquaintances who may do it for free/couple of beers/small amounts of money.


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Transparent video background from image
Is there a simple way to make the background of an video transparent, removing the background where it is similar to the image?
Just like a green screen, except that the chroma key is an image.
Is this possible in blender, or some other free/cheap mac programs?

I don't have time for a detailed map, but look at difference blends, the problem would be that for video, noise may well be a problem, but you might be able to tweak it to work.

photobooth does it, so it's possible.  but I don't know anything that'd let you export video off the top of my head

What you're looking for is a difference matte. (Not to be confused with a Color Difference Key which is similar to regular chroma key.) It can certainly be done, though you should know that difference mattes are fairly temperamental.
The way it works is by finding the difference between an image and each frame of video, and removing anything that's the same, while leaving whatever's different. This means you need a locked-down camera when filming and you need a clean plate of the scene without any actors (or whatever you're trying to remove).
I'm not knowledgable in Blender, so I don't know if it's possible there. I haven't used one in a long time, so don't know what the current landscape is for plug-ins or apps that do this.


text:
.wmv audio and .mov video out of sync
I'm a total amateur at this video stuff.  I'm actually a web developer trying to create a video for work and I've run into a problem.  Hoping those of you who know stuff about videography can help me out. All of this to say, I apologize for the ignorance that follows:
I have video/audio recorded as .wmv and another video recorded as .mov.  I'm trying to overlap the .wmv audio with the .mov video.  It syncs up at the beginning of the video, but a few minutes in and it's off.  I have not cut the video yet except to line it up at the beginning.  I've successfully made a couple of basic videos like this in the past but I suspect it has something to do with the two different formats. I'm using Adobe Premiere Pro.  Google has no advice for me.  Does anyone know what I can do to fix this?

Where did the videos come from?  There are a number of different possibilities, but without knowing more about how the files came to be, it is hard to narrow it down.

I recorded the .mov video in photo booth. I recorded the .wmv in windows movie maker.

There are several possibilities here.  It could be that one device or both dropped frames and thus ended up out of sync, it could be a difference in frame rate or it could simply be that one or both devices have inaccurate internal clocks for recording.  Your best bet is to identify a point at the beginning and at the end of each video that should be the same.  Figure out the offset and then do a speed adjustment to one of the clips to make it line up with the other.
After you do this, the beginning and end should both match up, but you still want to make sure to watch the entire video closely to make sure it stays lined up the entire way through.  If the loss of sync was due to dropped frames rather than a difference in clock speed, the rate adjustment will not fix the problem and you'll see sync issues emerge somewhere in the middle of your video.
If it is due to loss of frames, there isn't a lot you can easily do to recover from the problem because you are missing the information that should be in those frames.  If it is an internal clock rate issue or an FPS issue, then there is a decent chance that the rate adjustment should fix it for you.


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Relative Animation Presets
Is there any way to create an animation (a bubble for example, that rises up on the y axis and fades in from 0 to 100 opacity), that can be saved as an animation preset, then that can be added to another bubble (from animation preset) in another position, and to have it take the change in position into effect?
Thanks,
Andy.

If you're trying to make multiple bubbles rise up, you'd probably be better off designing a single bubble, then using it as a particle, inside a particle engine (AE has free particle engines like "CC particle systems" built in, but it's tricky to use).  Trapcode Particular is quicker and easier, but not free.
e.g.
http://people.redgiantsoftware.com/explore/presetdetail.aspx?presetid=831

If you need a relative position change I can only think of doing the animation in an expression. An expression can use the current value of a property as the starting point when being applied to the layer.

Do the animation of the position and opacity of your first drop, select the keyframes and any other property I-beams you want and create the animation preset.
Now create your other drops, apply the preset and then offset them using their Anchor Points rather than their positions. This won't work if you're animating their scale or rotation however, because scale and rotation work around the anchor point.
Of course there's always different ways to do thing in AE. You can create particle systems using expressions, as Prof. Sparkles said. Here's an expression that you can apply to the position property of each bubble. Use two nulls to control the start, lifespan and wiggly-ness of the bubbles. It's not quite up to the trapcode preset, but whadayawantforfree?:
wigglespeed=1; //controls the frequency of the wiggles; change this to whatever you want

seedRandom(index, timeless = true); //create static random numbers

start=random(thisComp.layer("start").inPoint, thisComp.layer("start").outPoint);
//when the bubble starts, set by the in and out points of the start null

//only do all the hooh-hah if it's time to start bubbling (saves processor cycles)
if (time>start)
{
    lifespan=random(thisComp.layer("stop").inPoint, thisComp.layer("stop").outPoint);
    //how long the bubble takes to go up, set by the stop null's in and out point
    posX=random(thisComp.width);

    wiggleX=thisComp.layer("stop").effect("Point Control")("Point")[0];
    wiggleY=thisComp.layer("stop").effect("Point Control")("Point")[1];
    startY=thisComp.layer("start").transform.position[1];
    stopY=thisComp.layer("stop").transform.position[1];

    wigglepoint=thisComp.layer("stop").transform.anchorPoint;
    //this should be [0,0] so that the wiggle doesn't introduce unweanted offset

    posY=startY+(startY -stopY)*(start-time)/lifespan;
    pos=[posX, posY]+[wigglepoint.wiggle(wigglespeed, wiggleX)[0], wigglepoint.wiggle(wigglespeed,wiggleY)[1]]
} else {
    //not time to go yet
    thisComp.layer("start").transform.position
}

For this expression to work you need two nulls called start and stop, and a point control effect (effect>expression controls>point control) applied to the start null. project file here


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how can I flip from camera to screen recording
I just get my new canon 70d camera. I want to use it for recording online tutorial and publish it in YouTube. how can I flip from camera to screen recording and vise verse while recording? are there some programs for doing that?

Are you trying to stream live or just record it while switching live so that you can avoid doing post production on it?  Is there anyone else who can handle switching for you on another system or does it need to be on the same system?  Does it need to be free/cheap or can other production hardware be involved?  What kind of quality are you looking for and what is your budget?  There are a bunch of different ways this can be done, but without more detail, I can't give you the best one for your situation.

@AJHenderson Ok, I need to record the video, no one to switch the camera, free/cheep solution will be perfect and i can't get any new hardware since i am living in Gaza-Palestine, it was sufferance to get the camera from out!, HD for youtube. please tell me if you have any other questions.. and thanks

Can you edit after the fact or does it have to be live? There is software that can record the video switching like open broadcast software, but it is mostly for streaming and the ui might be visible. The quality would also be lower.

@AJHenderson yes i can edit, it's not live

You have two main options I can see, first one is to take a look at Open Broadcaster Software Project.  This project is free and open source and is targeted at individuals trying to stream primarily, but it does have good support for both a video capture device and a screen capture.  I believe it is possible to configure a shortcut key for swapping sources and it does support local recording.
For this option, you will also need a way to capture the video from the camera.  You can either use a webcam hack to pull the preview video from EOS Utility using some third party drivers (Covered in more detail here) or you can purchase an HDMI input device, such as a Matrox MXO2 or BlackMagic Intensity (not free or even particularly cheap, but necessary if you want to make use of the HDMI out of your camera.
Alternately, you can just use standard screen recording software and record the video independently.  You can then edit them together after the fact.  To avoid sync problems, you can start by showing the camera the screen and opening and closing a window to sync to later.  This is the cheapest option as it can be done without any additional investment using entirely free tools.  It is also the highest quality option as non-real time encoding and hardware assisted encoding (such as on the camera) does a far higher quality job than software based real time encoding.  It also allows you to be the most selective about when you switch sources and preserves feeds of both sources in case you want to make changes later on.

Not that I know of (does not mean its not out there), this would be very easy to do in Post production and since you have to pull the video of the camera card to upload it anyway just drop it in in post and keep the camera audio playing over it.

I won't down vote since you included that there might be, but just to let you know there are a fair number of ways to do this general thing (assuming he doesn't mean doing it solely with the camera, but rather recording from the computer).  I need to get some more details from the OP to tell which one is most relevant, but I should be able to put together an answer once I hear back.  If he actually means from the camera, then you are quite right that it is impossible as the camera doesn't have a way to feed in the screen capture.

Of course there is a way to do this with a video mixer but he was asking if there was a program for it, I have never seen one but Im sure they are out there. However if there is no one to operate it that would pose a problem. I felt like he was looking for a one button solution or a remote control solution that he could discreetly operate while on cameral. Shy of hiding a mixer under the table I do not know of anything. An A/B box would cause drop out in the switch but could be used.

see my answer for more details on how it can be done.  There is an entire class of streaming software designed specifically to do this kind of thing.  Even on the higher end, there are PC based video switches that could be controlled by shortcut keys while running something.  It's not particularly easy, or possibly even advisable, to run it yourself while presenting, but there are lots of means of being able to do it.


text:
Using a 265 encoded video with a container
Let me start by saying I'm not a video production guy. I am a programmer so I'm in over my head in certain areas. I've been trying to use ffmpeg to mess around with HEVC encoded video.
I was told it needs to be an HEVC encoded video, with the filetype of mkv, mov, avi, or something real common like that. I though mkv, mov, etc was their own encoding.

Can someone help me understand what's being asked for? If I use the command ffmpeg command -i input.265 output.avi, won't it convert and encode it? I don't want that.
How do I know what's an encoding and what a container?
What commands or links can I look at so I can accomplish this task?

A container is what the name implies, a container for video data and audio data (and other misc. data).
This might go a little bit under your know-how but just to make it easy to understand:
A video is made up by frames which are made up by pixels. A codec like h265/HEVC is there to take this pixel information and process it in a way that makes it a lot smaller than the raw pixel array, this process is called encoding.
Most codecs do this in a lossy way which discards certain pixel information but trys to keep the image still look the same. The encoded image frame is mathematically not identical with the source but aims to look identical for the human eye.
The container is there to take this raw encoded stream and wrap it, many container formats provide extra meta information about the streams contained in it and support a variety of content other than video, like subtitles and audio information. The container is there to hold all this information, it doesn't alter the information like an encoder alters video or audio, it just holds on to them.
In order to mux (the term used when you mean you want to put a audio or video stream into a container, muxing will give you a lot of google results) your video into a container with ffmpeg you just have to tell ffmpeg to copy the existing stream instead of encoding it (in your case you provided it with no further information and it will just encode it to h264 which is the standard codec in ffmpeg when nothing is provided).
You do that by using -c copy which tells it to copy both audio and video from the source. You can also do -vcodec copy or -acodec copy to treat audio and video differently but this is more relevant to re-mux from an existing container which has audio and video data to another container.
In your case -c copy does the job just fine. Just add that to your command line and it should mux an avi for you. Though mkv is favorable over avi for h265 as its already the supported h265 container that DIVX uses for their h265 implementation.
If just providing a filetype exension to your output file doesn't work like you expect you can also enforce a container by using -f mkv or -f avi.
This does what your client asked for, the h265 stream muxed into a container format without touching it.

Thanks that helped me understand things. Maybe you have idea why, but when i play the hevc in ffplay, its laggy but runs. After muxing, It plays the first 2 seconds and then freezes

You can try muxing it into mp4 instead, that might be better supported by ffplay.


text:
How do you edit in multicamera mode if you have a mask on one track?
I'm using Sony Vegas Pro 10, and I have one track that I need to pixelate someone's face on.  There are 4 video tracks total.
So, I have one track where a Pixelation mask is applied.  Now I'm trying to make a Multicamera track (Tools/Multicamera/Create Multicamera Track) and it seems like it's losing the pixelation.
I have read that you can apply FX to a track in the media bin and it will stick when you create a multicamera track, but that seems to only apply to the whole track and not just a mask.
I hope this makes sense to someone, because I'm stuck!

Here's what I ended up doing.  I created a mask the way you would normally create a mask, and the end result was that I had 2 video tracks.  Any tutorial on the Internet can show you how to do that.
When I got ready to create my multitrack edit, I included every video track except the 2nd video track mentioned above.
In other words, let's say I have 3 video tracks; V1, V2 and V3.  V2 is the camera angle where the person's face can be clearly seen, so I put a pixelated mask on the person's face for the whole clip.
When I make my multicamera track I only highlight V1, V2 and V3,  This combines those 3 into one track, and V4 remains it's own separate track.
Now when you make the cuts and edits, that pixelation mask will still be on any shot where you use V2 as the source, but will not be on any shot where V1 or V3 is the source.
Just remember, when you render the video make sure the mask track, the one you didn't add to the multicamera track, is above the multicamera track in your track layout so it lays on top of that track instead of under it.


text:
what should be the minimum write speed of microSD for 30fps 4K, 60 fps 1080p or 100fps 720p etc?
I am planning to buy GoPro 4 silver edition. Since they do not come with a microSD I need to choose one. BH video recommends the below one which has 50Mb/s writing speed and costs75$.
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/945286-REG/sandisk_sdsdqx_064g_a46a_64gb_extreme_micro_sdxc_uhs_1.html
the one with 30Mb/s writing speed is 40$.
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/886007-REG/SanDisk_sdsdqui_064g_a11_64GB_microSDXC_Memory_Card.html
is 30Mb/s enough for me? Or should I go with the expensive one? How can I determine the required speed?
Thanks in advance.

You have to check the specification of your camera.  30Mb/s could be plenty for 60fps 4k or not enough for 24p SD, entirely depending on what format and data rate is being used.  Your camera should say the data rate of whatever you intend to record in.  Use that to determine the needed card speed.  Make sure that the write speed is actually what you need as well as read and write speeds can sometimes differ significantly on SD cards.
According to this page, the Hero4 Silver only supports 15fps 4k recording.  For that particular camera, the required data rate is 45 Mbps.  Note that memory cards are typically advertised for the READ speed which is faster than the write speed in almost all cases.  Verify that the WRITE speed exceeds 45Mbps as the camera needs to be able to catch up on writing if it falls behind.

It's 60 MBPS or about 8MBps for 4k 30fps, just bought an SD Card for my GoPro Hero 5 and it sucked. Need over 80mbps really if you want to use the 4K VID.

Thanks for posting more concrete details, however it appears your answer actually isn't correct for the particular model being asked about.  The Hero4 Silver only supports 15fps 4k recording and uses a significantly lower bitrate.  This was why my initial answer was so generic since it can vary greatly from one camera to another, but I went ahead and added a Hero4 Silver specific section to my answer to improve it, so thank you for suggesting a more specific answer as well.

Fair enough, but, important to bare in mind when purchasing a 4K  30fps camera which uses a micro sd card. This thread will help anyone who will come across this problem in the near future.

Only for a GoPro Hero5 specifically.  The data rates required for the same resolution vary greatly between cameras based on the data rates used and are widely independent of resolution.  My original answer was intended to be as generic as possible, but at the expense of not being as useful to the direct original question.  A camera doing something like RAW 24fps 720p video will use almost double the data rate of the 4K 30fps video on your GoPro, it's all extremely variable.


text:
Anyone with Mac Pro, please help for CPU advice
I'm about to buy a Mac Pro, possibly an iMac instead, in a few days for extensive 3D and video work. I was able to try an online CPU stress test which renders complex video frames on the iMac but I need someone that has a Mac Pro. If you could go to the link below and click on the third bottom option "Stress Test," and tell me exactly how many seconds it took to render the first frame. This would be greatly appreciated thank you!
http://silver.urih.com/
Also let me know what your processor is/specs are. Thank you again!

I have mid 2012 Mac Pro with two E5645 Xeon's and result is 01:10

But I don't think that SilverBench is best benchmark. Guys who use Cinema 4D usually use Cinebench by Maxon. My results in Cinebench:


text:
Using smartphone sensors to stabilise DSLR video in post
So I had an idea. Almost everyone has smartphone equipped with gyroscope and accelerometer. It wouldn't seem too far fetched to me to strap this smartphone to DSLR and have some app record data from these sensors while shooting video. Then you would load both the video from DSLR and data from your smartphone into computer and use the sensor data to stabilise your footage. Of course you would have to time-sync your data and video and you would probably get just 720 stabilised video out of 1080 original footage because of cropping, but you would get stable video for good coin (if you already have both smartphone and dslr) and in very portable package (unlike 3axis brushless gimbals and seadicams).
Now I am pretty sure I am not first person to think of that. Is there any solution like this? or do you see some obstacle I've missed?

Cool idea! @AJHenderson's answer below seems to dispute it (he's a really smart guy!), but I like how you were thinking: use the stabilization information from one device and apply it to footage from another, provided they were locked together during the shot.

@BrettFromLA - I made some additional updates to my answer.  My original post was a bit too harsh on the idea as it does provide some simplification to processing, it just doesn't provide anything you can't theoretically extract with sufficient software processing given the right kind of footage.

@AJHenderson Right; that makes sense. It seems as though the OP's idea would gather the stabilization data BASED ON THE VISUALS during shooting, whereas the stabilization data could be generated BASED ON THE VISUALS during post-production and produce exactly the same results.

Gyroscopes, gimbals and springs would eliminate the unavoidable (??) blur that comes from stabilizing in post.

@BrettFromLA - not quite exact in every case, but in enough to make the value proposition dubious, yes.  As for the blur, yes, that blur is from two things, camera movement during a frame exposure and trying to warp to correct for the perspective of the camera in the wrong place.  Physical stabilization addresses both of those, which is why it is pretty much always preferable to stabilization in post unless space constraints prevent it from being an option.  Mesh clouds (3d models) like MS Research is doing help reduce warp with more accurate guesses, but are still not perfect.

I forgot to mention that I would not expect such method to be ideal, it would obviously be no good to stabilise perspective etc. Stabilising footage by analyzing it in post is well known to me and fact, that in less than ideal conditions this method can be very unreliable led me to think about using phone to detect movement in the first place :-)

This doesn't work, at least not exclusively (more on that after some background).  With stabilization, there are two main ways to do it.  You can either stabilize during shooting by keeping the camera steady or after by taking unstable video, counteracting some of the motion and adjusting the image to account for other types of motion.
When you stabilize during shooting, gyroscopes, gimbals and springs are used to cancel out forces trying to move the camera to actually keep it stable.  This works because the camera doesn't actually move.  Things like optical image stabilization and steadicams perform this function.
Correction after the fact is possible, but harder.  When a camera moves, the problem is that it changes what the shot looks like.  Both angular movement and perspective can vary based on the actual settings of the camera and not just the movement, so there isn't a direct mapping from movement to correction.
There are two main types of camera movement, the camera can move through space, which results in near objects appearing to move more than far away objects as the relative change is greater.  (Think of a block directly in front of the lens vs a mountain in the distance, the block can clear the screen entirely while the mountain doesn't appear to have moved.)
The other form of movement is rotation.  This makes the rate of change depend on how zoomed in we are (the focal length of our lens).  If we have a very wide shot, then slight vibrations don't make much difference.  If we zoom in a long ways to a tight shot however, even the smallest vibrations have a major impact on the shot.
None of this information would be available to the data logging on the smartphone, so a lot still needs to be figured out by analyzing the footage.  You additionally would need to somehow keep the smartphone and camera together which a) adds weight, b) adds bulk and c) decreases the ergonomics.  The data really isn't that valuable as that information and all the other information we need can easily be gained simply from looking for high contrast areas of the image.
Stabilizing after the fact works by doing edge detection on each frame and looking at how the edges move from frame to frame.  These edges provide details about where things are in the scene and allow us to actually recreate the motions of the camera and the objects within the scene by looking at all the changes.  If they are consistent overtime with a stationary scene, we know they are static objects, if they don't, we know they are moving objects.
So, basically, the data the smartphone would gather isn't needed, isn't that helpful and adds too much disadvantage in trying to capture it to justify the gathering in the first place.  It could possibly save on some post processing load to simplify calculations from edges or provide improvements in cases where the footage lacks good trackable subjects, but generally, I wouldn't expect it to be worth much.  If it costs more than $100 or so, you are better off going with hardware stabilization that will provide far more benefit.
For more of an idea about what can be determined about video just from analysing the footage itself, I suggest taking a look at Microsoft Research's Hyperlapse Project.  Pay particular attention to the path they are able to derive as that is the same thing a device lack this would provide the rotational and acceleration data would be helpful towards determining.

SteadXp works like you describe, although it is still a product in development.  Also, it uses its own accelerometers, rather than using your cell phone's.  Presumably, this is simpler than relying on the myriad protocols of various cell phone manufacturers.

Data gathering on the phone wouldn't be that hard.  It's available to the OS on most phones and can be accessed in a standard way through that.  The bigger trick would be reliable mounting.

The Sony a7c, FX9, RX0, a7siii and ZV-1 put the gyro data in metadata.  Sony provides free software (Sony Catalyst) to use the gyro data to stabilize video in post where you can choose how much of the frame is cropped for stabilization.

authors: Ильдар Хайруллин

authors: Павел Маркушевич

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


text:
Time code audio tracks in NLE?
How do you generate audio time code (LTC) tracks, if your platform doesn't offer them natively? Some editing platforms can generate auxiliary LTC tracks, but many don't.
Audible time code may not be useful right in the editor, but it's needed in playout situations such as live venues, to drive lighting cues, effects devices, event triggers, sound sync etc.

Adding a moderator's note here to avoid confusion.  This is not spam.  Jim's a regular user who saw a problem and came up with a free solution for it.  It's a legit question that invites other solutions and he followed proper practice for disclosing his own participation in his proposed solution to the problem.

Various places I've worked have found different solutions. Some record the LTC from a broadcast video tape to an unused track. Some will reuse a track from an earlier project. The first is slow (1:1), and both are inflexible. Hardware TC generators are flexible, but it's still real-time creation.
I offer a free 32-bit Windows utility that can generate an hour or more of SMPTE/EBU code as an audio track (WAV file) in a couple of seconds, at any common frame rate. No catch, it's free for any use, personal or pro. I only ask that you pass along This Link, and not copy/share the program directly. Enjoy, and please send comments or suggestions.

I'm going to download it just for the blast from the past that is hearing LTC again!

@stib - (-: I recommend setting the start to 23:59:55:00 and a duration of 10 seconds, user bits to 0. Then you get to hear the "all change" at hour zero. (-:

authors: Вадим Алексеев


text:
Adding a sport watch timer
I'm looking for a way to display a timer to measure things happening during the movie, a swimming event for example.
Can I add a timer that will start once the race is started and displaying in MM:SS:MS?
I have Adobe After Effects 2014 running on my Mac.

You can generate a WebP animation of a timer using my Javascript-based generator here: https://arpruss.github.io/webpanim/ . However, currently it'll only do MM:SS.X (one digit after the decimal point).

The Timecode effect (effects>text>timecode) will add a timecode, but it's measured in HH:MM:SS:FF rather than milliseconds.
You could do it with an expression by adding a text layer, and applying an expression to the Source Text property. Below is an expression that returns what you want.
To apply it, alt-click on the stop watch for the text layers Source Text property and paste the expression in.

This expression includes an offset, because the time constant in AE starts at 0, no matter what your comp's timecode. So if you wanted the time on the dispay to be 0 at 1 second ten frames in your comp you'd subract 1.4 seconds (at 25 fps) from time on the first line. Or if you wanted to start the count at 1 second 234ms you'd add 1.234 seconds. Or you could precomp it if that's too hard. Here's the code to copy 'n paste:
offsettime=time //<--subtract or add a time offset (in seconds) here

//a hacky way to zero pad the end of the ms field to
//three digits, but easier than doing it numerically:
ms=((offsettime % 1)+"000").substr(2,3);

//zero pad the seconds if they're less than 10.
//"%" is the modulus operator, aka the remainder, so at 60s it rolls over:
s=Math.floor(offsettime % 60 );
ss=s>9 ? s : "0"+s;

//and so on. Thank you ancient Mesopotamia for our weird time measurement system
m=Math.floor((offsettime / 60) % 60);
mm=(m>9) ? m : "0"+ m;
h=Math.floor( (offsettime / 3600) % 24);
hh=(h>9) ? h  : "0"+ h;
//if whatever it is runs longer than 24hrs you're on your own

//now turn it all into a string:
hh + ":" + mm + ":" + ss + ":" + ms

note that the precision is limited by your comp's frame rate, so for 25fps the results will be just multiples of 40 ms.
Here it is applied (the red background is just the comp bg). Use normal text formatting to change the font etc (a monospaced one will work best).


text:
adobe premiere cc / picture in picture / editing video shape by its corners removed?
I remember old times when I could just put a video on a layer and drag each corner individually to shape it as I want but it seems in premiere cc this easy to use feature is removed or replaced with some effects for achieve the same effect by entering many many values.
or there is some option in some menu that I can't find to re enable it. (please tell me this is the case)
can a pro enlighten me in this matter please?

Double click the layer in the program monitor (the sequence viewer) or click on the little icon in the source view next to the Motion effect to bring up the drag handles.

that handles I already have but they won't move individually and I can't drag one cornet without moving any other corner.

Yup, the way it works now is that the footage scales around its anchor point (the circle in the middle) So you'll have to scale then move, or change the anchor point then scale. AFAICT there is no tool that does both at once like AE has.

authors: Орлин Вълчев


text:
Cinema 4D Objects Turn Black
I saved my file, and later on it crashes. So, I re-opened the file on C4D and my objects turned black. I looked at a post that had a similar question but it didn't seem to help me. Any ideas? I'm kinda new to C4D by the way.
Here's a link to the picture: http://gyazo.com/72d172984dbef3a12a3b864779308eeb
Thanks

It looks as if your lights are not illuminating the logo properly. Save it as a separate file, delete all lights and see if the "default" lighting comes back. Also try adding another light that illuminates the logo a more.

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

Nice additional thought about the lighting and hardware texture.  Glad someone was able to come along and provide more details about how Cinema4D does textures too.  It is literally the only one of the big four 3d packages I haven't used.

I don't know Cinema4d particularly, but it looks like the selected texture doesn't have a preview.  That may mean that something is broken with the material.  If the material is broken, then the renderer won't be able to render the geometry and will likely leave it as black.  Try altering the material and see if that fixes it.


text:
Windows Tool for Extracting enhanced images from video
I am looking for a Windows tool for extracting photos from videos, taking advantage of similarity between subsequent frames to enhance the captured still images.
There used to be a product for this, Topaz Moment, but this is no longer offered.
I’m interested in this, as I want to extract photos from my vacation video.
Any ideas?

If your actually looking to produce a single image from a number of temporally-local frames,  then your probably looking at doing some kind of superresolution or drizzle integration. There are tools that do this. I use them for astrophotography myself, such as Registax and AutoStakkert!! 2. These are designed to generate astronomy images, such as planets, the moon, the sun, from video sequences.
For these applications to work, they expect that the entire video sequence is generally going to be of an identical subject, and that only the quality of the contents differs. This implies that one has the ability to track or otherwise maintain identical subject framing. AS!2 is the one I use most, and it will sort the video frames by quality such that ones overpowered by seeing are dropped, and the best are kept and stacked.
The results can be quite stunning, detail can far surpass that of a single frame or even a high quality still.
I am not sure if this is what you are looking for, however it's the closest thing I can think of. Maybe the terms super resolution and drizzle might help in your search.

10x. I was looking more for a low cost Windows tool to extract photos from my trip to italy video  :$


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timelapse avi video shows frames not timecode
I have to splice together some timelapse files from a new Brinno HD camera and add a title. Pretty simple. The Brinno cameras automatically produce AVI files. When I import the files into PremierePro, letting PremierePro create the sequence settings, the timeline shows frames and not timecode. Sequence settings showed a timebase of 10 frames per second and the timeline displays only frames and only frames is available for display in sequence settings. I changed the timebase to 24 fps and the other options become available and I can display timecode in the timeline. Also, the clips change from white to purple in the timeline. Is there anything wrong with doing this? I am pretty new to video and timelapse work.

Your question is not very clear. What exactly is your problem? If your workflow is fine and you can accomplish your task, then colours and display settings do not really matter.


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Monetizing YouTube Channel with Videos Containing CC-Licensed Content
I have a YouTube channel that I eventually hope to earn ad revenue from, however some of my videos use CC BY-NC licensed content.
I realize monetizing those particular videos is off the table (obviously), but does having them prevent me from monetizing my videos that don't have such content (CC BY/royalty-free)?
In other words, can one video with CC BY-NC content taint my entire channel?
I'm still new at this and I want to study up on the best practices for running my channel to avoid doing something I shouldn't.

No, one offending video won't taint your entire channel.  At my workplace, sometimes the youtube algorithms will mistakenly flag some music to which we own the rights as copyright protected.  When such an event occurs, the video is automatically un-monetized, and we are asked to demonstrate that we have rights to the music. The video still plays, we just don't make any money off of it. The rest of the channel is unaffected.

Ah, okay. In this case, could I choose to turn off monetization for each future video with CC BY-NC content before it goes public, and leave monetization on for the rest without there being problems?

I've done that, and never had problems with my channels. I've been uploading to YouTube since 2006 and I have about 300 videos. YouTube pays me monthly for my monetized videos and just skips my non-monetized videos, though viewers watch them regularly.


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Switching between H.264 video streams on the fly?
I have several H.264 encoded MP4 files, as well as still images. From these I want to generate a single video stream that I can broadcast. The stream will be composed of alternating still images and video clips.
Here is what I think could work:

At any time, simultaneously play back two video streams using ffmpeg -re (one of
 the video streams is actually a looping still image).
Use a H.264 video mixer to switch from one stream to another. The mixer is
 controlled by a Unix command line script. A playlist wouldn't work since the
 order of streams is not known in advance.
Pipe the resulting (mixed) H.264 stream into broadcasting software such as Wowza.

Is that the correct approach? Is there actually a H.264 video mixer that runs on Linux and that can be controlled from the command line?

The question is definitely on-topic here but you might get more answers on Stackoverflow.

@ProfessorSparkles Thanks for the suggestion. I am also discussing the issue on one of the GStreamer mailing lists. Furthermore, I discovered FreeJ, which seems to be able to do what I want with Ogg Theora, i.e. re-encoding would be required.

there are som GStreamer based vision mixers: see here or here

Just created a question on StackOverflow, asking if it can be done with GStreamer.


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FCPX Crashes again and again
I was working on a project in FCPX. Suddenly it crashed. After that the library on which I was working is not opening.
Whenever I try to open it it crashes again. It was my 2 weeks of edit. How can I recover that lease help me ?? The error message I get is attached.

If you could file a bug report with Apple at http://www.apple.com/feedback/finalcutpro.html and include the crash log you have above, I'm sure they'd appreciate it.

Hold down the option key while you open Final Cut in the Finder.  This will open a dialogue which asks you to select a library.  DO NOT select a library from the list.  Instead, click the "new" button, name it "blank_Library" or something, select a destination, and click "OK".  This process should start Final Cut cleanly.  If FCPX has crashed at this point, then your problem is with the application itself, and you need to re-install.  If everything's OK at this point, you might have a corrupt library.
Assuming that FCPX is running, now you'll want to try to open the project upon which you're currently working.  Go to File->Open Library.  You should see the library which contains your project in the list.  Click it.  If FCPX crashes on this step, you know there's a problem with the current library.  If it doesn't crash, it could have been another open library which was corrupt and causing your crash.  If everything works at this point, carry on with your day.  If not, proceed to the next step.
Option-double-click to start FCPX again.  From the dialogue, select the blank library that you created in the first step. Click "OK".  Quit Final Cut.  This will ensure that the next time you try to open the program, it won't try to open the corrupt library.  Next, Spotlight search "Final Cut Backups".  This folder contains backups of all of your projects.  If the library which contained your project was called "Skateboarding_Kids", you'll see a folder called "Skateboarding_Kids".  Open that.  Within, is an iterative list of backups sorted by date.  Open the most recent one.  Did Final Cut crash?  If not, carry on with your day.  If so, repeat the steps in this paragraph, but open the next-oldest-to-the-last-backup-you-just-opened.
If none of this works, then my guess is that you're running a NAS or a SAN, and it's a network problem that's causing the crash, but I don't know enough about your system to say.
Hope this helps.

really?  works for me.  how are you launching final cut?  Try holding option while double-clicking the icon in your applications folder.


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JVC 3CCD camcoder light changes during capture!
I'm trying to record a training session at work that requires me to capture the Projector screen as the lecturer is teaching. The light on my JVC 3CCD camera keeps on changing between Orange, blue and Yellow.
Please help!
The training class starts in 1 day.
BM

For consistent performance with any camera, you will want to disable any automatic functionality that may change with shooting conditions.  White balance, shutter speed, gain/iso and aperture should all be set manually.
If you need the auto-exposure, you may still get okay results by just setting the WB to a custom white balance (and setting the custom white balance to a grey card help up under the lighting). There would still be the risk of fluctuations in lighting level, but if the light levels actually do change during shooting, it would adjust accordingly.


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What is This Zooming/Opening Cinematographic Technique Called?
Some time ago, I wondered about what this particular cinematographic technique is.  I figured out that what's happening is the camera is simultaneously moving away and closing its field of view (or moving toward and opening its field of view).
One example I can think of is in the shortfilm Big Buck Bunny right before

 the flying squirrel gooshes the bunny's butterfly.

(link starts at 3m 14s):

The camera starts focusing on the bunny and then, without much affecting the bunny, causes the background to distort.  In this case, the camera moves toward the bunny, while the field of view increases correspondingly so that the bunny doesn't actually appear any larger.
This example is not perfect (please edit if you have better ones).
My question is: what is this technique called?

Particularly, see the last term on my answer.  This is a dolly zoom.

@AJHenderson I disagree that this is a duplicate, since the linked question "Terminology connected with camera movement" is more general and has a different focus.  However, this is indeed the effect I was thinking of.  Thanks!

It isn't an exact duplicate, but the question does include the answer.  Note, I also gave you an upvote as this is a good description of the term and should make discovery easier for people in the future.  (I actually had to use google to find it because I couldn't find my own answer with the on site search. :/)


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video capture problem
With the firewire connected to the PC and camcorder there is no digital connection.  I'm using Windows XP and the video card, firewire and camcorder are all ten years old or so.  Is it something simple like drivers?

What software are you using to capture?  The camera won't just show up in Windows.  Firewire is used to control playback of the device and the video stream is relayed over firewire, but you need a client program that is capable of controlling and capturing the footage sent over the line.  It isn't the same as something like USB where you just copy files off.


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Creating menu for a video file (not for DVD)
I need to create a menu for a video, which will be written onto a disk not in a DVD format, but as a single file (f.e. mp4). The problem is that programs such as Adobe Encore are not able (as far as I'm concerned) to create a 'standalone' menus (executable-like). What is the recommended way to do such a thing?

Hmm, I learned something new today.  I didn't even know this was possible before today, but apparently it is part of the MP4 spec.  This doom9 thread has some discussion, but isn't really all that user friendly.  Hopefully someone has more experience with this and can offer some advice.  I'm curious too.

I'm sure I remember reading about plans to implement this in Matroska, but I don't think that went anywhere... and, of course, you'll run into the problem that no players will be able to use the menus, probably. Interesting problem, though.

Looking at what Mr Henderson was saying, it appears you will need to have some basic programming skills to do what you want.  The system he provided a link to appears to be based off of a markup language (similar to HTML if you've used that).  If you aren't afraid to get your hands dirty with some basic programming that would be the way to go.
(details here: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=66583)
Alternatively you could use Encore and create an image (ISO) of the DVD, but I'm not sure if it's possible to run a disk image independently of a disk.
I will play around with Adobe Encore tomorrow and see if there is a way to export a standalone menu.

It is possible to run a disk image in many DVD player applications, but I didn't get the impression that would meet the OPs requirements.  If it does, it simplified things considerably though, so probably worth seeking clarification over.


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Hardware suggestion for recording DVI on mac with unknown frame rate
I am trying to record a screen recording from a medical imaging display (a box with output ports that can be plugged into a monitor), and I am unsure what is the best hardware to have the best chance at recording the video stream.
Specs

Video resolution: 1080i
Video frame rate: unknown (proprietary to company) to  but likely not 29.97, 30, 59.94, or 60 fps
Ports to record from: DVI or SDI
Computer to record to: macbook pro early 2013 (Thunderbolt or HDMI ports will support this amount of data, but write to disk speed is likely not fast enough to support writing uncompressed video)
Cost: Lowest possible...

What I've tried
I bought the Blackmagic Ultrastudio Mini Recorder and tried to record via the SDI port of the imaging display. However, one of the only parameters you can change is the video frame rate from a short list. None of these seemed to match the frame rate of the imaging system. The manufacturer of the imaging display said this value is proprietary.
Question
 What hardware should I look at to be able to record this video stream with unknown frame rate.

Note that what you are trying to do may not even be possible.  There is a high degree of likelihood that they are using the content protection mechanisms that DVI supports to prevent unauthorized usage and protect the PHI that is being displayed.  If they are doing that, then you will not be able to capture the data no matter what you hook up to it.  Can you hook any monitor of your choice up to it or does it have to be theirs?

Thanks, AJ. This was a really great idea -- the arbitrary computer monitor worked, so I think there's no protection mechanism in place.


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Best value video cameras as of 2014?
I could always google lists and such but nothing can beat legitimate suggestions and reviews from video professionals.
I'm looking to produce music videos in the next months/years and I need a good video camera.
Here is my criteria for a good video camera :

720p/1080p videos
Max budget is $1000 (but feel free to include cameras worth more if you think they are worthy of being included)
Doesn't need to be waterproof
Must be tripod-compatible (I'm a noob here, so I'm not sure if there are cameras that can't be attached to tripods)

I'm not sure if these types of questions fit in VP.SE but there are software-recommendation questions and I wondered why hardware-recommendations wouldn't work as well. Thanks in advance.

Since your budget is only about $1,000 I would recommend checking out a DSLR or possibly the Black Magic Pocketcam...

I think you've probably scoped this enough to fit.  It's time constrained and has good definition of what you are looking to accomplish.

@JeremyB, what do you think of these video cams? https://www.jbhifi.com.au/cameras/video-cameras/
I'm not sure if I'll get the value of a DSLR given that I won't really be needing still pictures much.

At your price point, I'd have to recommend the Black Magic Pocket Cinema camera, though I don't believe it comes with a lens, so you would still need to buy a lens which would put you over your $1000 budget.
You could get a basic PDAF (phase detect auto focus) enabled video recording DSLR like a T4i along with a semi-decent zoom lens or a fairly good prime for $1000 as well, though the cheaper DSLRs (T4i is only one or two steps above entry level) tend to have pretty strong rolling shutter, which will produce a "jello" effect when panning.
I would recommend staying away from any DSLR that doesn't have PDAF enabled video for a beginner because it would mean having to manually adjust focus while shooting, which is fairly challenging to do well.
The Lumix GH3 is also pretty well regarded in terms of video quality for the price, though the GH3 is a bit older.  I also don't recall for certain if it has the ability to auto-focus on video.  It does produce very nice video quality for the price though.
One nice thing about shooting music videos is that the audio doesn't matter much.  You can use the recorded version of the song for the sound and don't have to worry about sound from the video shoot, so you don't need to worry about a multi-track recorder (which would make your $1000 budget almost completely infeasible.)
You will still additionally probably want to get some lights though as good lighting is also pretty key to shooting music videos, though if you only have a $1000 budget, you are probably best to put it all in to the camera and use whatever lights you can find for now and then buy good lights later when you can.
Overall, $1000 is still very much on the cheap side for getting a rig capable of really professional quality video.  Most people doing even fairly low end professional cinematography have multiple lenses that cost more than your entire camera budget, not to mention the cost of the actual camera.


text:
How do I fix my corrupt video files?
I have multiple video files that have been taken on an iphone, put onto the PC and then deleted off the phone without being tested (yay colleagues!). None of these video files will work and I've tried everything I can think of/find to fix them and nothing has worked. The issue I'm having is that the files seem to have no information, when i click on properties there is no length/resolution/bit rate.
The video properties http://puu.sh/cBvBL/45128864ed.png
The files are all .MOV but no programs seem to recognize them as such, VLC won't play any of them, and none of the repair programs will work as they don't recognize the files as .MOV's. The only success I've had with this issue is on mp4repair.org which has seemed to recognize the file as a video, but only recognizes 2 minutes of footage, when i know that the video is at least 10 minutes long.
Anyone have any ideas? I'm Stumped.

If they are MOVs, the first thing I would do is find a computer with Quicktime correctly installed, to see whether they play on there.  If they do, it could be a codec issue on your machine.  Any Mac with Final Cut installed should do it.

Have you tried transcoding them? It worked for me once, although I didn't have the same issues you had. I simply had a. .MOV file that was not being accepted into FCP and I transcoded it which seemed to fix it. I don't know if you'll have any luck since VLC and non of your repair programs will work but it's worth a shot.

Tried this, no luck, transcoder would just output a 4kb file.


text:
Achieve a video warping effect, where it appears like the camera was shifted
I am writing this topic in regard to a very interesting effect I've observed while watching tennis games. An example can be found on the Facebook page called "Tennis Channel", e.g. the last posted video there with the shots of Grigor Dimitrov.
In the video, one can see that there is an effect of a "moving camera" that moves to the left/right when the footage is paused on a particular frame.

During this simulated movement of the camera the audience gets slightly blurred so this appears to be some video simulation or similar? I am pretty sure that there is no hawk-eye involved here. In addition to that there are other effects of zooming in and some "paint" alike effects on the relevant parts of the court.
How can I create such an effect?

Hi, FredP! Here is a link to the video I was referring to:
http://www58.zippyshare.com/v/28515826/file.html
Have you got any idea how one can achieve this? :)
If there are other questions, let me know.
Thanks in advance!

To achieve this effect, all you do is re-project the 2d video onto 3d geometry, move the 3d camera to create a parallax displacement, and re-render.  I'm only familiar with the tools available in Maxon Cinema 4d, but I'm sure that Max, Maya, Modo, Blender, et al can do this too.  It should be relatively easy with something as geometrically simple as a tennis court.  Incidentally, the use of this technique is the reason you notice distortion in the paint on the tennis court, the audience, and the players.  The 3d geometry isn't detailed enough to move the pixels correctly.  Also, there's no foolproof way to automatically generate the textures of things behind things when the camera moves.  Chances are, for sporting events, broadcasters like this use an automatic solution akin to Photoshop's content-aware fill, which will never produce results as good as a human matte painter.  Google "3d projection mapping" to learn more about this technique.

Thank for your contribution. I will research the options that you have given above and let you know if I have succeeded to accomplish those "simulated camera movement" effects.

Best place to start for free is using Blender but it is not automated. However as Jason says its trivial geometry to reconstruct. There are lots and lots of free tutorials on line to recreate this effect, it may also called photogrammetry.  Here is a tutorial that I created for Blender to achieve an effect like this. It comes in 2 parts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=km7ko2yddx8

This particular effect couldn't be done without some pretty advanced computer vision algorithms and a whole lot of processing.  Based on the screen shot alone, it appears that it tries to identify flat surfaces and objects within that space so that it can alter the camera's perspective.
Note that this is quite imperfect as you have no material for the actual side of people's heads and such.  Additionally, you can see that the system they were using doesn't understand transparent objects well.  It saw the net as a wall and modified it differently from the court, which is why we end up seeing that disjointed line where the net is.
I'm not aware of any specific system that does this, but I wouldn't expect it to be cheap and I really, really wouldn't expect it to be free.
If you don't care about cost, the fundamental start to it would probably be something along the lines of SynthEyes, as long as the camera does move some.  This can track where the camera actually moved and use that data to establish what depth things were at and what backgrounds looked like.  From that, it may be possible to create a virtual scene which you can effectively move the position of the camera in.
If the shot isn't moving, then I couldn't find any tools that would be helpful and your best bet might be to try contacting the company that produced the video directly to ask them what they used.  It appears to be something very specialized and not particularly well advertised as far as I can tell.

thanks you for the contribution. I am really interested into finding a solution for similar video edits, so the price is not such an issue at the moment. The question is, what software is able to do this :)
Any other suggestions/contributions are warmly welcome.


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Text templates made in after effects render gibberish characters in Premiere Pro
Upon importing the template composition, the layout get successfully imported, however the text is changed to random exotic characters. Why?

It's worth pointing out that it also looks like the kerning got screwed up somehow as well.

Could be a text encoding problem. Is the original text using the Latin alphabet, or something more complex (accents, cedillas, or right to left languages)? If not, maybe try copying the text into a plaintext editor (like Notepad on a PC or TextEdit on the mac). Then copy it again, and paste back into AE? I haven't tried the premiere import yet, so these are guesses...


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Why my Zapcode is with low resolution?
I developed a Zapcode and follow the tactics to have a video with good resolution, I've done a video in MP4 and FLV, both rendered in the After Effects, but remains at low resolution. Here is my Zapcode. What can I do to fix this?

Can you post a copy of what the video you are uploading looks like?

Yes, FLV and MP4.

The Zapcode Creator compresses the video further in order to reduce download size of the video and so that it will run in an AR camera view on lower end devices. This means that it will be lower resolution than what you have uploaded.
If you like you can email us at support@zappar.com and we can take a look at your Zapcode and video to see if there's any specific suggestions we can give.
Hope that helps!

Ok, send an email.


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Choosing video editor for my wife
My wife is looking for video editor and therefore we have few unusual requirements on it.
First of all it's a first time she will use this type of software so, it shouldn't be difficult to use.
Second, it should have a relative short learning curve before she will get a finished product, otherwise it's a huge chance that she will abandon it.
Third, only Windows right now. We considering to buy Mac, but now it isn't an option. Btw, she tried to use Movie Maker but wasn't happy with it.
She doesn't want to make something complex, just a short movie from a bunch of photos + soundtrack + subtitles. But I know her, and she will want more if a first attempt will be successful and I absolutely interesting that it will be successful.
Thank you for you suggestions and h

Similar question was asked recently: http://video.stackexchange.com/questions/10891/looking-for-free-program-that-allows-pip-and-cutting-splicing/12940

It's a shame she isn't on a Mac, because iMovie is pretty simple and intuitive. It even includes automatic features that improve the look of "slideshow" videos (made from photos), like the automatic Ken Burns effect that slowly zooms in and out on different photos. There are also fun themes (filmstrip, comic book, scrapbook...) that set the tone for slideshow videos and other simple videos. And it's free on every Mac.

EditShare Lightworks is a very good editor and one of my favorites.  It has a free version which will work fine as long as you don't need higher resolution than 720p.  Lightworks does have some weird ways of doing things which will take some getting used to, but overall it's much easier to use and more intuitive than, say, Adobe Premiere or Sony Vegas.
http://www.lwks.com/

I'm not really sure I'd classify Lightworks as easier than Premiere.  In my experience, the interface of Lightworks is far less developed and more clunky than Premiere, but based around all the same professional UI designs that are consistent to pretty much all professional video software.  They just don't implement them as smoothly.

@AJHenderson I find lightworks much easier for importing and exporting footage and chroma keying. The interface isn't as developed as premiere, but it still does the job.

How do you import in premiere that it is easier in Lightworks?  In Premiere, you right click the project bin, select import and choose your files, when you drag it to the timeline it automatically asks if you want to adjust the sequence settings.  The last time I tried lightworks, it was trickier to get the files loaded and if the formats and sizes didn't exactly match the sequence, then things just didn't work or blew up.  Maybe they've improved since I last used them though.

@AJHenderson I should note my experience with Adobe Premiere is mainly with CS5 and some CS6.  My experience with Lightworks is with the most recent version; 12.  In my experience with both, Lightworks is much better about setting up a sequence.  CS6 (but not CS5) does warn you if your sequence settings don't match your videos, but Lightworks takes care of all of the sequence settings automatically when you import your videos.  Exporting videos is also smoother, I've had issues like windowboxing in Premiere but never in Lightworks.

Honestly, Adobe Premiere is not hard to use at a basic level.  You import photos or videos, drag them from a bin on to your timeline, adjust their length and cut them on the timeline and then drag effects and transitions on to them.  There is a free trial so she can try before buying to see if it is too complex for her, but there are a wealth of tutorials available to help with most basic tasks.  The main concern she is likely to run in to is that if she is mixing assets of different sizes, she'll have to be careful on the import settings so that they fit the sequence, but it still isn't too hard, you just have to select the right options.
If it is too complication, there is also Premiere Elements which is a more user friendly video editor targeted at the consumer market.  It functions completely differently from Premiere and is far more limited, but it is also does a lot more hand holding.
I generally would recommend staying away from most of the free offerings if complexity is a concern.  There are some very functional free offerings out there, but for the most part, they don't have the same level of time and money to spend on refining their UIs, so they tend to be more clunky to work with from the ones I've tried.

Update, from the discussion in KC McLaughlin's post, it does sound like perhaps Lightworks has improved their game in the most recent version, so it might also be worth taking a look at when comparing things.


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ffmpeg input from images stream out video
I am using ffmpeg to capture a video recording device and would like to add an overlay to it .
I have images being rendered on the fly and I would like to use them as the overlay .
How can I take a set of Images as they are being rendered and use it as an overlay to a video stream ?

Couldn't wait! Figured it out:
I saved an image to the file out.png at a fixed frame rate from processing.
Created a fifo:
mkfifo fifo

Then in one terminal:
tail -f out.png  > fifo

Then in another terminal:
cat fifo | ffmpeg  -f image2pipe -r 1 -i pipe:0 spo.mp4

Making sure to close tail first allowing ffmpeg to write the last bit of the file.

Wow, thats a really nice "hack".