text:
What's the best before editing format to convert to?
I am making a production for my companies trade show booth.  We're going to be running 2 40" inch TVs one cycling a few videos of our products in production and one cycling through a bunch of product pictures.  Anyway...
I have a bunch of videos we want to use but they're all in different formats and resolutions (Taken with different cameras over the years).  Some 720p, some 640x480, some MOV, some MPG, mp4, avi, etc, etc...  I am trying to get away with free on the video editing (VirtualDUB, Handbrake, etc...) so I am forced into using different tools to do different things.  Well in my experimenting I am finding that some video tools open mp4 and some don't.  Some open mov but most not.  I'd like to keep the videos as "RAW" as possible because they're all going to end up on a 40" screen eventually.  So you can see where I want to lose as little resolution as possible in the conversions.  I like mp4 (H.264) because it's the format that my player (Roku 2 XS) requires, but there isn't much as far as free video editing tools that will open those video files.  What format should I convert everything into before I start doing my editing?
Thanks
-Craig

What platform/OS are you going to be editing on?

I would recommend downloading the trial version of Adobe Premiere Pro, and cutting the videos together in there. The trial lasts 30 days which should be enough to get the job done..
Premiere Pro can take almost any file you throw at it (so you can leave all your videos in their original format). This way you wont be loosing any quality by converting your videos to one uniform codec before you edit.
Otherwise as a completely free solution Id suggest converting all your videos to 1920x1080p h.264 files. Then you can bring them into iMovie or Windows Movie Maker to order and export one final file.
If you dont need the all the videos combined into one file (ie. if your player can play all the files on its drive continuously) then all you need to do is convert them to 1920x1080 h.264 files and load them on the drive.


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How do they create the AT&T Video Bill?
Last month I downgraded my AT&T UVerse service and this month I got my first bill -- including a custom video detailing all of my SPECIFIC charges. Custom animations, my own name, etc.
Apparantly, this has been around for awhile -- I found this YouTube video detailing the bill for a new customer "Brad"
Any suggestions as to how they do this?
Thanks,
Chris

I use a script for After Effects (CompsFromSpreadsheet) which generates compositions using the data from a spreadsheet. We use it to batch create graphics with different values - like in the ad.
The script can add different files into the animation at different times, so they probably have a database of all the possible phrases.
The script as it stands couldnt be used to fully automate the process as you still have to specify where the spreadsheet is, but you could easily create a simmilar script which would look for new spreadsheets, apply the data to a template and start a render.
That being said, I wouldn't be surprised if they had their own in-house software.

That's a really good answer, I think you are right that being AT&T they have their own software.

source: Stack Exchange

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

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Corrupt video when playing through JW Player
I have some files that when played in jwplayer the playback is corrupt.
The files are encoded to h.264 using FFMpeg and there is other files encoded in the same way that works.
At the moment we only use the flash version of the player.
The corrupt playback looks like this:
http://adam.ingmansson.com/public/jwplayer-corrupt-video.png
This problem started showing up after we did an upgrade to FFMpeg, so I haven't ruled out that it could be an encoding error.
the command used to run FFMpeg is:
ffmpeg
    -i /home/ftp/1c8f08b7d0d9e7fa4b24066156ad50bc981497a0.mov
    -vcodec libx264
    -preset ultrafast
    -profile baseline
    -acodec libfaac
    -ab 96k
    -crf 19
    -vf movie="/home/adam/logo.png [watermark]; [in][watermark] overlay=main_w-overlay_w-10:main_h-overlay_h-10 [out]"
    -y /home/ftp/1c8f08b7d0d9e7fa4b24066156ad50bc981497a0.flv

I am in no way an expert in FFMpeg commandline, so feel free to point out any mistakes made.
FFMpeg info:
ffmpeg version git-2012-05-02-2330eb1 Copyright (c) 2000-2012 the FFmpeg developers
  built on May  3 2012 08:51:25 with gcc 4.4.3
  configuration: --enable-gpl --enable-libfaac --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libopencore-amrnb --enable-libopencore-amrwb --enable-libtheora --enable-libvorbis --enable-libvpx --enable-libx264 --enable-nonfree --enable-version3 --enable-x11grab
  libavutil      51. 49.100 / 51. 49.100
  libavcodec     54. 17.101 / 54. 17.101
  libavformat    54.  3.100 / 54.  3.100
  libavdevice    53.  4.100 / 53.  4.100
  libavfilter     2. 72.103 /  2. 72.103
  libswscale      2.  1.100 /  2.  1.100
  libswresample   0. 11.100 /  0. 11.100
  libpostproc    52.  0.100 / 52.  0.100
Input #0, mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2, from '/home/ftp/javarecorder/aeb1038bd3e380782e2293cfdeb56ba8fab0d167.mov':
  Metadata:
    major_brand     : qt
    minor_version   : 537199360
    compatible_brands: qt
    creation_time   : 2012-05-15 16:33:35
  Duration: 00:25:01.00, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 4299 kb/s
    Stream #0:0(eng): Video: qtrle (rle  / 0x20656C72), rgb24, 1920x1080, 3593 kb/s, 9.24 fps, 1k tbr, 1k tbn, 1k tbc
    Metadata:
      creation_time   : 2012-05-15 16:33:35
      handler_name    : Apple Alias Data Handler
    Stream #0:1(eng): Audio: pcm_s16be (twos / 0x736F7774), 44100 Hz, 1 channels, s16, 705 kb/s
    Metadata:
      creation_time   : 2012-05-15 16:33:35
      handler_name    : Apple Alias Data Handler

Seems like the framerate was the problem. JW Player seems to have problems playing videos with high framerates (like 1k).
A simple -r 30 in the FFMpeg command seems to have solved it

Did the movie have a frame rate of 1 000 frames per second??

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


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Command-line tool to split video at timepoints?
I have an hour-long video that I want to split into individual clips at arbitrary timepoints. I could do this by hand in iMovie, or even borrow a machine with Final Cut, but there are upwards of thirty separate clips, so doing it manually strikes me as time-consuming and error-prone.
(It's a sequence of recordings for a language textbook, but it's all one file, and it's unwieldy not to be able to separately view, repeat, etc. the chapter-by-chapter clips. Currently it's an H.264 MPEG-4 but I'm not adverse to converting it.)
I know all the timepoints, and I'd like to feed a list of them to something, or build a script around the list, to produce the split clips without further human intervention. Linux would be okay but Mac OS would be ideal; Windows isn't really an option.
Suggestions?

30 cuts of clips is really not much for editors. I would simply put them in my Vegas timeline and use the 'split' feature as required or put them in a Premiere CS5.5 timeline and use the 'razor'. Do you want these as separate renders too or just have time points that have perhaps a title separating them? It's just not clear to me how you see the final product?

Cross posted from Super User. Please don't cross post questions over the network — there should be only one site for them, and if they don't receive too much attention they can always be migrated.

ffmpeg is the obvious choice.
ffmpeg -i x.mov -ss 00:05:00 -t 00:01:00 y.mov

will split out a segment of the movie 1 minute long from minute 5.
I've not had much luck with lip-sync when doing this. I think there a problems with both decoding and re-encoding the GOP structure and the equivalent AAC or MPEG1 audio structures; but the underlying issue must be that the audio and video frame rates are not linked, e.g. 48 kHz for the audio and 29.97 fps.

I wrote a Python wrapper around FFMpeg that allows to do video splitting into equal chunks and since then other folks in the community enhanced it to support splitting at arbitrary points in time (using manifest files), and splitting by target file size, number of chunks etc. Here it is: https://github.com/c0decracker/video-splitter

The segment muxer can already do this.

If you want to cut a sequence out of a .mov file with an alpha channel / transparency that should be preserved, use:
ffmpeg -i x.mov -ss 00:05:00 -t 00:01:00 -vcodec qtrle y.mov

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


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Editing AVCHD on older XP host?
I just bought a Sony camcorder that records videos in AVCHD.
I only have a modest, older XP host with an Athlon 64 X2 5200+ and 2GB of RAM.
It looks like I should first convert the AVCHD files into something smaller before editing the segments with standard applications. I need to edit videos I took over a vacation, so lower quality is OK.
What would you recommend I do?
Thank you.

Remember every time a video is transcoded or rendered you will loose some quality. Why not consider getting Vegas Movie Studio. Version 9 through the current version 11 are compatible with WinXP and can handle the AVCHD format just fine.
Vegas Movie Studio is the light or home version of Vegas Pro and costs about 84% less.
If you are only editing simple scene to scene, not multitracking video as in compositing, and keeping it simple, any of these versions should work on your WinXP machine. The older the version the cheaper the cost, for instance Vegas Movie Studio 11 (current verison) is running about $94 while the older version 9 maybe as little as $75 on amazon.com or less on EBay. This way you can edit your original AVCHD files and only have to render once.
I ran Vegas Movie Studio 9 before upgrading to the pro version and found it perfect for simple scene to scene edits, and it has a multitrack audio too so can have voice, effects, Foley, ambient, and music all on their own tracks.
If you choose to do this, I would run a test with how long vs how many effects you can get Vegas Movie Studio to do on this older machine so you will know what the limits are. Even with a quad core running 4 GB of DRAM on Win7, I have learned there are limits what I can do with the Pro Version of Vegas 10. This is extremely useful to know as you will be able to walk into a project knowing if your gear can handle it or if you will have to seek workarounds, like breaking a project in half and rendering separately or not.

Thanks guys. I'm playing with the trial version of Vegas Movie Studio HD 11. I'll see if it can edit AVCHD directly or if I need to first transcode to HuffYUV or Lagarith.

In the early days of AVC where pretty much nobody had a computer that can decode H.264 with decent performance it was standard to transcode to an intermediate format for editing.
There are many choices for an intermediate format. An important quality of the intermediate codec is that it is intra-coded, meaning that each frame is encoded independently, without depending on other frames (this referencing of other frames is one of the reasons that make AVCHD/H.264 so slow to work with during editing).
Assuming you have plenty of disk space, then a good option is to go with a lossless codec, like HuffYUV or Lagarith. These will preserve the original quality of your AVCHD source, but will decode a lot faster, while taking a lot more disk space.


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How to create a new stereo mix from one channel in Premiere pro cs5.5
I have a video with stereo audio, but one channel is completely silent. So the audio only plays on the left stereo. How is it possible to duplicate the left channel and create a new stereo mix for the same clip? Or alternatively force the sound in a mono audio track?

Hey try the audio effect Fill left or Fill right!
(I use a zoom h4n and have to constantly do that )
http://www.mediacollege.com/adobe/premiere/pro/audio/fill.html !
Happy editing!
(remember fireballs always make video better!)


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Opteka CXS-2 vs Glidecam HD-2000
Recently I have been looking at a lot of reviews of these two video stabilization products and now I simply can't make up my mind - which one is better for me, which one should I buy?
I mean, the Glidecam is amazing, but is it really worth the price? Perhaps Opteka shoulder rig would be enough if I'm filming just camps, public events and such things.
Perhaps you have had a similar experience. Perhaps there's something else that you can suggest for a low-budget starter in DSLR film making?
Ps. - I already have a really great tripod, but I would like to be able to move around while recording.
Opteka CXS-2: http://cheesycam.com/optekas-new-cxs-2/
Glidecam HD-2000: http://www.glidecam.com/product-hd-series.php

I have a glidecam 2000 and a chest harness for it.  I also have a shoulder mount similar to the opteka one you linked.
I use shoulder mount far more then the glidecam.
It takes time and practice to get good at the glidecam.  Lots and lots of time.
After using it with a chest harness I would never use it by itself again.
Without any extra support just the glidecam is exhausting for your arm.  Guess what your arm does when it's tired, it shakes..
The shoulder mount rocks.  I can give that to a rooky camera op and they have very few issues using it.
It's ideal as a mobile shoot.  Unless you have good image stabilization neither can move very fast or far.
Keep in mind neither can move far or fast, your not going to be running after your actor .
You will also need to shoot with a wide lens that has image stabilization using either of these pieces of gear.

A few years ago, I invested in a Fig-Rig. The price is right (under US$300) and I love the look of the footage. Because it's hand held, there's still a little bit of the organic movement that you lose with the perfect stability of a GlideCam.
Versatility is awesome...high shots, low shots, travelling shots, I can attach it to a tripod, and most of my accessories...eye-lights, mic receiver paks, cabling...can attach right to the frame. Google for "Fig Rig Demo videos", & watch them to see what it can do.
I originally picked it up for my Panasonic DVX100B, but recently switched over to DSLR. For the latter, it's a wonderfully compact support package that does everything I need it to do except make coffee.  :)
Designed like a steering wheel where the camera creates a low center of gravity, it self-stabilizes like gyro stabilizer, without having to fight as much as you do against a gyro stabilizer.
Which should you get? Whichever one you like. Personally, I don't like SteadiCam/glidecam shots; they're TOO perfect. I like to see a little bit of human frailty in the image that reminds me of the hard work the operator puts into the film.
I'd recommend finding friends, rental houses or production companies in your area that may own these or similar devices. Try them out for a weekend by borrowing or renting them. Analyze the footage. More likely than noe, you'll find something you LOVE, and then you have your answer.
One thing that I will note, is that there are a TON of DIY plans on the 'net to make these things on the cheap. One of my first stabilizers was made for under $10.00 with iron pipe and some fitness weights.


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Video capture device for senior citizen
My father has a large collection of video tapes that he wants to transfer to digital format.  He's brilliant, but getting up in age and I'm finding that he is having an increasingly harder time with technology as years pass.
He's tried using a stand alone VCR/DVDR unit, but I cannot get the unit to record to DVD in spite of meticulously following the instructions and using approved media.  The entire process is complex to begin with, so even if this device worked (it is several years old) it is not a good choice due to the complexity.
I thought the ION VCR-USB player is an ingenious idea, but reviews say the software is atrocious.
Are there proven capture devices (analogue to digital) for PC that also have reliable, simple to use software?

The worst part of transferring old VHS to DVD is that it has to be done in real time as VHS is linear access and analog. Here are two ways I know of that work. One will eat your time the other will eat your wallet.
1) for about $35 or less you can get a transfer device which connects the output of your VHS machine into a USB interface to your computer. There are a bunch of these out there, they are all about that same as this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815306013
It comes with software to capture the VHS program and "software included to burn full screen video capture, edit and create DVD" but you can take the captured mpeg files and put them in any video DVD authoring suite too. The software is easy to learn, you can start transferring quickly.
I did this process 3 years ago, I must have saved over 50 VHS tapes. So the cost was less than $40 but I surely put more than 40 hours into that project.
:>
2) Costco and many other large chains have video transfer services, e.g.:
http://www.costcodvd.com/videotape_to_dvd.aspx
Prices range from vendor to vendor, $9 to $20 per transfer.

I think your question makes me confused, but i wish i still can provide something useful here for you.
If you father needs some converter to convert video taps to digital formats, you can check the top 5 free video converter here(list made by the company I work for), most of them can convert your vcr to common video formats and preserve your father's best memory.
If you need a proven capture devices for pc (if i didn't wrong you, you mean a screen recorder, yes?), you can check the top 5 free screen recorder.
The above lists are for windows version, good luck!

Question is more than a year old.. dad has regressed in that time.  VCR conversions are pretty much out of the question now.


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What software was used to create this stylized screencast for Disqus 2012?
I am making a video and want to have a stylized screencast like the Disqus 2012 video: https://vimeo.com/43917945
What software is used to create these sorts of animations?

In order to grab the screencast itself, a number of applications have been discussed here before.
Then use whatever video suite you feel most comfortable with - the angled view used in that clip can be done in Premier or various others, but it isn't very complex.

To follow up, I used Camtasia, FCPX and the FCPeffect 3d Perspective plugin (http://www.fcpeffects.com/collections/new-stuff/products/3d-perspective-plugin) to create this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6WkSERCRJU
I think it turned out great and the rest of the team love it too! Thanks for your help!


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High quality ogv files - possible?
I'm converting mov (or flv or mp4) files into ogv. Unfortunately, the programs I've been using (Miro, FFMPEG's ogv plugin) have terrible encoding that appears extremely fuzzy.  Does anyone have recommendations for less compressed files in this format? Is it possible? Software recommendations?
Thanks.

Need details, such as specs of the input video format and encoder parameters too. Samples of the input and output will also help.

Yes, it is possible - ogv allows for high quality. Provide more info as to what you are currently doing.

I don't see what benefit converting videos into OGV are. In fact's it's likely to be detrimental. Keep your media in MP4!

You can encode to Theora video and Vorbis audio with ffmpeg if it has been compiled with --enable-libtheora and --enable-libvorbis. Depending on your ffmpeg version the default settings may not provide good enough quality. Therefore you must add some additional parameters to enable a constant quality type of mode for the video.
Theora video
Adjust video quality with the -qscale:v (or the alias -q:v) option. The valid range to set video quality with libtheora is -1 to 10. A higher value is a higher quality.
Note: More modern alternatives such as VP8 can provide better quality at lower bitrates. See the FFmpeg: VP8 in WebM Encoding Guide for more info.
Vorbis audio
Adjust audio quality with the -qscale:a (or the alias -q:a) option for VBR audio. The valid range to set audio quality with libvorbis is 0 to 10. A higher value is higher quality. See the Recommended Vorbis Encoder Settings to get an idea of what values to use. The default of -q:a 3 will be used if you omit -q:a or -b:a.
Note that ffmpeg supports two Vorbis encoders: the external library libtheora (-c:a libvorbis) and the native Vorbis encoder (-c:a vorbis -strict experimental). The native encoder is experimental, does not compare well to libvorbis, and usage is not recommended.
Example
The following command will create a good quality output for both video and audio:
ffmpeg -i input -c:v libtheora -c:a libvorbis -q:v 6 -q:a 5 output.ogg

Getting ffmpeg
Make sure to always use a recent ffmpeg build and refer to the current documentation specific to your build since options can change. See the FFmpeg download page for various ways to acquire ffmpeg or follow one of the FFmpeg compile guides.
Also see

FFmpeg documentation on libtheora
FFmpeg documentation on libvorbis


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Simple Video Editing Tool?
Can someone suggest free tools for video editing and video making? If you can include the feature much better. Hope to be able to get some of your advice. I need it badly. I am really not into technology but greatly needed to make a simple video. Thanks!

Charlotte, which OS do you use?

Very similar questions: http://avp.stackexchange.com/questions/2274/good-open-source-video-editors?rq=1 http://avp.stackexchange.com/questions/2389/non-linear-video-editor-for-free-or-cheap-that-does-these-things?rq=1

iMovie_________

Not free, but Corel Video Studio is pretty good, and on the Ultimate version is on sale right now for $50: http://www.videostudiopro.com/en/products/videostudio/ultimate/

@stib if you get a notification for this msg in your inbox, post a reply. thx.

Why not try this list. All of this are basic software and very easy to use and learn. Hope this helps!

Movie Maker
Magix
Media Composer
Premiere Pro
After Effects

Try also to visit this link http://www.techyv.com/questions/software-required-making-vedios-and-editing I believe this will going to be very helpful to you too.

Since when were Media Composer, Premiere Pro and After Effects considered 'basic'? They are industry standard tools and exceptionally complicated in some respects. They also cost a considerable amount for someone who is looking for something 'basic'.

Q:Best Video Editor for Windows (Free)
A:

Windows Movie Maker
Windows Movie Maker is a free video editing tool for Windows and users can make home movies by simple drag-and-drop. It contains features such as video effects, video transitions, adding titles/credits, audio track, timeline narration, and Auto Movie. What's more, new effects and transitions can be added and existing ones can be modified using XML code.
VirtualDub
VirtualDub is a powerful free video editing software for Windows with many amazing features, such as compression, video splitting, and the addition of audio tracks. As a free movie editing software, it has batch-processing capabilities for dealing with large numbers of files and can be extended with third-party video filters.
Wax
Wax is a high performance and flexible video editing program which is good for both home users and professionals. It can be used as a stand-alone application, or as a plug-in to other video editors.However, its video editing functions are quite limited. If you want more advanced video editing features like Mosaic, Jump Cut, Flashhold, or need more transitional effects, picture-in-picture, titles, sound effects, you can turn to Wondershare Video Editor software, which make your video go to the next level.
Avidemux
Avidemux is a free video editor designed for simple cutting, filtering and encoding tasks. It supports various file types, including AVI, DVD compatible MPEG files, MP4 and ASF, using a variety of codecs.
FFMpeg
FFmpeg is a paid video editing tool for Windows, but a collection of free software that can record, convert and stream digital audio and video, including libavcodec (a leading audio/video codec library), and libavformat (a leading audio/video container mux and demux library).
Blender
Blender is the free open source 3D content creation which supports all major operating systems under the GNU General Public License. Blender has many advanced features, such as modifier-based modeling tools, powerful character animation tools, a node-based material, etc. and is one of the best video editors for both Windows and Mac.
ZS4 Video Editor
ZS4 Video Editor is another great free video editing and compositing software that provides media experts with a facility to combine photos, videos and audio files into one or more output files.
Cinefx Jashaka
Jahshaka is the first OpenSource Realtime Editing and Effects System in the world. With the power of OpenGL and OpenML, it gives users exceptional levels of performance. It currently supports Linux, OS X, Irix and Windows and is considered one of the best free video editor for Windows.
Zwei-Stein
Zwei-Stein is a great free video editor featured with many video effects. It can edit up to 256 video, audio, and still image clips. But the user interface is very technical so many people find it hard to use.
Movica
Movica uses some fine programs to edit your movies and receives good reputation. The keyboard shortcuts make video editing easier than ever. It's one of the best free video editor for Windows and fully supports WMV, FLV and MPG files.

Q: Top Mac Video Editor here (Free of course): http://www.wondershare.com/video-editor/free-video-editing-software-mac.html
Don't tell me that i'm the affiliate of this company, actually i'm the contributor for that site, and those articles are wrote by me. And i wish i can help here. Thanks

Thank you for the proper disclaimer :-)  All we ask is that when you link to content that you have created you let us know it is yours, whether it is your software or articles you have written about someone else's.

You write "FFmpeg is a paid video editing tool for Windows". Not at all! ffmpeg is actually free, open source, and multi platform. But most importantly, it is NOT a video editor, but a command-line encoding/decoding/(de-)muxing tool.

There's also a free version of Davinci Resolve

Both windows and the Apple IOS have free video editors that work well enough for basic stuff.
(I used the windows one for a bit before buying Elements)
Windows Movie Maker
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/downloads/get-movie-maker
IMovie
http://www.apple.com/ilife/imovie/

GoPro gives away a quite capable video editor: GoPro Studio. Nothing prevents you to use it with no GoPro cameras media. Sometimes you have to do some conversions, but it is quite easy to use, has a lot of tutorials, works in Windows and Mac, and makes it easy to publish everywhere. Have I told you that it is free?


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Camera shake produces ripple-like effect
I'm using a Kodak Zi8 at the moment, but I've noticed this effect on other cameras. When a camera is moving it occasionally produces fun house mirror-style effects. It makes things appear to stretch and shrink. Is this a software issue or a problem with cheap components? Are there any cameras that don't produce this effect?
See example video:
 Kodak Zi8 shake issue from Reed Law on Vimeo.

This "effect" is called Rolling Shutter. It is common in most CMOS camera sensors because they don't capture an instantaneous image, instead they do it progressively over a period of time. CCD sensors do not have this problem as they do have instantaneous capture.

It is down to the raster/line speed of the CMOS array in your camera - it does not expose the whole thing at once, it scans from left to right and downwards. For even more amusement google for iPhone propellor videos, such as this one, or in fact any video of oscillating or moving objects.
The solution is to get equipment with slightly more upmarket sensor arrays.

Look in your video editing software for "Rolling Shutter" correction.  That will help, but probably not completely eliminate, the problem.


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Adding voiceover without video recompression
I have some mp4 video files with pretty poor video quality. I need to add a voiceover translation. I have seen some video software programs that could do the job but unfortunately most of these programs recompress also the video stream, so it becomes worse.
Is there any (preferably, free) software, which would allow me to remix only audio part of my mp4 files and leave the video stream as is, without recompression?

Yes, it's possible. What you need to do is demux and remux. Check out free tools like VirtualDub and Any Video Converter to split the original into separate streams, add what you want using Audacity or similar, then re-multiplex them together using a tool like AviMux. The video can remain unchanged.

Thank you for the hints, "My MP4Box GUI" did the demux, then I mixed my voicevoer in Audacity and then again remuxed it with "My MP4Box GUI".

Both Apple Logic can separate the audio from an .mp4 file for editing and then bounce a new audio track back to a video file without changing the video at all. Pro Tools can do similar but I can't remember if it does mp4 or not.

Short answer is no...in order to marry picture and sound, a new file needs to be created.
That being said, some software will allow you to edit the compression settings, and may have a setting to leave the video at "original quality" or "no compression" or "uncompressed". The latter may actually result in a larger file, as the file get decompressed and then re-saved with ALL the data intact instead of compressed.
Do some experimentation to see which option(s) work best with the software you have available. You can also download some free trial versions of software that are fully functional for 30 days before you get locked out. Most editing programs that allow tweaking of the video codec's options will work for you.

You can remux video and audio without recompressing, for example see -vcodec copy options to ffmpeg.

It's correct that a new file needs to be created, but that doesn't tell anything about recompression, which indeed can be avoided for the non-modified track.


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How to re-edit and/or duplicate an in-progress edit with YouTube Video Editor
After uploading a bunch of clips to YouTube, I go into their editor and begin making cuts, combining clips together, etc. The problem is, after I published it, there is no way (that I can see) to go back and open up that project in the Video Editor again to make changes to the edit.
This wouldn't be so bad if I also couldn't figure out how to duplicate an edit project. So for example, if Im in the middle of editing a bunch of clips together, named "Project 1", how could I think "Save as..." or duplicate that project to "Project 1b."
Any ideas? The google help center on this is pretty sparse.

The YouTube video editor is just not designed for this sort of thing - it has very basic functionality, just enough to allow you to tweak a couple of things. Once the edit is complete it has no ongoing concept of a 'project' - you just have a new video.
I would always recommend editing locally in a proper video editor and then uploading.

dang thats what i figured. its just so convenient to do it online and not fiddle with settings and stuff locally sometimes. for simple cuts, it has enough and the great thing about it is doesnt have a million options like final cut does (which inevitably gobbles up all my time as i get stuck playing with all the cool possibilities).

i will reluctantly check this as the correct answer, although, if youtube is ALREADY saving projects then that data struct is already there, so duplicating a project cant be hard to add... @YOUTUBE - please add this feature - duplicate projects!

I would imagine the problem is a scale issue - imagine storing every edited video project - you would have many times the storage space requirements.

No copies of projects are yet possible on Youtube. I love the basic functionality of Youtube, straight to the point. Adobe Premiere makes it perfect, but woo! how much work and time and nonsense! Me too, I prefer it simple and basic most times. I sent a Feedback to Google to ask to add a couple of features in future. Fingers crossed. Ciao


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How does one edit and save clips once and reuse in multiple videos with Adobe Premiere?
I have many clips which all need basic editing such as adjusting the start and end. I would also like to reuse these same clips in multiple videos without setting the start and end again. I would like a portfolio of these basic edits once and simply use them as is. Of course inside premiere i would edit them again if necessary and so on without affecting the original settings. Is this possible if so how ?

Within a new project, create a sequence/timeline; call it 'Basic Edits' if you like, and make your trim edits on the source clips there. For each of your multiple videos, create a new sequence and copy-paste the trimmed clips from the first sequence.
Or if you want to use these clips in another project, you can import the sequence by the File -> Import menu dialog.
Of course, I presume that by Adobe Premiere, you don't mean Premiere Elements - the lite version - which doesn't feature multiple sequences in a project, as far as I know.

Thnx will try! i was hoping there was a formal way rather than "messy" copy/paste but the second para seems to be on the money...

The import option seems to imply all my clips get imported. I was hoping that a panel of "edited" clips could be built up and then i pick one by one without "importing".

In the import dialog, you can choose to import the entire project or selected sequences. Just gather your reusable clips in a single sequence and import just that. Or if even that's too much, you'll have to create a sequence for each source clip and then import just that. More trouble than it's worth, IMHO.


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Shoot moving clouds
I need to shoot the clouds and how they are moving during the time. I saw a lot of time similar clips on youtube and always shot it is just a set of animated photos. Am I right? If yes, is there any special name for this approach? Or is it just an accelerated video?

I think what you're thinking of is time-lapse photography. In a sense it is animated photos, except that the "photos" are captured with a video camera.
You can certainly Google time lapse and get hundreds of good ideas for creating time lapse photography, there are two methods for doing it--in-camera, and post-production.
For in-camera, you're generally going to be shooting 1 frame every x seconds. The larger "x" is, the longer the time lapse will last, and the more time between each frame. I usually run some tests starting at 1 frame every 30 seconds and adjust from there. It take a lot of time to test, since you have to go through about 200 frames to get a true sense of what the motion looks like.
In post-production, you would just take the 1hour clip you photographed in real time, tell the software to make it, say 30 seconds, and the software will automatically pick out the frames it'll show you during playback. Again, it's like animated stills, one frame at a time.
The principle is the same: normal film/video is 24/25/30 (depending on your standard) frames every second, you compress the time by INCREASING the time interval between frames. Instead of 24 frames per second (fps), 8 fps will give you fast motion and 1 frame every 8 seconds will move so fast it's a time lapse clip.
Whether that technique happens in-camera or in the post production proceess is up to you.
d

Good one, have some extra things to add:

oops didn't get in 5 seconds...Good one dwwilson. I have some extra things to add: In Post Vegas for example can only speed up or slow down by a factor of 4, so an hour sped up would be 15 minutes. However, there maybe plugins that will extend the range such as Twixtor. In production, the best in camera time-lapse work I've seen is Adonis Pulatus, he recommends one exposure every 1 second with a 1/2 second shutter time--this gets rid of blipps. Most experienced in camera time-lapse pros will recommend "Drag the Shutter" to make things smooth as you can't really fix the blips in post.

Your question doesn't really explain what you are trying to do - my guess is that you mean a speeded up film of cloud movement over a long time period.
If so, your two statements are actually the same - a video is a series of photos...
Generally you take a series of individual frames at a low rate (1 a second, 1 a minute or whatever) then play them back at 24 frames a second to speed up the footage into a video.


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Repeating Flashing Text in After Effects
I'm using After Effects CS6, and I'm deliberately trying to recreate the look of a cheap camcorder. I want that stereotypical red "REC" text and big red dot in a corner of the screen, and I want it to blink off and on. I want the "ons" and "offs" spaced one second apart, like so:
ON ==[one second]=> OFF ==[one second]=> ON ==[one second]=> OFF
And so forth. However, animating this by hand is a huge pain. How can I automate this animation? Would an expression work, or is there a way to tell After Effects to loop certain keyframes?
Thank you.

This can be done easily with a mixture of time remapping and an expresison. Simply precomp the text animated as once on, once off (keyed out manually), then drop it into your main comp and apply the following expression:
loop_out("cycle",0)

Then, just extend the composition for as long as you would like it to loop.

That seemed to do it. I hate to be a bother, but could you please tell me what specifically the terms in that expression mean, for my future reference?

There is a really good explanation of all the loop expressions (and other expressions) and their uses in this Adobe help article: http://help.adobe.com/en_US/AfterEffects/9.0/WS3878526689cb91655866c1103906c6dea-79f8a.html


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filming objects that emit light in low light conditions
I have a Canon HF100 HD camera which I'm using to produce video for youtube and other online video channels, in HD.
I need to primarily shoot video of objects and people in low light conditions, where the objects emit light (lamps, etc).
The main problem I have with the camera is that it quickly renders the objects to be white when in fact they emit purple light (the diffuser is purple on the object).
Also, during daylight, when I want to shoot video and want it to be obvious in the video that the object is emitting light, it looks like the object is not emitting light at all (probably because the daylight is so intense that the camera adjusts for that and hence the object's light is not visible in the image ... ?)
I'm not a photography or video expert, so I'm wondering what to do with each of these situations. Should I get some lights? Should I buy a different camera, and perhaps specific lenses?
I have a small business, so don't have 10,000 dollar budgets to spend on cameras.
Thanks B

This type of photography is called 'available light' which covers shooting subjects without adding strobes or other lights. It is favored by many photographers for many reasons. I personally favor this because the subject and scene appear more natural to me. Things that glow interest me as well and there are tons of things that fit this: the moon, neon art, neon signs, street light reflections on the surface of wet pavement, faces illuminated by camp fire, Christmas lights and decorations, just to name a few.
Each of these subjects will require the photographer to make needed adjustments to capture the light. Let's start with the brightest thing in my list, the moon. The moon as you know does not emit light, but rather reflects the light from the sun. As I recall when I would measure it with my digital spot meter, a full moon might be close to or exceed 12 EV. When I shoot video of the moon where it is almost 50% of the frame, I have found these things that assist:
1) very high magnification, 80x to 100x
2) heavy tripod and no vibration
3) do not touch camera while recording, use remote to start and stop
4) manual exposure
5) manual focus
6) set the white balance to outdoor (sunlight)
7) setting up these things before starting the recording.
According to the specs on the Canon HF100 it has both manual exposure and manual focus.
When I put my Sony in digital zoom, I notice that the manual focus is not always accurate as far as the numbers go, so I trick it by first lining up the moon in the middle of the frame, set focus to auto then after it adjusts, I lock it down by pressing the manual button. I adjust the manual exposure by looking at how much detail I want on the surface.
example of moon shot:
https://vimeo.com/11145790
Notes: in the example the motion is sped up 4x in post production, also note the wavy lines as per atmospheric distortion.
Regarding the issue you are having with "the camera is that it quickly renders the objects to be white when in fact they emit purple light (the diffuser is purple on the object)."
This could be more than just one thing that needs adjustment. First I would check that you are not over exposing the lamp, then I would also make sure you have set the proper white balance as well. If you were expecting to capture both the purple lamp and an illuminated face, the lamp may be too bright for this or that the dynamic range of getting the lamp's purple glow and enough illumination to see detail on your subject's face may exceed the camera's dynamic range. You may have to change the bulb in the light to be brighter or darker to bring it in range.
Also note that in very low light situations, less than 10 LUX, you may start to notice digital noise in the black areas.
Shooting a light emitting object in sunlight is going to be difficult as you are correct in thinking that the daylight is too intense compared to your subject. Remember the sun is so bright that it may harm your sensor if you expose the sun directly for extended periods of time.
Another thing you can do is add a reflector on your subject as a fill light or add highlight. Here is an example:

Balancing the light of a scene will take some practice and some experimentation. Let's say you wanted to shoot a scene outside in daylight and your subject is working on a laptop. Your goal is to have the subject's features to be illuminated and at the same time be able to read or see detail on the laptop screen. To do this, you will likely have to shoot these in the shade to reduce the amount of daylight in your frame, and may have to use a reflector on your subject as well as put the laptop display in max brightness. It's all a balancing act of light.
If you can not afford a light meter, or spot meter, use your camera's display as the best source of how the scene will be balanced for light.
I recommend that you examine your display carefully to see that all the things you want are properly illuminated. Some scenes may have extreme high and low values of light that exceed the dynamic range of your camera.
Summary:
Capturing things that reflect light or emit light can be interesting yet require camera adjustments and good planning. Adjustments include: manual exposure, manual focus, manual white balance, possibly using a reflector, and if possible change the brightness of any lamps in your scene.

The main problem I have with the camera is that it quickly renders the objects to be white when in fact they emit purple light (the diffuser is purple on the object).

This is because you are letting the camera choose the exposure. Since most of the scene is dark the camera will expose for those dark areas and that will put the light emitting object above the dynamic range of the camera, making it clip to white.
Solution: switch your camera to manual exposure and set the exposure so that the light emitting object is a tad below clipping. To find the right point let it go to white and then back up until you get it to look properly.
Unfortunately this is probably going to make everything else look too dark. So you may need to add ambient light to compensate. For adding light you may want to point your light source towards a white ceiling or wall, so that it evenly lights the scene. The size of light you need will depend on how big is the space you are shooting, you will need to experiment until you find the right light.

Also, during daylight, when I want to shoot video and want it to be obvious in the video that the object is emitting light, it looks like the object is not emitting light at all

In this case the problem is that the object is receiving a lot of light, and that overpowers the light that is being emitted.
Solution: Do not shoot in the sunlight, find a place in the shade, so that the ambient light isn't too strong. Also, it is important for a light emitting object to reflect its light on something. To help show this light you want to have some close object onto which the purple light of your object reflects.
Good luck.

thanks, I'll have to find out how to manually set exposure on the camera...


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Remove audio tracks from multiple MKV files
I've got a multitude of MKV files each containing two audio tracks that correspond to two languages. In each of the files, the English language is the second track and it's the only track I need for these MKV files. So how do I easily discard the first audio track in each of the MKV files.
N.B. My primary OS is Windows but if there really is no easy way to have it done on Windows, I could be interested in a Linux answer too.

I don't know Windows, but I have just gone through this in Mac OS X (Linux Applicable).
mkvtoolnix is your friend here, and is available for Windows.
I used the GUI to check (a sample of) my files to make sure the audio tracks that I wanted to keep and delete were in the same order in the files. Then I manipulated the options in the GUI to match what I wanted.
Finally, I used the "copy to clipboard" button to copy the command line output to the clipboard and massaged it into a bash script to run on a directory of the files I wanted strip the audio from.
I know it's quick and dirty (and maybe not to your liking), but you can probably use it as a starting point to massage into what you really want to do.
#!/bin/bash

for file in *.mkv; do mkvmerge -o "$file-noeng.mkv"  --language "1:jpn" --track-name "1:AVC-HD" --default-track "1:yes" --forced-track "1:no" --display-dimensions "1:1920x1080" --language "3:jpn" --track-name "3:AAC" --default-track "3:no" --forced-track "3:no" --language "4:eng" --track-name "4:ASS" --default-track "4:no" --forced-track "4:no" -a "3" -d "1" -s "4" --attachments "1" -T "--no-global-tags" "$file" --track-order "0:1,0:3,0:4";

done


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Is it possible that the actual video resolution of the t2i/550d is not 1920x1080
I don't know if i'm doing something wrong or this is the way my camera (550d/t2i) works.
It seems to me that the video is softer than it should be.
To test this I made a picture and video using the same settings (iso, f-stop, shutter speed and picture style) at the same distance and without moving the focus.
I cropped and resized the picture to match the resolution of the video (1920x1088) and then I compared the results.
Detail from movie frame

Detail from picture (appropriately scaled)

here is an archive of the originals 550dTest.zip

The sensor in your camera has about 18 megapixels, and all those MP are used to record pictures and movies. What's different is how the sensor data was processed on the picture and the movie.
Scaling
For the picture you scaled down the original 18MP picture using Photoshop, GIMP or similar. This was probably a high quality scaling operation, so the resulting 2MP image still looks pretty good, since it was generated from the whole 18MP of data.
For the movie, it is the camera that did the scale down operation. The camera has to scale down images at a rate of 24 per second, so it can't use as good scaling as you get from an image editing app. I'm not sure what the algorithm is, but I'm certain its main goal is performance and not quality.
Compression
For the image you took a raw or a lightly compressed jpeg (not sure which one you used). If you went with the jpeg, it's got 4.7MB worth of data. The raw is way more than that.
For the movie the camera compressed all the frames using H.264 encoding and you took a random frame from the middle of the movie. Your movie has 58 frames and is 20.3MB big, so on average, there are just 360KB for each frame if we consider the audio and metadata in the noise. H.264 makes an amazingly efficient use of the limited bitrate by encoding differences between frames, so it isn't as bad as it looks.
So based on the above reasons, I think the picture vs. movie quality cannot be expected to match.


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Best way of presenting both 720p and 1080p screencasts
I record screencasts in 720p resolution, but would like to put up 1080p as well. This brings a problem: how can I record videos in 1080p such that they still look OK when scaled down to 720p? I've been thinking about DPI scaling (on Windows), but maybe it's possible to go the other way, i.e. record at 720p and then use some sort of smart scaling to produce a (relatively speaking) high-quality 1080p render?

Generally speaking shooting in 1080p and scaling it down to 720p is not a problem with cameras as I do this all the time and it looks just fine. When I do this I may also be mixing 1080p and 720p raw images, and I always scale to the lowest resolution. When I render a 1080p I will generally render a 720p version as an answer print to view before committing the final cut to a 1080p render. I say this with caution because I have not worked with screencasts or using screen motion capture software.
However, shooting in 720p and trying to make it into 1080p is a losing battle because then you are asking software to make up for pixels that do not exist. You can try it, but I don't think you will like it unless someone makes a software product something like Twixtor that adds frames needed for extra slow motion shots.

Screencasting has its own set of weird issues for downsampling, though, especially when you're going between resolutions which don't have a reasonably clean ratio between them and when there's a lot of precisely-placed one-pixel-thick horizontal or vertical lines.


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Automatically capturing stills from video presentation
I have a video training course supplied as AVI files. Most of the screens are shown as slides with a pointer moving around on them.
I'd like to capture a screenshot of the slide automatically when the screen changes (ignoring when the image changes a small amount due to the pointer moving around.)
I want to do this so I can paste the images into a word or html document that I can add notes to as I learn as at the moment I'm taking screenshots but it's very slow and tedious and the course is very long (around 24 hours play time).
Can anyone suggest how to go about doing this?

You can do this with Processing.  You would have to write a processing sketch to step through the movie frame-by-frame, and calculate how different each was from the previous frame.  When the difference is above a certain threshold, save the whole frame as an image file.  Here is a forum post about something very similar.
Other than processing, you may also be able to use Max/MSP's Jitter, Quartz Composer, or a bonafide programming language such as Python.

Thanks. I've managed to do this with ffmpeg and imagemagik via a python script.

@zio Are you willing to share the python script? If yes, can you get a download link?

@zio Do you still have that python script that can automatically takes stills of a slides presentation video?


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Good place to learn about every option/button in Adobe After Effects?
In particular, right now anyway, I want to know what the following under Animation menu do:

Track Camera
Track in mocha AE
Warp Stabilizer
Track Motion

Looking for a text-based explanation.

The User Guide has all this information.
Online, visit the Adobe After Effects Help pages here and read the Animation and Keyframes section. As an example, the Track Camera page says:

3D camera tracker effect
The 3D camera tracker effect analyzes video sequences to extract
  camera motion and 3D scene data. The 3D camera motion allows you to
  correctly composite 3D elements over your 2D footage.


text:
Should I just get a gaming PC for audio/video production?
I was looking around for computers aimed at AV production, and there doesn't seem to be many. It seems you largely have the option of SOHO PCs, business machines, or gaming machines.
Is a gaming machine optimal for AV production? What aspects of a gaming machine are unnecessary for AVP? What aspects are missing?
I plan on mostly doing audio production, with some graphic design, and maybe a little video production (mostly 2D).

My biggest concern with buying a "gaming" machine is that a large part of the cost is the graphics card. You don't need a super powerful graphics card for making music.

@ObscureRobot: yeah, that's part of what I was wondering - I mean, how important is a decent video card for, say, HD video production, where you might have 2-3 video tracks running simultaneously (with fades, etc)? I mean, I don't need 150fps running the latest shooter, but I also don't want to buy something that's going to be useless for hi-res video editing that I might end up doing.

Good question, but I can't help you with video.

Graphics processors currently are of no relevance at all in audio production; in video production they are primarily used to run codecs on, but for that a really high-end graphics card isn't much better than an average one. However, things might well change in the future – as technologies such as CUDA and OpenCL become more popular, more video and perhaps also audio software will use them. In some cases, this might greatly boost performance.

re: Graphic design, Adobe products (photoshop, Illustrator, inDesign etc.) do actually make use of the GPU by default. The performance difference with gpu enabled is slight in my personal experience.

I researched this when building my own computer for HD video editing about a year ago - I don't remember all of my sources, but there's a hardware guide on the Adobe Primiere Hardware Forum (very helpful place) that was a big help. That guide is several years old, so the specific hardware recommended is out of date, but the principles are still there.
Basically, most gaming PCs are going to have a more powerful graphics card than you need and less RAM than you'll want (and possibly inadequate hard drives). It's better to build yourself, but if you're going to buy an off-the-shelf model, a gaming PC will probably serve you better than one that's not (since most of the manufacturers' high-end stuff is geared toward gamers). There are companies that build PCs specifically for video editing, but they are VERY expensive, especially compared to what you can do yourself. I built mine for around $1000, which is what I would've paid for the Dells and HPs I was looking at, but I was able to get exactly what I wanted.
I don't know about audio, but for video, I'd recommend:

The fastest processor that fits your budget (use benchmark scores, not clock speeds, to compare)
Fast hard drives. An ideal setup from what I've read (and based on Premiere benchmarks) is to have a small SSD for your boot drive and a RAID array for the actual editing. Those are fairly expensive, but at minimum, you should have 2 hard drives, one to boot and one to work in (and do NOT get 5400 RPM models).
A mid-level graphics card. I've got a GeForce GTX 550 Ti and it handles my 1080p/60fps video just fine.
RAM will depend on what software you're using (as will all of these, but RAM more so). For Premiere CS5+, for instance, you probably want at least 12 GB; I use Lightworks, which is still a 32 bit program as of this writing and therefore can't use more than 4 GB.


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What does ALL-I mode mean?
I've started seeing this term mentioned in camera specs but have no idea what it means. It somehow relates to recording video.
Can somebody please explain where does it come from and what it means?
Here's all I found:
http://www.dslrnewsshooter.com/2012/03/02/canon-launch-5d-mkiii-headphone-jack-all-i-recording-and-better-controls/

The compression system is the same as the 1D X and supports the higher
  bitrate ALL-I compression system alongside a more regular IPB option.
  The ALL-I mode is supposed to offer easier editing due to it’s less
  compressed nature, whether it also offers improved quality over
  standard IPB remains to be seen.

Also, the upcoming Panasonic GH3 has

Video Bitrate 50Mbps (72Mbps ALL-I)

Never seen this thing before...

This will get migrated but the short answer is that ALL-I stores every frame in it's entirety, whereas other methods store a certain number of keyframes in entirety, with the other frames stored as the difference to the keyframe.

@DmitryPashkevich Whether it affects perceivable quality depends on which codec, mostly. What is can often mean is when pausing the video, odd artefacts appear. It is definitely more editing-friendly, however, regardless of the codec.

@nchpmn: If you get odd artifacts when pausing, your decoder sucks. >.<  I-only video is more editting friendly because you can seek more quickly to any arbitrary frame, instead of having to decode from the previous keyframe.  You can also cut / merge at any frame, because every frame is a keyframe, but that's only useful if you weren't going to re-encode for distribution.


text:
Seeking free and simple way to brighten a dark video
The title says it all. My video is too dark. I Learned how to avoid it next time (after the horse had bolted).
Is there anything I can do to lighten it up? Preferably freeware and not to complex. THe video is .AVI format
[update] Windows 7 pro (and I am wondering whether brightness or contrast is the way to go (ans if some magic s/w has an "auto" feature))
Thanks a 1,000,000 in advance

interesting. I gave your comment +1 when it was on the photo site. The question got migrated to the video site & now I can give it another +1   ;-)

I've used VirtualDub (one of the open source tools) with some success for just this.
It's not trivial to use, and I'm afraid I don't remember the exact settings, etc., but there are plenty of tutorials/explanations around the web.

+1 I am trying it now, but when I try Video/Filter, it complains "couldn't locate decompressor for format Xvid" and says it requires a "VFW compatible compressor".  I D/Led from http://www.xvid.org/ and it looks good. I will check it out & get back to you. Thanks

Windows:
If you are on windows 7/Vista, you should have Windows Live Movie Maker. You can open your video in that, go to the Visual Effects tab, and select the brightness button. Then you have to re-encode your video. This will decrease the quality.
Free Windows Live Movie Maker
The problem with Windows Live Movie Maker is that there are limited effects and no way to create custom effects. However, Windows Movie Maker from Vista (i.e. WMM 6.0) does support custom effects, etc.
You can download WMM 6.0 for Windows 7 here.
Blaine also provides an extensive list of add on effects here. Which includes contrast effects to increase the contrast.

Mac:
If you have a MAC and iMovie, I found this link. You hover over the thumbnail and a "sun" symbol should show up, clicking that should bring up color controls.

Hopefully one of those will work. If not, you'll have to dive into the world of opensource video editing tools, which is a nightmare.

+1 I go it. The brightness is on the visual effects tab, right? It didn't seem to help much, and I can't find any contrast. Any other suggestions?

@Mawg, that is correct. I do not think that it is possible to change the contrast.

@Mawg, I added another option to use the old WMM 6.0 (vista) and custom effects to change the contrast. I edited the answer above.


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Cleaning tracked keyframes in After Effects
I'm new to After Effects and played with Mocha for After Effects a bit (which is v.easy to pick up) and was wondering: If I have a bunch of dense set of keyframes as a result of tracking, is there an After Effects option/script that can clean the data (reduce keyframes but maintain easing/timing) ?
Is this possible ? If so, how ?

Just select all the keyframes you want reducing and use the built-in plugin called 'smoother' which will convert your set of baked keyframes back into a bezier curve.

I'm trying to clean the camera keys (camera is imported from Blender).  This works for the "position" parameter but not for orientation.  Any solution that would work for any parameter ?

I assume you mean "smoother"? In any case, I can't find anything like that in AE CC 2018. Where do I need to look?

Edit: nvm, it's under "Window"


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how to convert a video to black and white color without any shades
How can a video be converted to black and white color. It should not have any shades of gray color. Only two colors - black and white.
There are many options to convert colored video to grayscale - which will have various shades of black. But I want video to only contain two colors.
Is there any source where such videos can be found?

I'm only familiar with Vegas Pro, but I think many NLEs will do the same.
Begin by applying the desaturate effect or the 100% black and white effect. Then engage the Brightness and contrast effect, adjust the contrast until you have only black and white, you may need to toy with the brightness as well but not much.

Depending on which editor / effects SW you're using, you may find this as an existing effect.
If you have to do it yourself, first desaturate -- convert to greyscale.
If you then simply increase the contrast until only pure black and white remain, you may be disappointed in the result, because video generally has a low-ish APL (average picture level), so most of the image will turn black as it's stretched to the two extremes.
To counteract this, first (or simultaneously) increase the gamma of the image, to raise the APL into a centered range. Only then max out the contrast.
Playing with your actual images is the only way to know where the knobs should be turned, but it's important to know what knobs there are and what they do.


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Focusing away from Premiere causes playback crash
I've been using Premiere Pro since CS5 and am now using CS6.
I have always had this odd bug where, if at any point while using Premiere Pro I switched to any other application on my computer (Mac 10.8), coming back to Premiere would result in the playback function not working anywhere and the audio not playing, even while scrubbing. The only way to fix it is to restart the app. I am able to save and everything, so the app isn't completely crashed, only playback functions are affected.
I can adjust the playhead, but hitting the play button only turns it into a stop button, no playback occurs, and pressing the stop button has no effect whatsoever. And as previously stated, audio doesn't play anytime, not even while scrubbing over the footage.
I have never heard of this bug anywhere in all of my searching. Does anyone know what might be causing this?

From what you describe it sounds like a sound-card or audio driver issue. Are you using any outboard equipment or third part audio drivers?

Mac, OS 10.8 (though this happened under 10.7 as well).

so no outboard equipment (like a audio-interface) or third party audio drivers (such as Hear which take precedent over the Mac's normal driver)?

Aha! I uninstalled Hear and some preference pane called Better Sound (don't even know why that was there) and that fixed it! It's so nice to be able to edit again without being locked into one single application the entire time! Thank you for pointing me in the right direction. I'm not too familiar with SE, how can I give you credit for this answer?

and next time, make sure to add a little more detail in your question like if you have any equipment, sound plugins, or other things that could effect the answer.

1st, make sure you don't have any equipment or 3rd party programs that interfere with the audio on your computer because, more often than not, it is a problem with that instead of the audio on the computer itself.
I actually asked a similar question (which is specific to your question) about a third party program messing with Ableton (same as with Premiere).
I also answered a similar question (that got accepted) that covers a lot of things about different audio drivers and sound and the tendencies of both.
Since you have Hear installed, make sure to remove the leftover plugin located in Macintosh HD/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins even if you followed the correct steps to uninstall the app.

feel free to upvote the answer if its good ;)


text:
Software for video cut automation / scripting
I am very new to a/v editing and need to automate a simple process. Basically what I need is a way for my mom to capture video from her camera and input a series of numbers like
1:02 1:30
1:55 2:34
3:10 10:00

then the software to process the full video, cut out only the sequences specified by these time signatures and mix everything into one file.
I am a software developer by trade so ideally that would be some software that has a scripting language which I can learn and make a script in. I can semi-automate the process up to the point where it needs to cut out the desired sequences. I would do it myself for her but we don't live in the same town.
Note that no special editing is required, only cutting out sequences and stitching them together. I have googled around after "adobe premiere automation" and similar but found nothing. I am sort of familiar with AP, but it can be any other software.
If all else fails I would have to use some sort of desktop automation, but I would rather avoid this.

You can also try to use Avidemux -- its free and open source program + you can use it on Windows, Linux and Mac.
Here is the documentation wiki on Avidemux, where you can find section "Scripting":

Thanks, this looks best to me out of these three options.

MoviePy looks less intimidating than other scripting languages. It may be easier to script your time tag cutting tool with it.

http://zulko.github.io/moviepy/

I'm sure Virtual Dub http://virtualdub.sourceforge.net/ can do what you want, though there may be simpler scripted cutters out there. Before investing too much time in the script, be sure VD can handle the particular codec(s) you'll be using.

Thanks I remember this software from ages past. The API (http://www.virtualdub.org/docs/vdscript.txt) is a bit of a too much learning curve for now but Ill keep it in mind.

Take a look at Sony Vegas Pro. It supports scripting automation based on .NET (C#).
There are third-party extensions like Vegasaur, which contains a lot of scripts and tools.

Thanks, this actually looks pretty cool but I don't want to invest all this money which is why I'm choosing Avid

try Freemake (older version, latest adds a watermark) or video to video converter.Both have easy to use graphical interface.

LosslessCut is the most efficient and free tool for your requirements which comes to my mind.
Your mother would watch the footage and just press I O   I O   I O   ...  all the time to set in and out points while watching. One can operate:

either inclusively: Keep everything between all in-out points and export the result.
or exclusively: Throw away everything between all in-out points and export the remainder.

Pros

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

Cons

Not frame-exact cutting (hh:mm:ss:ff), that would require to losslessly re-encode the portion from the last keyframe to that frame, but they look into implementing Smart Cut.
As far as I understood you only need seconds precision, so this con should not affect you.


text:
What tool should I use to animate text on an EXTREMELY high resolution "screen"?
I need to make a video with extrodinary dimensions.
The "screen" will have to be large enough to hold a very large amount of text and diagrams....  say 20,000 By 20,000 pixels.  The text is going to be transitioned onto the "screen" one word at a time - synchronized with a voice over.
I'm then going to take this animation and wrap it around a sphere in Maya and have a "camera" follow the text/diagrams as they are revealed (with a big finish where the camera zooms out and shows the text has formed word clouds in the shape of continents).
Can someone suggest a tool or method I can use?

After effects, and while your at it, just do the whole thing in After effects, by the time this renders out, and then bring it into maya, apply camera animation, and render it out, you could have made 20 with AE

After Effects was a good solution; it does let one produce an animation of extrodinary dimensions - and of course it's text effects are second to none.  However Maya was necessary, even if it's ardious, as After Effects can't do the camera/sphere part of the animation.


text:
Simple software program for converting H264 video in to flashvideo flv for website?
my question is:
Which simple, lightweight, straightforward, easy to use software for Win7 can do the following:
A) import/convert on the fly MP4 (H264) movie into FLV (Flashvideo) and apply following:
B) Downscale FullHD footage from 1920x1080 into exactly half 960x540 pixels.
C) Simple color toning or sharpess effects will be great
The MP4 movies are recorded in Full HD and come from an Android 4.0 device that captures footages in great detail. I tried Premiere but thats too heavy/expensive/too much)

FFmpeg can do this. By "FLV (Flashvideo)" I assume you mean "FLV1 / Sorenson Spark / Sorenson H.263". Not sure why anyone would choose this these days over H.264.
Example:
ffmpeg -i input -c:v flv1 -q:v 2 -filter:v scale=iw/2:-1,hqdn3d output.flv

What the options mean:

-c:v flv1 Choose the encoder named flv1
-q:v 3 Quality level. Range is 1-31 (for MPEG-1/2/4, excluding H.264) and a higher value is a lower quality.
-filter:v scale=iw/2:-1,hqdn3d Filters that will:

Scale your video to half the size of the input then
Apply the de-noise filter hqdn3d

Windows users can download recent FFmpeg from Zeranoe FFmpeg Builds.

Use Mpeg Streamclip, its an industry used conversion software that is reliable and fast, and free

Either Avidemux or FFMpeg+Avisynth(+Avanti) will do the job. The former should be faster to get going.


text:
What is the name of this minimalist film genre?
There is a category of film and a contest I read about some years ago.  The rules were:

sixty seconds or less
black and white
no cuts fades or edits
stationary camera
no sound

the idea was to mimic filmmaking technology available at the dawn of time.  I want to introduce the idea to my son but can't remember where I found it or the name of it.

Generally "Minimalism" is more about shedding content to focus on the essence, "eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts." This does not necessarily require the elimination of sound or strict use of b/w.
Another term used for a Minimalist like film back in the 1970s was "lean".
What you are describing is more like emulating a silent film which reached its peak in 1928.
If you only use b/w, 60 seconds, no camera movement (pans, tilts, tracking), no cuts, no edits what you have is one clip from a stationary camera. This in itself does not fulfill what "Minimalism" in cinema is about as the balance of this question rests with whether the content is in fact Minimalism.
Also, specifying certain aspects such as b/w and no sound are somewhat superficial now.
Consider that before 1928 that sound was generally limited to what music or sound effects could be played live with the film. So too, color films were not widely available so only hand tinted films existed. Before 1928 the cinematographer generally did not have the option of synchronized sound and color. To go back to this approach is a conscience artistic choice today where as back then, you did not have this choice cause that's all you had.
I would call the genre you are describing as approaching Neo-Silent but not quite there as these guys use hand-cranked gear etc, as described in their manifesto:
http://www.silentmovies.com/neosilent/neosilent.htm
So perhaps, "Post-Neo-Silent" is a more accurate term?
In any event what you are describing is actually very popular in some cinema circles. Consider director, Blake Whitman's "1 Minute Vimeo Project":
https://vimeo.com/groups/1minute
Wherein Blake offers:
"Welcome to the 1 Minute Vimeo Project Group. Add one video, comment on two!
With the chaos of everyday life consuming our senses, it is nice to sit back and enjoy moments and experiences that are often overlooked. This project aims to study the forgotten moments and times in life that we often pass by without acknowledging.
The rules:
-Video must be exactly one minute long
-No camera movement (no panning, tilting, etc)
-No editing whatsoever
-Use original sound
-Tag with '1 minute'
-Have fun"
Aside from allowing color and sound, this is pretty close to the criteria you have defined.

http://videoblogging.info/ is exactly what I was looking for, the Lumiere Manifesto

You're describing, I think, the kinds of films made by the Lumiere Brothers like Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat. The official term for these kinds of film today is Actualities.

good first answer


text:
Merge .ass-subtitles into movie
I produced a video which will include subtitles. The movie is edited in Premiere Pro and (currently) rendered to a .mov file. I've created subtitles with Aegisub which creates a .ass file in order to keep the existing font- and position settings.
Is there anyway in which I can merge the .mov and the subtitles together? I've tried many different programs but none of them seems working. The only one that worked a bit was SubMerge but that ignored the font-settings and positions of the subtitles.

can you not add the subtitles within Premiere Pro instead of using Aegisub?

This is not the purpose of the title tool in Premiere. Next to that it works not as handy as Aegisub.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8672809/use-ffmpeg-to-add-text-subtitles was very good for me.

Will refer to Premiere Pro as PP and After Effects as AE from here on:
Here is a solution which requires AE that I think works but can't test it because my demo of PP and AE has finished. Luckily for you, they have trials for many products including AE which you can download from their site. I contacted a friend of mine who works as a video editor about this and he mentioned something that sounded a lot like this method, but without the conversion I will mention. At least I'm pretty sure since some of what he said went over my head.
Anyways, he initially said that .ass files are not compatible with Premiere Pro. Luckily though he pointed out that you can easily convert .ass files into .srt files, which can be imported into PP (CS4 and above).
Here is a website that does this for free
This is where he began to loose me, but mentioned using the analyze content feature to make sure the content roughly matches up with the video. The video below will explain more and clarified stuff for me.
Here is the video explaining how to do this and how to automate the process

Not 100% the solution I was looking for. But I think there aren't much better alternatives as we speak.

Sorry this is a bit late but I just found your question while doing research on this topic.
If you have access to After Effects, I've developed a script that can import .srt subtitle files (I think you can export .srt from Aegisub). You can download a trial at http://aescripts.com/pt_importsubtitles/
It preserves the timings but not the font or position, although these are easy enough to set in AE. Once imported you can drag the composition straight into Premiere Pro using Dynamic Link for compositing onto your movie.
I've also developed a script that can import .ass files into AE. It's primarily meant for subtitles with karaoke timings, but it should be able to import plain subtitles too.
http://aescripts.com/pt_ssakaraokeanimator/


text:
Will a lower resolution while rending cut down rendering time
Currently I am recording screencast in fullscreen and my resolution is 1920 x 1080, which means I can render in 1080p.
For me 720p is already acceptable if this means that this will cut down in rendering times. But from what I have heard is that changing the resolution while rendering will always result in longer render times.
So the question here is, should I stick with 1080p, because my raw video file is also 1080p, or can I change my render settings to output 720p and cut down on render time.

Rendering in lower resolution will

Downscale the video, which takes very little additional processing time
Take less per frame time for the video encoder to compress

You should definately notice a significant gain in rendering speed if you switch from 1080p to 720p, and I cannot imagine what the other person meant, by "will always result in longer rendering times".
Of course if you cancel a rendering process which is 95% through, just to change the resolution, you will not have gained much, since the renderer has to start all over again.
Also there might be some video software on the market which is so incredebly bad that the situation I described above is reversed. But this shouldn't be the case, especially if you render with video codecs like h264, which always need a lot of processing time.


text:
What is this filming technique called and how do I do it?
I hope I'm in the right forum for this question!
Basically, I'm trying to create this effect, where the camera zooms in on Simba's face and the background seems to zoom in at a different pace.
I'd like to know, first, what this effect is called. I want to see if I can recreate it in the opposite way. So basically, I want to make it seem like I'm zooming out in the same way this effect is zooming in.
Second, I'd like to know where I can find out how to do this. I'm really a complete n00b at filming and I don't have any fancy filming material, just a basic camera that can record. I'd love some suggestions. :) Thanks a ton!

your lion king video (it was, I recall from memory iirc) link is gone (trolled by copyright trolls). could you link another example or make a gif? (if possible, would be big extra, be it creative commons lic-ed, which helps protect against stealing away our rights of fair use by big companies and their harm against humanity and the environment..)

It's called a dolly zoom, and you achieve it by moving the camera towards your subject and zooming out at the same time (or moving away and zooming in).

YES! Thank you so much!! It was driving me nuts to know what it was, haha.


text:
Import Theora video into Premiere Elements
I am trying to edit a Theora video in Premiere Elements 10. I installed the Xiph OpenCodecs package which allowed me to view the video in WMP, but it still wouldn't import into PRE. I then tried installing QuickTime and the XiphQT package, but still no joy. However, QT wouldn't play the video so maybe this didn't work. I notice that the Xiph website has not been updated since 2009, so maybe these are out of date.

Currently it doesn't appear possible to directly import Ogg Theora video into Premiere Elements 10, however I did manage to convert the video to DNxHD/VC-3 so that PRE would handle it nicely (previous conversions had behaved very badly)
ffmpeg -i out-48.ogv -s 1920x1080 -r pal -b 36M -threads 2 -vcodec dnxhd -acodec libmp3lame out-48.mov

http://blog.jamiek.it/2012/11/encoding-ogv-files-to-edit-in-adobe.html


text:
Creating effects/transitions in AviSynth or Lightworks
I'm very much an amateur video maker, but I am trying to broaden my skill set a bit and start creating my own effects and short video clips to supplement the recordings I make in a more substantial way.  As an example, one of the first things I'd like to do is to make a small clip that functions a little bit like Megaman boss select screen of yore; moving a selector around some pictures and scrolling in a text label to briefly explain it.
I can handle the resources that go into it to a large extent; the portraits, the actual selector graphic, the text, all no problem.  However, I have no idea how to properly overlay and tie all this stuff together!  I'm most familiar with AviSynth and Lightworks, and I've pored over the documentation for both the best I know how.  It seems like I'm just missing out on a structure for the basic work flow.  Can anyone help me out with an approach to making basic animations and movies when you have a large amount of static content to go into it?


text:
Software to capture high quality screen-casts
I want to record video tutorials but I can't get the program to capture my screen with high quality, and not just that, when I try to edit it in After Effects scaling and positioning the fonts and window seem pixelized and doesn't look sharp. Thanks!

There are a lot of screen recording software, for example:

CamStudio (free)
Screenpresso (free/paid versions)
Movavi Screen Capture Studio ($49.95)
Camtasia Studio ($299.00)

What are you using currently?
I use Camtasia Studio and it works pretty well, I can record portions of the screen or the entire screen with the native screen resolution [1280x800].

@tecfreak I use total recorder, is there any free soft?

I use ActivePresenter. The best free screen recorder I've known. It contains everything you need to make a professional screencast.

If you're using Ubuntu or any other Linux distribution, I'd recommend recordmydesktop. You can install it in Ubuntu:
sudo apt-get install recordmydesktop

Afterwards, run it from a terminal, using the desired filename as an argument:
recordmydesktop tutorial23.ogv

Stop recording by pressing Ctrl + C in the terminal.

If you have a Mac, give ScreenFlow a try. It offers lossless screen recording which can be exported for use in Premiere or other NLE's and it's inbuilt editing is pretty good too for quick edits.

If you have a compatible Nividia GPU then Nvidia Shadowplay is a great screen recorder, it can do 4K at 60fps with a 50MBPS bitrate, has low CPU usuage and is free. It can also capture the last 5-20 minutes of what was on your screen. The file sizes can get a bit big but you can reduce the quality to what you want and can delete the video files after making the video that used the footage. All other software others have mentioned are also very good.
http://www.geforce.co.uk/geforce-experience/shadowplay
Happy recording and have a nice day!


text:
Canon DSLR that changes aperture in Video
I purchased a 1100D/Rebel T3 as a starting DSLR.
I like the video aspect the most, but its quite limited.
I have some low aperture lenses and I like them very much, but they make it difficult to focus  when something is moving around.
The only option I have with this camera to change the aperture setting on video is... buying a different lens with a different minimum aperture.
I was wondering what Canon DSLR allows me to change aperture in video mode?

With canon the first DSLR that can do that is the 550d (you need to set the movie mode to manual in the settings otherwise it will adjust automatically).
However i would suggest something with a swivel screen (600d and up) because it's very useful while shooting video. The 60d and 7d have more options for video (frame rate for one) but it depends on your needs and budget if those are an option.
Hope this is helpful.


text:
How can I find duplicate videos from a large set of videos of varying formats?
After losing a backup device with a bunch of my original videos I've had to download a large number of them (~300) back from Youtube. The new downloads are a mix of MP4 and FLV, and the originals are a mix of almost any video format due to lots of experimenting.
To make matters worse there's no clear cutoff for when my local copies disappeared; I've found a point in my youtube videos chonologically where I have some of the videos and I don't have others. I've been trying to manually weed out videos where I already have a copy, but with this many videos I'm sure I've missed some.
How can I effectively go through several hundred videos of different formats and weed out duplicates? The names will be similar but not identical. The formats may be different, and the file size may be different due to that (and or encoding differences). The file lengths should be the same, and visually the videos should be similar enough, but I'm not sure there's any tool to sort that out visually.
Am I doomed to go through the list based on running time and manually look for duplicates or is there a better way?

Very interesting question!

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

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

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

Thumbnails are a great idea! The new videos came in as FLV, which I can't seem to thumbnail no matter what I try. This could work quite well

ffmpeg should be able to convert the flv files into something else (avi, mp4, etc).

Yeah, I'll eventually convert them to MP4 but I want to make sure I lose as little quality as possible when I do that, so I've put it off until I can take the time

If you wanted to, you could find a program that would analyze the thumbnails to find duplicates. However, the time spent finding such a program then configuring it would not be worth it for a small project.

@BenBrocka Another solution is you make an unique hash string (exampley 8 digits character) from your file in uploading time  and store it on your db, and add a condition on stored unique string for checking duplicate videos in upload time.

This seems related to : https://video.stackexchange.com/a/33521/32436

You could check out
https://theophanemayaud.github.io/video-simili-duplicate-cleaner/
(macOS and Windows binaries available) It's open source, I created it with QT and it relies on ffmpeg.
The idea is to extract a few (eg 2, the first and the last) frames,
and compare them. If the duration is close, and the frames look
similar : you've got a duplicate.

You can "manually compare the extracted frames", or use thresholds to configure some automatic behaviors, and trash the duplicates.

It uses opencv for frame comparison, and ffmpeg for frame extraction
(ffmpeg is also for video metadata which is very useful when trying to
tell which video to keep !). Since it's open source, you can improve
it to fit your needs !

I've found it to be really helpful in a situation like yours, where I had about 15 000 videos from google photos which compresses them, Picasa, handbrake compressed, original copies, and other changed versions of the same videos !

You can try Video Comparer (shareware).
http://www.video-comparer.com
It quickly detects similar videos with image transformations and supports split videos into multiple CDs.

This software did not detect similar videos (same scene/person taken a few minutes apart).

I had the same problem recently and I found the program that helped me. It doesn't compare file names or calculate hashes. It compare real video content. It is not free, but if you haven't many duplicates, the trial version is enough. The link to the program is http://duplicatevideosearch.com

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


text:
Getting Started with Webcasting and Video conferencing
Our church is trying to move into the 21st century.  We have the opportunity to apply for a grant of up to $20,000 ($10,000 would be more likely to succeed) for equipment purchases.
We need to be able to accomplish two things. First, to stream our Sunday morning service along with recording for our archive.  Second, to host video conferences as a remote site. The Diocese (bigger entity over us) is already setup with MegaMeeting, we just need the equipment to send and receive audio and video to MM in real time.
Given the above, I know I need a Video Camera (or two), a few more Mics, a dedicated computer, and the equipment to hook them all together.  It is the last part that I am not sure about.
I'm fairly certain that once I get audio and video into the computer I can get it out to the web, what I need to know is how to mix it all together.

Blackmagic and Livestream are your friends :)
You probably want to get 3 cameras - one for the priest, one for roaming action shots and one for the audience. You'll need a whole bunch of microphones and an audio mixer. But you probably already know all this.
Buy a Blackmagic TV Studio and buy a Livestream Broadcaster - plug the TV Studio's HDMI output into the Livestream Broadcaster and plug a computer into the TV Studio's ethernet port. You use the computer to control the switching between cameras and the Livestream Broadcaster spits it out to the Internet using Livestream's servers. Make sure where you're broadcasting from has a fast Internet connection.
Lots of churches seem to have projectors these days, so you can plug the output from your projector's source (use a splitter of some sort, and a scaler to match the frame specs as the cameras) into the TV studio too, and add what's on the projector into the mix as well.
You can replace the Livestream Broadcaster with a computer, but the Livestream Broadcaster is cheaper, more flexible and more reliable, in my opinion.
I guess this is a starting point - but if you want more info, just post and I'll answer any questions :)


text:
Timelapse Countdown Timer in After Effects
I'm sure someone out there must have done this before, but how do I create a countdown timer with hours, minutes and seconds that starts from a specific time and counts down at 71.928x speed?
71.928x because I took one frame every 3 seconds and I'm playing it back at 23.976fps.
I've tried using text expressions but to no avail.

Take a look at this tutorial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFFiWQhnfGo

Here's what I did in the end (as an expression on the  text layer)
countspeed = 144;
clockStart = thisComp.duration * countspeed * -1;

function times(n) {
    if (n < 10)  return "0" + n else return "" + n
}

clockTime = clockStart + countspeed * (time - inPoint);

if (clockTime < 0) {
    minus = "";  clockTime = -clockTime;
} else {
    minus = "";
}

t = Math.floor(clockTime);
h = Math.floor(t/3600);
min = Math.floor((t%3600)/60);
sec = Math.floor(t%60);
ms = clockTime.toFixed(3).substr(-3);
minus + times(h) + ":" + times(min) + ":" + times(sec)

You will have to do it with expressions, unfortunantly it is the only outside of possibly finding a 3rd Party plugin...
This is a good start, http://www.motionscript.com/design-guide/up-down-clock.html


text:
After effects: Moving text along 3D path
After Effects beginner here.
The effect I'm after is where text is appearing from behind an object. So far, I'm using the position and rotation parameters.
But the text is rigid. I found something about having text along a path which is what I want except I haven't found out how to work it in 3D.
Here is what I have so far. I need the text to look like it's bending as it comes around the ... well, bend!

to accomplish this, we need to cheat something. I assume you are trying to do something like this in the following image:

First, create a camera in your comp (i see you already have one)
Then create a text layer and make it 3D (you have this as well)
Select your layer and select Ellipse tool (Q) but do not apply
anything.
While your text layer selected, double click the Ellipse tool in
your toolbar. This will create a circular mask on your text layer.
Rotate your Text layer -90 degrees on X Axis.
Twirl down the controls of the Text layer and under Text controls
you will see Path Options. In these options select your mask. And
change your settings as you wish.
Now expand all the controls of that layer. There you will see a text
label Animate: with a small circled arrow.
Select Enable Per-character 3D.
Then in the same menu, select Rotation.
There will be an Animator 1 section, expand it and change the X
 Rotation to 90 degrees.

Now check with your camera, orbit around, you should see your text bends through your mask.
To animate this text along that path, get back to the Path Options. Keyframe the First Margin option or add an expression by Alt+Left Click, and add this value and edit as you like:
time * 500

This will get the current frame and multiply it with 500 and give this value to First Margin property.
I am also adding the link for the project, but you need at least CS5.5 to open: http://www.mediafire.com/?13dl3x67w4v5yod

I'm glad it worked.

You can copy a motion path on to a mask path property, so you can use the exact motion as your mask shape.


text:
How to stay objective after viewing your edit hundreds of times?
When I start editting something I'm very sharp about cuts that does or doesn't work. But as I go through the process, in which I watch the sequence hundreds of times, I get used to it, and becomes a bit blind to problems.
How do you stay objective and aware after viewing your own work so many times?

I believe the only answer to that is to take at least a 24hr break. Move onto another project or start something new. The number of times I have come back to something after a decent break and can all of a sudden see what needs to be done is shocking.
I don't believe their is a quick fix to this issue.

Except in the reality of being a professional editor you almost never have 24hrs to take a break, so I don't think this is a good answer honestly

If you have a specific goal in mind, you can focus on that and just keep going until you're satisfied.
More often than not, though, I find that taking at least one session away from the project to do something else helps. When you come back to it, your eyes and ears will feel fresher.

What you are referring to is what I like to call Temp Love, you get used to something that is not finished.  The key is understanding where the end is, have a vision, and work through it...thats the key to being a good editor...knowing where you are, and where the finish is


text:
How to tune a musicbox
I want to try to make my own musicbox. The picture below shows what I mean:

I was wondering how to determine the length of the metal tone generating plates (shown in dark grey). I assume it is a function of the length and thickness, I just don't know the exact relationship.
Could someone please provide me with a formula relating the plate dimensions with the frequency?

I am not sure if this is the right SE to ask this, feel free to move it to a more suitable SE site.

Sadly this is now too old for us to migrate. Thanks for flagging it up though.

Do you know what gauge the steel teeth usually are? At the base anyway (ie. what it starts out as)? Thanks

The tuned teeth (or lamellae) of the steel comb is typically set to a chromatic scale. To change the tuning would require adding or subtracting material to an individual tooth with some trial and error and a good ear. Changing the length would cancel the action of the pins on the revolving cylinder so that is not a good idea.
If you think the scale you have meets your tuning definition then it would be far easier to make a new scroll to change to the melodic and harmonic content you desire. If you are starting from scratch and have the tools you should make a system to be able to change the scrolls so you have a diversity of songs.
Here is a reference to tuning the reeds on a harmonica since this is adding and subtracting material related:
http://www.angelfire.com/music/harmonica/mikesretuning.html
Information on how to tune lamellae as used in a Karimba:
http://www.nscottrobinson.com/mbiratunings.php
Here's a place where you can make your own music box tunes by using
punchable paper strip musical movement:
http://www.deanorgans.co.uk/order_musicalmovements_mbm30hp.htm
Math part:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuning_fork#Calculation_of_frequency
UPDATE:
I am not entirely certain that using tuning fork math is the right place for a series of metal bars as found in a music box comb so I have done some more searches and found a reference that covers much more here:
http://windworld.com/features/tools-resources/exmis-free-bar-length-calculator/

I was planning on doing it from scratch, I hadn't thought about changing the roll... I'll look into that, thanks.

I would buy a cheap movement for like under $10 and experiment with it to gain experience before you start your design and first prototype.

tI am building a music box comb ( and everything else ) to make a musicbox. I have found little answers out there but this is what I KNOW from trial and error. Get a cheap , used miter saw blade. and using an angle grinder cut a square or rectangle out of it , ensuring that it does not get hot. Have a spray bottle of water or bowl of water to cool it every few seconds Choose how many notes you will need and with a sharpie and ruler draw lines about 1/8th inch wide but allow for the width or cut of your blade ( 40, ks ) I have used my angle grinder for years and using the  cutoff blade  is second nature... but be careful,  Draw a line at about 60 degrees at an angle for your cut teeth ensuring each one is a bit longer by cutting to that line. Drill 3 holes near the top and bolt it down to a sound carrying box of any kind. You can buy a clip on guitar tuner for under $10 . with that clipped on near the comb pluck a tooth and see what notes you have. By cutting a bit deeper the note will become lower.   Get it close for now. After I have a clean , deburred comb I heat it nearly red hoe and then quickly drop it into water. This tempers the steel. Any blacksmith shop can explain annealing... if you dont know simply lay it in your oven at 499 for a few hours... that will make the steel harder , but not brittle.