text:
Convert interlaced(?) video to progressive
I have a video with the following details:
Format                      : MPEG-TS
File size                   : 6.49 GiB
Duration                    : 1 h 35 min
Overall bit rate mode       : Variable
Overall bit rate            : 9 694 kb/s

Video
ID                          : 512 (0x200)
Menu ID                     : 1 (0x1)
Format                      : AVC
Format/Info                 : Advanced Video Codec
Format profile              : High@L4.1
Format settings             : CABAC / 3 Ref Frames
Format settings, CABAC      : Yes
Format settings, Reference  : 3 frames
Codec ID                    : 27
Duration                    : 1 h 35 min
Bit rate                    : 8 827 kb/s
Width                       : 1 920 pixels
Height                      : 1 080 pixels
Display aspect ratio        : 16:9
Frame rate                  : 29.970 (30000/1001) FPS
Standard                    : Component
Color space                 : YUV
Chroma subsampling          : 4:2:0
Bit depth                   : 8 bits
Scan type                   : MBAFF
Scan type, store method     : Separated fields
Scan order                  : Top Field First
Bits/(Pixel*Frame)          : 0.142
Stream size                 : 5.91 GiB (91%)
Color range                 : Limited
Color primaries             : BT.709
Transfer characteristics    : BT.709
Matrix coefficients         : BT.709

Audio
ID                          : 513 (0x201)
Menu ID                     : 1 (0x1)
Format                      : AC-3
Format/Info                 : Audio Coding 3
Commercial name             : Dolby Digital
Codec ID                    : 129
Duration                    : 1 h 35 min
Bit rate mode               : Constant
Bit rate                    : 384 kb/s
Channel(s)                  : 6 channels
Channel layout              : L R C LFE Ls Rs
Sampling rate               : 48.0 kHz
Frame rate                  : 31.250 FPS (1536 SPF)
Compression mode            : Lossy
Stream size                 : 263 MiB (4%)
Service kind                : Complete Main

I want to convert (using ffmpeg) from 1080(?) to 720p, the point is, I don't know if it's interlaced or progressive, is the first time I see MBAFF.

Scan type                   : MBAFF
Scan type, store method     : Separated fields
Scan order                  : Top Field First

MBAFF Information can be found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Video_Coding
Not sure how did you get such information, MediaInfo? But those Scan information can't be a progressive.

Yeah, it was through MediaInfo. I managed to convert, used yadif to deinterlace and it worked. Thanks.


text:
Can't see differences between videos?
I back up my data to pairs of external hard drives, and recently (in the process of transferring the contents to larger external hard drives) found that some of the data between them has diverged. Several of them are video files.
I used this answer to use ffmpeg's ssim and psnr filters to find the differences between the two videos. Once I had a location, I loaded the tracks into kdenlive, applied the "difference" transition, and seeked to the area where the difference was.
However, no difference was to be seen! I even extracted the audio, and used audacity to compare differences, and still nothing.
The files are clearly different; ffmpeg shows that. But if I can't see any differences, I don't know which file to copy over the other file.
Any idea what I could be doing wrong? This seems too simple to fail.

The files are clearly different; ffmpeg shows that. --> how?

@Gyan: The ssim.log and psnr.log files, generated by the method described above.

Why use audacity to compare them?  Isn't this a question about video?  Use video vectorscope, waveform monitor, parade, etc.  That's what they do.  They're built to help you examine a video signal objectively, without the biases and limitations of your eyes and brain.  Lossy compression is designed to exploit those limitations, expressly so that you DON'T perceive a difference.

@JasonConrad: I was using audacity to compare the audio, to look for differences around the same area.

Use a vector scope and waveform monitor to judge the difference, not your eyes.  Even if you're doing an XOR comparison, there are cases where your eye isn't enough.
Here, for example, I've taken this sample footage from BMD's SDK (available here):
 The original is 12bit RAW.  I then transcoded it to H.265, using these settings:

If I then superimpose the transcoded version over the original, like this:

... and set the blending mode to "difference," a.k.a., "XOR"

and then use the scopes to analyze the result, you can clearly see that the files are different.

The top half of the above image shows the timeline viewer, and the result of the "difference" comparison.  To the naked eye, it looks black, as if there is no difference.  The bottom half of the above image shows Resolve's waveform monitor.  Here's a detail of that same image:

There's clearly noise at the bottom end of the signal.  Other types of scopes will tell you different information about the comparison.  For instance, you can use a parade to examine Y'CbCr, and see that the transcode operation has affected the image's chroma more than its luma.
I know that you're trying to examine the difference between files that you've copied and not necessarily transcoded, but this example is meant to demonstrate that scopes can give you insight into the type of difference between the files, when that difference is invisible to the naked eye.

Any options that don't cost thousands of dollars?

DaVinci Resolve is free, and contains several different types of scopes.  ScopeBox used to be a good standalone scope utility for under $99, but the price has gone up, and the features included in Resolve's free scopes have narrowed the performance gap.

I just double-checked to see if Divergent Media have brought ScopeBox down to a fair price.  Unfortunately, they've opted for a subscription pricing model which costs as much per year as their original software was for a lifetime.  I can't see how their development costs could possibly justify the expense; video signal standards simply don't change that quickly, and that's kind of the point of having a standard!

I don't understand why my answer has been downvoted twice, so I've updated it to be more clear.  If somebody could please explain what I'm missing, I'll amend or withdraw.  I do realize that OP is probably looking for a more programatic, bitwise comparison, but since this is video stack exchange,  I believe standard video signal analysis tools are a fair answer.  If this question is purely about file comparison, maybe video production stack exchange isn't the right place for it.

Assuming ffmpeg's result is reliable and it does what you think (I don't know, don't use ffmpeg much), it seems that one of your drives, either the primary one or any of the backup drives is faulty. Use tools that calculate checksums, like md5 or sha or crc32 to verify that the files are indeed different. If the checksums differ you have to find out the faulty drive(s).
A few faulty bytes in a video are often not visible when watching, maybe the frame will be dropped where the faulty section is, maybe the way the video has been encoded masks the damage.

I'm aware that one of the drives is faulty...the question is which one. The differences were first revealed to me with a sha256sum, and verified by a direct binary compare. And if the faulty frame was dropped, it should have shown up when viewing the result of kdenlive's "difference' transition.

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


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Making a YouTube video from powerpoint presentation file with embedded audio file
I have a power point type file (.odp in ubuntu linux) with embedded audio file in it for presentation. How can I make a good quality YouTube video from that? I have used kazam screen recorder for that. The video resolution looks good but after uploading it in YouTube the resolution get worser.

Is that an Open Office file?

It is "LibreOffice Impress" file.

Mmm I have a similar problem using Kazam screen recorder. When I save the video on my computer as MP4 it looks great. When I upload it to YouTube it's out of focus and clearly has lost quite a bit of it's resolution. Kazam is quite outdated but on Linux I couldn't get anything else working. Kazam has MP4 H264 and WebM VP8 and then it's also possible to set the frame rate. I would like to know what is the best for YouTube.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/turn-your-presentation-into-a-video-c140551f-cb37-4818-b5d4-3e30815c3e83

On the File menu, select Save to ensure all your recent work has
been saved in PowerPoint presentation format (.pptx).
Click File >
Export > Create a Video. (Or, on the Recording tab of the ribbon,
click Export to Video.)
...

It is a PowerPoint "like" file, not PowerPoint.

It is "LibreOffice Impress" file.

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


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Premiere: Add transition to trimmed clip
In the screenshot below, I trimmed the left clip (by dragging its right edge to the left) in order to remove a couple of seconds from the end.

But the applied morph cut transition is only added to the right clip when I drag it there (which doesn't work, just shows an error in the video). How can I fix this?

Delete the transition, click on the edge between the two clips, so it goes red like this:

Then apply the transition.
If you cannot, it's because one of the clips does not have any more frames to the other side of it with which to complete the transition.  ie if your transition is 10 frames long, you need five extra frames of footage on the left and right edges for it to work.


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Widely compatible video format with lossless audio
I'm a software developer. My software produces animated video files with music.
The video files should be compatible with a wide range of software, and they should have excellent audio quality. The audio that users load into the program might have been encoded twice already, and the resulting video will be encoded one more time when uploading to YouTube. So I'd like to let my software output uncompressed audio into the video file.
For the longest time I wrote AVI files with WAV audio. Unfortunately, this format suffers from compatibility problems. Some versions of Sony Vegas cannot open it, same problem with some versions of Premiere.
MP4 files should be compatible with a wide range of software - unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a widely supported way for MP4 files to contain lossless audio. Most common seems to be AAC audio, which is transparent at 320kbps - but I'd like to avoid that additional lossy step for reasons mentioned above.
MKV files support WAV audio, but are unsupported by Sony Vegas.
What container format and audio codec should I pick for wide compatibility and lossless audio? I'm using ffmpeg, so I have the ability to produce almost any format.

So, it has to be readable by Vegas and Youtube? Looks like Vegas will be the limiting factor here. Ask in their forums. My guess is, MOV container with ALAC or FLAC audio. Certainly MOV with PCM audio.

I know you have your reasons, but AAC at 320 or 384 kbps, sampled at 48K, is indistinguishable from WAV in any real world setting. And it's widely compatible.

According to Mozilla Developers MPEG-4 containers can include FLAC audio.  Ditto for OGG containers.

To my knowledge, the only lossless audio format with really wide compatibility is plain old linear PCM.
As container format, MP4 is the most wide-spread.

The MP4 container officially supports the Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC). Doesn't mean it's supported by other software, though.


text:
Need helping creating dynamic lower third
I am new to After Effects so I apologize in advance for any misuse of terminology or lack of necessary information. Just let me know if you need anything and I can provide it.
I am trying to create a lower third reveal that I can use in Premiere. I have the lower third made and I used the typewriter preset animation to reveal it. In addition I have a shape that moves along with the animation as an additional reveal element.
I am looking to have this a preset that I can use in Premiere so that when I change the text, the typewriter animation and the shape adjusts according to the length of the text itself.
Here is a reddit link to a post where I ask the same question and it has a video example of what I am trying to accomplish: Example
Please let me know if there's anything else you need from me, thanks.

What you're looking for are adobe's essential graphics function in premiere. I have never worked with it myself, but it might be a start for googling away.


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How to implement fast forwards or skips in video editing
I have made a couple of diy and hobby videos in youtube, but without any eye catchy effects.
I would like to implement the effect of fast forwarding with the idea below:
Suppose I am making a paper plane. First a plain paper is shown, then the paper rotates automatically, and bends in half, fold itself vertically,and so on.
I have seen a similar effect in the following video in youtube between times 00:01:20 to 00:01:55.

The method used in your example is called "stop motion" and is pretty much the way people create their lego-videos, clay-animations, etc. To do this, you will need to take a picture of the paper, then rotate it very slightly, take another picture, rotate some more, and so on and so forth.
When you took all the pictures, you can import them as an image sequence in After-Effects or premiere and adjust the speed by setting the framerate, something between 10 and 25 should work for these purposes. But behold, this method is very time-expensive - just as a heads up.


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Easy way to preview 120 fps footage at 30 fps?
I recently got a Nikon Z7 and I've been playing with its ability to shoot 120 fps at 1080p and then make slow-motion 30fps (or even 24 fps) videos from it.   A 120 fps video can be used to generate a slower-fps video using Premiere Pro or even ffmpeg if you don't dialing your Wayback machine to 1983 and typing in a command line.
But if I have a bunch of 120 fps videos and I want to select the one that looks best, I just want to VIEW them at a slower playback speed.
Is there any way to do that either in-camera or with some simple Windows app?

If you want to view at slower playback speed, would videoLan help?
Menu->Playback->Speed->Slower

then check if the speed at 0.25x is it what you want.


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When does Premiere allow audio to play in the background?
I often need to transcribe clips in Premiere.
To do this, I will open (eg) TextEdit, and switch between the two apps.
Sometimes Premiere will allow audio playback in the background, and sometimes it just mutes.
Does anyone know why or how this happens, and any method to get it to more reliably play when backgrounded?

What kind of footage is it? Is your hardware able to play it without a problem? And is this when it's playing in the source monitor or in a sequence? Also, not related to your problem but to your task: there are plugins that might help, and older premiere pro versions had a transcription option as well.

bog standard mp4s or ProRes files usually... I have transcription services, it's just occasionally, I need to play and type things.. Now it's working fine of course... Earlier it wasn't.

Hardware is MacBookPro 15 inch 2018 running MacOS 10.14.6, CC2020.

Ok, I don't know what might be causing this. Can you perhaps include a screenshot of your audio hardware preferences. It could help others identify the problem.

I always thought this was just a bug. I was editing an MP4 on Windows 10 yesterday, and it muted about half the time when switching to another app. Usually I'm editing .m2ts from a camera, which doesn't seem to mute quite as often. But it also mutes intermittently for me when editing on mac as well. I've never tried to resolve it, I just switch back to Premiere, stop/start the clip playing to bring the sound back, and switch back to the other app.

I also just noticed that sometimes when I use the keyboard in another window while the video is still playing, the audio will come back.
So, alt-tab into the other window, let the audio stop, type something in the current (non-Premiere) window, and the audio comes back. Not a "solution", but it does result in audio playing while Premiere is not the focused window.

I had the same problem. It seems to be working now, after I changed the setting under Preferences -> Playback, and unchecked "Disable video output when in the background".
Edit: Ten minutes after I posted it, my "solution" stopped working. So YMMV. Sorry.


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Given 2 videos, one edited down and one unedited, how can I automatically find matching sequences between them?
I would like to upgrade some old videos I made long ago using standard definition (or lower) video sources, replacing them with higher definition sources, but without access to the original project files.
For example, it could be a fan-made music video with video sourced from an old film on DVD, but now I have the blu-ray and I want to automatically find and replace all the matched content from the edited video.
To do this I need a library or script for windows that will take two videos, compare one to the other finding all the similarities and reports a list of timecodes where the 2 videos appear to match.
With such a tool I could easily automate this process completely.
I'm sure such a script (open-source) already exists, I just can't find it. Can someone point me in the right direction?

Interesting question. You could try finding matches by audio sync, but that doesn’t usually work well for long content. Maybe break it up into smaller segments first, find where the small clip syncs best to the larger whole, and extend the edit until it doesn’t match. AFAIK, that’s about as automatic as it gets, unless there’s something new out.   Visually, you’d need to index every n frames, come up with a distance metric, then search for nearest neighbors. Point trackers would use a similar algorithm, but they only need to worry about next and previous frame. Following.


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What is the meaning of "channels" in an audio recorder program?
I compiled and ran this audio recorder program derived from JUCE: https://gitlab.com/DamienAuvray/simpleaudiorecorder
I can see that it has the options of selecting channels. I am a newbie in this area.
What do those channels represent? Do they represent different microphones? Selecting many channels means that we can use more than one microphone for recording?
Please explain.

I am not sure about that particular software, but a channel is one of two sides of a stereo recording, and yes, a truly stereo microphone is in reality two separate microphones in one device.
Another option is to use two monoaural microphones connected to the same input device.

When a studio recording is being edited, a channel can represent this same; one of two microphones. There can be an even greater number of them, for example, a recording of an orchestra or they can be recordings from the same microphone made on different moments, for example, a solo artist that is recording his own chorus.

So this does mean having different channels can enable use to record from different microphones?

Channels are not necessarily part of a stereo pair. They can be the left and right sides of a stereo pair or they can be mono, independent recordings, or even part of a multichannel (5.1 or similar) configuration. Channels can definitely be used to record individual microphones. If you do that and you have the option, you should configure the channels to be mono, not stereo.


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NUKE getting slower with every rendered Frame
I am currently trying to render out an .exr sequence out of a simple nuke script that uses rotopaint and smart-vectors. However, upon rendering out the .exr files, the render-speed gets slower and slower with every frame rendered. When I cancel the rendering and resume from the frame it left off, the rendering is fast again, yet getting slower and slower until coming to a halt around 20 frames in.
Why is that? I checked the cache-path, made sure enough space was free and am sure to be rendering with the GPU. This is a very strange problem that I have never encountered before.

It's difficult to know without actually seeing the script, but one possibility has to do with the rotopaint node and the clone brush (if any are used). Sourcing from other frames in nuke often causes recomputation. the smart vector node also sources information from other frames. You might have more luck if you pre-render the smartvectors or the output of the paint (whichever comes first)


text:
Changes in file size and quality after ffmpeg VOB/mp4 conversion
Question

I wish to know — in my own particular case — why the conversion of VOB
files to mp4 files using ffmpeg results in files of only about one
quarter the size, whether this reduces the quality and, if so, how to
ameliorate the effect.

The commands I am using are of the type:
ffmpeg -i VTS_01_1.VOB -q:v 0 VTS_01_1.mp4

I understand from my research that “-q:v 0” specifies maximum quality.
I also gather from the answer to a related question that the bitrate and codec could be affecting the reduction in file size, but I have no idea how to experiment with these parameters in my case.
Background
I am converting commercial DVDs produced by a friend who is a retired Hollywood technician. The DVDs are instructional DVDs for a particular textile craft and typically involve two, three or four discs, made on a Mac using an old copy of Final Cut Pro. With the decline in DVD drives on computers my friend has started also to distribute the files on thumb drives after I suggested I could convert the DVDs to mp4s. I had played with free software for my own purposes, although I know next to nothing about video, but I am familiar with the unix interface on my Mac and discovered that ffmpeg seemed better than the GUI software for converting and then concatenating the various VOB files. The reduction in file size seemed a bonus as it allowed him to use 8Gb thumb drives. For some of the DVD conversions he felt there was no loss in quality, but for the latest one (done exactly the same by me) he reckoned some loss was noticeable (size reduction from about 10Gb to 2Gb — a bit more than usual). The “Get Info” on the videos includes the following:
Kind: MPEG-4 movie
Dimensions: 853 × 480
Codecs: AAC, H.264
Audio channels: Stereo

The default codec for MP4 - x264 - is a lot more efficient than the default codec for DVDs - usually Mainconcept's MPEG-2. However, the quality loss is more likely to be due to lack of deinterlacing. Add -vf yadif=0 and check.

@Gyan — I repeated the rip with the options you suggested and sent the video to my friend. However, unfortunately, he does not think there is any improvement. In fact the quality isn't that bad, and he is going to distribute the mp4 version as is, but it would be have been better if I had been able to fix it. Thanks again for your effort to help. I have noted your info for possible future use.

@Cdon meant to comment: "I'm in same spot. I don't know if my qualities worse but I'm suspicious of reduced file size. Did u find a solution? Thank u? The answer is that I think there is no problem with the quality after all. I bought a film movie of an opera (Joseph Losey's Don Giovanni) which was in the original operatic Italian with German subtitles, for which there was no turn-off option. I ripped it as an mp4 so I could strip out the subtitles, and then found software to make it into a DVD again to sell it on. The mp4 was smaller, as usual, but the DVD reflated to the original size.

@Cdon — But I may be wrong. See the answer to this similar question I just found: https://video.stackexchange.com/questions/18582/big-difference-in-the-video-file-size-after-the-conversion-mov-to-mp4?noredirect=1&lq=1


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X-Rite i1Display Pro - Gives my MacBook Pro a greenish tint - What am I doing wrong?
I ordered an X-Rite i1Display Pro and was excited to see the corrections of colours of my old MacBook Pro (mid-2014). Well... I got somehow disappointed and now I cannot really trust i1Display Pro, nor do I know how the real colour profile should look like.
Below this text, you'll find the settings that I went through and I'm going to append a video where I see a meaningful green shift and how everything looks slightly uncontrasty.
i1Profiler
The first thing that shocked me is that I paid "quite" much for a small dongle but the software's resolution looks way off. Just to say it simply, it looks blurry, as if it's not made for the retina display.
Have a look:
Screenshot-2020-10-16-at-20-36-12.png
If you look at the letters you see that it's blurry besides the open window of Chrome. I tested the application with a new MacBook Pro 2019 and it's the same issue. I'm just not sure why I don't see it anywhere else. Do you have the same "problem"?
i1Profiler Settings
I try to make it short:
User Mode: Advanced -> Profiling
Display: White LED
White Point: D65
Luminance: 100 cd/m^3
Gamma: Standard with 2.2
Contrast Ratio: Native
Flare Correct and Ambient Light Smart Control: Off
Default Profile Settings: Use Default
Patch Set Size: Large
Adjust Brightness: Manual
That's about it.
Since I'm not able to afford an extra room just for colour correcting/grading, I did the measurements in a room with daylight but with no light coming directly to the monitor. Obviously, I have checked that the device lies flat.
DisplayCal Settings
Because of i1Profiler I was disappointed, so I looked up for an alternative software and I found DisplayCal. I used it just by setting everything on auto and as measured and I actually liked the colour profile way more. The greenish tint was gone.
Video
Unfortunately, I have no idea how to present you my changes, besides showing you a handheld video. Because I have noticed, that you are not able to see the changes on screenshots. Even screen recording doesn't show the changes that much.
So I thought to my self, that I'm using my LED light and set it to 6500 kelvin and I shot the video als0 in 6500 custom white balance.
Here is the video:

Color LCD: is the standard color profile given by apple
MacbookPro_LCD_16-10-2020.icc: Is the one made by X-Rite iProfiler
MacbookPro11, etc: Is made by DisplayCal
For both software, I have used the X-Rite i1Display Pro (just to make it clear).
Thank you for your help :)

Those low-cost (sub-$1000) colorimeters are not much better than nothing at all.  The ones that work are so expensive, that it's better to rent them, and best to pay a technician to calibrate.  This is part of the appeal of FSI; you can ship the monitor back to them, and they'll re-calibrate it for free (once a year, if I remember correctly).  Here's a good article on it. https://mixinglight.com/color-grading-tutorials/dramatically-improve-low-cost-colorimeter-results-calman/

Also, having a "greenish" tint doesn't mean anything, and isn't a problem, if the calibration software gives it the exact same greenish tint every time, and can do the same for any monitor you use.  It just means your room is more magenta than x-rite's labs (I'm kidding, but to make a point; it's consistency that matters).

@JasonConrad hmm ok thanks for the article


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ffmpeg mov_text subtitle too small when converting mkv to mp4
I want to remux a mkv file into mp4.
I used the following command.
ffmpeg -i "input.mkv" -c:v copy -c:a copy -map 0:0 -map 0:1 -map 0:2 -map 0:3 -c:s mov_text "output.mp4"

Problem: The subtitles in the output.mp4 file are way too small.
Also, the subtitles of the mp4 file are unaffected when I try to make them bigger from vlc preferences.
I can turn them on/off but I think they are somewhat hardcoded.
I had to rencode subtitles while remuxing as otherwise it was showing error.
Also, I'm using the latest version of mmpeg.
input.mkv :

output.mp4 :

input.mkv has the following streams,codecs :

I searched a lot, but couldn't find a way to make mov_text subtitles bigger. How can I make them bigger?
Or Please suggest any other way to retain the subtitles while remuxing from mkv to mp4.

I was having a similar issue and realised it was because the subtitles contained style information that VLC was only rendering in the output file, not the input file. Have you checked if the SSA subtitle file contains some style specifications like font size? To copy the contents of the SSA without the style information you can use
ffmpeg -i input.mkv -map 0:s -c:s text output.srt

and then mux those into the mp4.

I consider subtitle text rendering is part of the player feature. If you are using VLC, may this link, https://wiki.videolan.org/VLC_HowTo/Adjust_subtitle_font_settings/, help?
I had tried on a mkv to mp4 video, before

After, I changed the VLC subtitle font size to larger, exited the program and replayed it again, i got

I already tried to change font size, appearance from vlc preferences, as I mentioned in the post. But it did not have any affect on the subtitiles.

i updated my answer with screen-capture

Every other text becomes large except the subtitles.ScreenShot  , Also you can notice that the subtitles are not hardcoded. Still their size is unaffected by changes in vlc preferences.


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Unselect after making a cut in Davinci Resolve 15
After I make a cut in the middle of the clip I would like to have only the part of the clip I want selected not both (previously only one) clips selected, since it takes more time to than deselect both and select only the one i want deleted.
Any advice?

You'll need to be more specific about the exact steps you're using to get a good answer.  Is "Selection Follows Playhead" active in the "Timeline" menu, or not?  When you "make a cut in the middle of the clip," are you using the blade tool, or keyboard shortcuts?  In many cases in Resolve, toggling the SFP control will give you the behavior you want if it's not behaving the way you expect.

I use shortcuts to make my edits (B for making a cut instantly). after I make an edit I would like only the second clip selected not both (now there are two clips bcz I split them)

Here you can see both clips being selected. How do I tell the software I would only like the second clip selected by default?
Thanks!!

Assuming you work in the edit window, I guess you're using following:

press B to select Blade cut tool
mouse click on clip where you want to cut it
press A to switch to select mode
select cutted part I want to delete
press Delete

You can achieve something similar with Trim tool:

press T to select Blade cut tool
mouse click on clip where you want to cut it
press Shift+[ to Trim start (from left)
or Trim End with Shift+] (from right side)

This will make the clip shorter and if you click on the clip you'll see that it continues (the white box) only some part is shown:

now you can move which part of the clip is shown by pressing < or > (comma and dot keys)

This answer doesn't mention the "Selection Follows Playhead" toggle, which fundamentally changes the way editing behaves in Resolve, nor does it mention the Auto Select target toggles, which also have a significant impact on how the edit controls behave.  If SPF is on, whatever clip's under the playhead will become re-selected if the playhead moves in the example above.  And if you'd used command-B to place the cut instead of "B" key, then click, the clip would stay selected the whole time.


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How do you organise your timeline clips in Premier Pro
I would like your opinion or the way you organize your clips for this situation:
A few days ago I got raw footage around 6h in length, 1 camera. It was recording all the time without cutting files on angles or scene changes...
So my workflow for this situation is to drag all to the timeline (Premiere Pro) and watch it all on fast forward, clean up trash and leave what could go in the final video.
At this stage, I have around 30m of footage left, around 900 clips and the final video should be 8m.
Those 900 clips contain around 30 different topics (people, objects, details etc.)
So I have 30 groups on the timeline, each group around 30 clips, and blank space between them.
I would like to have some kind of folders with group names that I can easily access.
If I drag a group of edited clips to a new folder in Project it will contain full unedited clips.
So my usual way is to have all on one timeline, including the final video that I am creating and going back and forth looking for next A or B clip on this same timeline.
I am 100% sure there must be a smarter way to do this, where I have all clips group under same name (I do not use labels/color as they do not mean much If i need 30 different colors) so please advise.

Opinion-Based questions are generally not appropriate for this forum.

I would like to hear how others solve this issue

In this scenario, I start out with a single long sequence.
I make cuts wherever the good stuff is, and move it up one layer to identify it.
I duplicate the sequence, then label the old sequence as unedited, and the new sequence as "edits".
I delete all the unnecessary stuff on the lower layer, then duplicate again, and make a sequence with all the good stuff in a single sequence with all the gaps removed.
If I need to split things up thematically, I would duplicate and rename sequences down to whatever granularity makes sense.
Then I would start labelling, colouring and adding markers as appropriate.
Would be interested to hear how others do it.

feels like this is also relevant sadly https://video.stackexchange.com/questions/29538/is-it-possible-to-search-all-markers-in-premiere


text:
How can I programatically identify video frames containing a fixed rectangular area of a certain color?
I have video material containing frames with a rectangular area of uniform color interspersed with other content.  I would like to identify these frames, with the intent of removing them. The technique discussed here  looks promising, as does the ffmpeg blackdetect filter on its own.  However, I need to be able to specify the color of the rectangle for each video.  It is not always black.

Identify a logo should be part of the CV. My suggestion is to use the idea of checking the logo from png (https://ai-facets.org/robust-logo-detection-with-opencv/) and modify the code to read a frame from a video (https://opencv-python-tutroals.readthedocs.io/en/latest/py_tutorials/py_gui/py_video_display/py_video_display.html)
Hope this help


text:
Is 8 Bit 4:2:0 chroma subsampling "good enough" for chroma key?
My school bought a Panasonic 4K camcorder (which I don't remember exactly which model) pointed at a green screen and this got me thinking.
If it's a HC-X1000 with it's tiny sized sensor and 8 Bit 4:2:0 (In HDMI output too!) it probably means it won't record green screen and subject transition nicely.
So what I wonder is. Is 4:2:0 really enough for chroma key? I have heard even 4:2:2 has problems when it comes to chroma key so I am worried and would like some clarification
Also, If I downscale 4k 4:2:0 to 1080p somehow will it mean it will become 4:2:2 footage? I have thought about trying to do this then doing some recent "Artificial Intelligence Supersampling" wizardry to push it back to 4k

4:2:0 subsampled to 1080p is absolutely 4:2:2. Scaling it back up using AI is probably going to introduce a metric sh!t ton of artefacts and weirdness though. What are you delivering? Unless you're delivering to cinema most people are going to be watching in HD.

@stib I honestly don't know. I am an intern at a TV station and I am pretty sure my teachers will ask for help sooner or later.

Hah, in my country broadcast TV is almost all 720p, not even 1080p.

"Good enough"? Sure. I wouldn't love to work with subsampled footage for keying, though. You want to maximise resolution, minimise or avoid subsampling and avoid spill. If your screen is well lit, you got the best circumstances.
So yeah, on paper, a chromatically subsampled file will give you more artefacts and jagged edges in your matte compared to a prores4444 or raw-recording. It is still a workable compression, though. Just try to optimise everything else I mentioned.

Four big factors in your results...
About 10 years ago, I was using HDV, which is not only 4:2:0, but is actually 1440 pixels wide, stretched to 1920 wide. At the time, I wasn't always happy with the results, though recently I went back and revisited it with more experience and better tools and I was actually happy with the results.
Four things to consider:

Light things well. If your green screen is unevenly lit or has wrinkles or different colors in it, you're starting with problems that 4:2:0 will make much harder to fix. Work harder to get it right and that work will provide benefits throughout the rest of the process. (This also includes the foreground -- though watch spill and shadows on the background. If the foreground is too bright, you'll end up compensating and making the background too dark, and vice-versa, and too bright causes saturation problems and too dark creates noise and saturation problems.)

Avoid spill and reflection on the subject. Make sure the subject is far enough from the green screen and perhaps has some rim lighting to cancel any green spill. Also, try to avoid shiny materials near edges. For example, I recently did something that involved a puppet that had whiskers that were really reflective and reflected a lot of the green. Of course, this is difficult if you're on a budget and have a smaller screen and fewer lights. Also make sure you don't have green (if using green screen) in the foreground. Watch clothing, etc, that is in the same area of the color wheel as your green screen.

If you have flexibility of background, take advantage of that to help hide border issues. You're likely to get black, white, gray borders after keying, so depending on what's happening, if the background can help hide this, that's helpful. (Of course, if you have a specific background called out in advance -- a particular photo of a particular location rather than a kind of location -- you can't do this.)

Use the best software for keying that you can, and don't expect a single key to handle it all. You may use one key for someone's head, another for their body, and various garbage and solid masks to control things. It's tempting to keep tweaking keying controls or switching keyers (if you have options) to try to get the Perfect Key (tm), but in reality you will need to use multiple layers and tools.

Again, if your input quality (screen lighting, etc) is lower even a dozen layers and effects will probably not salvage it.
Bonus point 5: Test everything. Set things up, can you truly get even lighting on your green screen that's sufficiently bright and even? Check it on a scope, or pull some footage into your program and look at scopes. Document that setup exactly so you can reproduce it. Check clothing and props on the taping day to look for that lime-colored belt that the actor wore thinking "It's not green" or not thinking at all.
You'll probably get reasonable results.
[EDIT: I jumped into an answer before reading everything. 4K footage -- if your delivery is at 720p or 1080p -- covers a lot of problems. As stib says, downsampling essentially gets you 4:2:2.]

Nice tips. This made me remember the HD 1000E cameras we still have which are hooked up to the Blackmagic video mixer through hdmi to ethernet adapters.

At least the mc2500 cameras we have can 422 output through hdmi.

What exactly do you mean by covers a lot of problems?

@DeltaOscarUniform: The OP was really concerned about 4:2:0, and my main point was that I've gotten okay keying out of 4:2:0 by focusing on the fundamentals. But having 4K resolution, the whole "is 4:2:0" part drops out. You've got a lot of resolution there, if you're delivering 1080 or less. Of course fundamentals still matter, but the fear should be gone.


text:
h264 Settings for Motion Tracking & Analysis (technical photography)?
I'm trying to do "scientific" video motion analysis. Right now I'm using a Raspberry Pi camera, which records natively in h264, which then needs to be converted/wrapped as MP4.
Is h264 an appropriate format for constant/fixed frame rate "progressive" images? I'm already noticing curvature of lines with motion, with the default settings.
Right now I'm using the open source Tracker software to do the motion analysis.
What would be a good starting point for raspivid and gpac MP4Box settings, to get crisp "progressive" images (ie. full frame captures, with minimal compression/motion estimation), and preserving the frame rate through to the final MP4?
Or is a different capture format better for this purpose? Eventually I'd like to get high frame rate (~250 FPS or so) - low cost camera suggestions also appreciated!

My suggestion is MPEG-2. For tracking and analysis, latency is the concern. H.264 is more complex than MPEG2, it introduces high latency as well. Since your content is not going to stream over network, i suggest MPEG-2
OpenCV always is the starting point, you may check https://www.pyimagesearch.com/2015/03/30/accessing-the-raspberry-pi-camera-with-opencv-and-python/ and https://www.pyimagesearch.com/2018/07/30/opencv-object-tracking/
Good luck!


text:
FFMpeg: scale and then overlay keeping overlay aspect ratio
I'm trying to scale a video, and then apply an overlay keeping the aspect ration of the same.
This adds the overlay, but it stretches it to the same aspect ratio of the video which is what I'm trying to avoid:
ffmpeg -y -i video.mov -i watermark.png -filter_complex "scale=-1:1280:flags=bicubic,overlay=(main_w-overlay_w)/2:main_h-overlay_h" -crf 0 -preset ultrafast -c:v mpeg4 -qscale:v 10 -c:a: copy out.mp4

Any help will be truly appreciated!

Unclear. I assume you want both the video and watermark to appear undistorted, right?

Ended up solving it through scale2ref:
ffmpeg -y -i video.mov -i watermark.png -filter_complex "[0:v]scale=-1:1280:flags=lanczos[bg];[1:v][bg]scale2ref=(250/180)*$ih/8/sar:$ih/8[wm][base];[base][wm]overlay=(main_w-overlay_w)/2:(main_h-overlay_h)-overlay_h" -crf 0 -preset ultrafast -c:v mpeg4 -qscale:v 10 -c:a: copy out.mp4`

Where 250 is the width of the overlay in pixels, and 180 its height.
This outputs a video of N:1280, with an overlay of 250x180 at the bottom-center of it.

Why two $ih? Was that a typo?


text:
What's the best way to visually compare codec compression?
Maybe I'm mistaken, but a long while ago I seem to have read an article about comparing videos encoded by different codecs.
Basically what I think what was done, was to put them together in a timeline - and by use of some effects - "null" them so you could only see the difference.
Now that I'm writing it down, I'm not so sure anymore - but I just wanted to check if someone knows a way to efficiently compare codec compressions.

I can only think of 2 perspectives: industrial and recreational.
Industrial: visual examination is super expensive, you may take a look of how Netflix do the comparison https://netflixtechblog.com/performance-comparison-of-video-coding-standards-an-adaptive-streaming-perspective-d45d0183ca95
Recreational: you may check out youtube with codec comparison e.g.

 or doom9

Hope this answers your questions.

I wouldn't say objective codec testing has to be super expensive. PSNR, SSIM, and VMAF are all freely available (as in beer and as in speech) in ffmpeg. Sure, if you want to use a commercial codec analysis system, like Interra Vega, you'll need the budget to support it.

Expensive, in my answer, refer to human involvement since workforce and working hour are limited; Better solution is automation.


text:
ffmpeg conversion - vp8 with alpha
I'm trying to convert a mov file (with alpha channel) to webm, vp8 with alpha, on windows.
ffmpeg -i C0016.mov -s 960x540 -vcodec vp8 -pix_fmt yuva420p -metadata:s:v:0 alpha_mode="1" c0016_alpha.webm
gives me:
[NULL @ 00000204af221e80] Unable to find a suitable output format for 'c0016_alpha.webm'
c0016_alpha.webm: Invalid argument
How can I fix it?

Share full log.

May i know the reason of using the option -pix_fmt yuva420p ?

I took the sample from apple https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2019/506/
My command line using on colab was
!ffmpeg -y -i https://devstreaming-cdn.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2019/506lqy7sprpfyo800/506/506_hd_hevc_video_with_alpha.mp4 -s 960x540 -vcodec vp8 -metadata:s:v:0 alpha_mode="1" c0016_alpha.webm

Hope it matches your scenario.


text:
Can anyone help me with a command line to convert .asf to .mp4 using ffmpeg?
I am using the command line ffmpeg -i test1.asf -c:v libx264 -strict -2 test1.mp4 but I get the below error 'test.asf: Invalid data found when processing input'
Any suggestions, please?
thank you

Do you have any problem with samples from https://filesamples.com/formats/asf? the conversions are doing fine on colab.

sounds like something wrong with your input file. Try ffprobe test1.asf and see what it says.


text:
Importing Clip with Alpha Transparency into Resolve
Working on a video for a client with a third party animation company.
I need to figure out a file format they can export video with alpha transparency, that Resolve will import correctly.
Ordinarily I use the following settings to export video (say from After Effects) with alphas that Resolve can understand...
Quicktime, RGB + Alpha, Straight (Unmatted), Apple Prores 4444
But this company use Windows machines, and cannot export ProRes. They've tried sending me PNG encoded MOV files but Resolve can't even open them.
Does anyone know what file formats - that can be easily rendered to from say Cinema 4D or After Effects - that Resolve will be able to ingest properly preserving alpha transparency?

After Effects is totally able to export Prores 4444 on Windows. I do it every day. But for heaven's sake, use image sequences like a professional, Quicktime is for amateurs.

Just to clarify - the version of AE that the third party company I'm working with uses is outdated and cannot export prores on windows. Can you be specific about the image sequence settings you'd use. As a 'professional' editor and shooter, I do not usually work with transparency in this way.

Tiffs are quickest, support alpha and are lossless. I used to use pngs, which are smaller, until someone wised me up on how slow they are to read and write. Just render as an image sequence (there are pre-made image sequence output modules, I'm pretty sure one is tiff sequence) and Resolve will be able to open it as if it was a movie file.

Thanks, thats very helpful.


text:
Final Cuto Pro X sort by modified date
I have few videos in one event. The problem is, that for some reason (probably because of moving them from disk to disk), Modify date is the original one (the correct one) rather than Create date.
In the finder, I can do: sort by -> Modified date, and everything is correctly in order. But when I import those videos into the event in the FCP, it keeps sorting by Content Created.
I cannot see an option in FCP that would allow me to sort videos in the event by "modification date", is it even possible ? (or at least keep the order imposed by the finder?)

Seems like the question is asked on other places as well, with no answer so I will propose a workaround as I don't think FCP X gives you option to sort by Modified metadata field.
Bash script that adds a modification date at the beginning if each file in the directory in epoch. Then sorting in FCP by name.

Open terminal and go the the directory you want to apply changes (in my case a directory with videos).
do cat > script.sh
Enter: for f in *; do mv -- "$f" "$(stat -f %m "$f")-$f"; done
Hit enter and then ctrl + D
Now type: bash script.sh
Open FCP X and do Sort by: name

Note:
In order to revert the process, all you have to do is to replace what is in the point 3 to: for f in *; do mv -v "$f" "${f#*-}"; done


text:
Budget Mandalorian backgrounds
If I have a projector, an iphone with (basic) motion tracking, and a fast-ish computer running Unreal or something similar, has anyone figured out a way to make Mandalorian-style responsive backdrops on a tiny budget, by using the iPhone’s motion tracking, or something similar? Seems like it might be possible soon?

Soon? Definitely not. That tech has taken 25 years to make its way from the £20M cave systems for one person, to Vox, which is similar in cost, but makes it simpler for multiple persons+cameras.

Wasn't there a hack for the Wii about a decade ago that did this?

Yes. 12 years ago. That’s why I’m surprised there’s nothing more formalised since then. I could see it being useful: https://youtu.be/Jd3-eiid-Uw

Update - this is the closest thing I've found, but you need to use Unreal and have a fast graphics card:


text:
Why aren't chapters being added to my m2ts using tsmuxer?
Question - Why aren't chapters being added to my m2ts using tsmuxer?
Background I have a mkv file with 61 chapters. I confirmed the presence of those chapters by using mkvtoolnix. I want to convert the mkv to a bluray ISO. But whenever I use tsmuxer, the produced m2ts file lacks any chapters. I confirmed this by opening the file in VLC player; no chapters are listed.
Please note that I am adding a custom chapters list in tsmuxer.

On the input screen, I can see the video codec is indeed H.264 and the audio is AC3. I've pasted the input view from tsmuxer below.

Command line arguments are:
MUXOPT --no-pcr-on-video-pid --new-audio-pes --blu-ray --vbr  --custom-chapters=00:00:00.000;00:02:34.000;00:05:04.000;00:08:45.000;00:10:58.000;00:15:36.000;00:18:05.000;00:22:46.000;00:24:42.000;00:28:14.000;00:31:25.000;00:34:49.000;00:37:46.000;00:41:06.500;00:43:39.000;00:47:31.000;00:51:32.000;00:55:52.000;00:58:23.000;01:01:53.000;01:05:16.000;01:09:48.000;01:12:52.000;01:16:25.000;01:19:06.000;01:23:14.000;01:27:35.000;01:30:36.000;01:33:15.000;01:37:26.000;01:40:56.000;01:46:10.000;01:48:35.000;01:52:14.000;01:54:18.000;01:59:38.000;02:03:04.000;02:08:26.000;02:11:30.000;02:15:11.000;02:19:07.000;02:22:57.000;02:26:04.000;02:28:53.000;02:33:00.000;02:36:30.000;02:38:39.000;02:42:59.000;02:46:18.000;02:49:52.000;02:52:37.000;02:55:44.000;03:00:54.000;03:05:29.000;03:09:23.000;03:13:14.000;03:15:19.000;03:17:55.000;03:21:24.000;03:25:15.000;03:28:45.000 --vbv-len=500 V_MPEG4/ISO/AVC, "F:\Videos\Yule Log Project\Movies\test5.mkv", forceSEI, contSPS, track=1, lang=und A_AC3, "F:\Videos\Yule Log Project\Movies\test5.mkv", track=2, lang=und

M2TS as a format / container is not able to store chapter information itself. On Blu-Ray disks, the chapter data is stored in the playlist files. Therefore you won't see chapters when you just load an M2TS file in a player.
I am actually a total newbie to this, so I have no clue whether tsMuxeR creates appropriate playlist files when producing the ISO file. If so, you should see the chapters when you load the playlist file into the player, not the M2TS file.

FIGURED IT OUT THX TO THIS POST I FOUND ON ANOTHER FORUM PEOPLE!!
"Find the main movie .m2ts file (could be 00001.m2ts)
and find the matching playlist file in the PLAYLIST folder (would be 00001.mpls).
Add only the playlist file in tsMuxeR and the matching .m2ts file will be imported.
Go to the Blu-ray tab at top of tsMuxeR and select "Custom chapters list".
Mux whatever you need and you have the original chapters."
you just need to add the playlist file into tsmuxer not the m2ts file! and add ur chapters and it worked for me perfectly! hope this helps you! :D

This is not an answer to the question. The OP converts from MKV to M2TS. There are no playlists in this case. Your answer describes the opposite process.


text:
can I use ffmpeg drawtext filter as a passthrough/identity filter? (and/or performance question)
Background:  I have a script which needs to apply a variable number (from zero to 'a few') drawtext  filters to a base stream, and I'm trying to balance performance and coding/maintenance concerns.  The coding concern here is that I want to be able to use the same base code for each possible filter even though some of them won't be enabled for a given execution of the program.
So... the question: is there an explicit identity or passthrough option for the drawtext filter?  In an ideal world, there would be some option to leave the filter as part of the graph, but tell the code that this particular instance of the drawtext filter should just be an identity filter: said another this is a 'do nothing' or 'passthrough' filter with minimal performance impact.
I could think of a couple ways to possibly do this:

pass a null string as the 'text' value?  I think this would require explicit support within that specific filter?
pass some values using timeline editing that end up making the filter do nothing?  Are there well-known values here (something like "if frame number is less than zero") that are valid but would always evaluate as false?

I'm sure there are many other possibilities - I'm hoping someone has already cracked this particular nut.
Is my thinking correct that most of the compute effort ends up being in the actual filtering and the subsequent encoding, rather than the act of passing the frames into and out of the filter?
(I think this should be here rather that a different stackoverflow sub-site, but if this is better suited for some other place, feel free to either move it or let me know and I'll move it...)

Yes, method 2 is suitable. Add something like enable=0


text:
What actually happens to footage that is upscaled or downscaled?
I was wondering if there was any hard number evidence for upscaling or downscaling footage to a certain raster size, and what happens to the quality or if any degradation or improvements are made to the output.
I know anecdotally that if you take a 320x240 video file and upscale it to 1920x1080 that the quality is lost - mainly from stretching pixels.
I know anecdotally that if you take a 3840x2160 video file and downscale it to 1024x576 that the quality in the larger areas remain, and but the finer details can be lost when compressed into a smaller pixel area.
I'm currently in an environment workplace that uses only SD outputs, but for some reason there is a push to take the incoming media (which can range from 320x240 all the way to 8k) and conform it to 1920x1080. When it is imported into the editor, it is an SD project, and burnt to DVD-Video.
For some reason the explanation of matching our output raster or device (DVD-Video) doesn't seem as sufficient evidence, so I wanted to know if there were any numbers or studies or factual papers I could use!

For the most part assume the conversions are performed with "off the shelf" converters, which most likely run ffmpeg in their processing. All resizes with in the applications too would be default - so Bicubic interpolation is most common.

... Depends...
There are many concepts that need to be differentiated. Let me explore a bit.
Information
The first one is that we need to think about an image as information. So we need to ask first. Is the information lost? Is the information modified? Is it improved? Keep this concept in mind.
Scaling
And now let me apply this idea to another word. Scaling.
Scaling "per se" does not modify the initial information. It only adapts it to conform to another viewing size or display.
Take your 320x240 video file and do nothing with it. Only play it on any monitor to full screen. The video is exactly the same. If viewed on a large screen you will surely notice the pixels, but that is your perception. The information on the video file is exactly the same.

Now let us actually scale the image so it is no longer a 320x240 file. Normally you would like to use round multiples. 2x, 3x, 4x. If you use a "nearest neighbor" scaling method, the information will be exactly the same.
A 240 P image 4 times would be a 960P image. But scaling it to 1080 has a compromise of how you scale some pixels, the factor is 4.5x so, either some pixels are scaled 4 times and some other 5 times, or you average some values.
Resampling
And here is the key. An operation you are now performing is not scaling, it is resampling. Taking some values, and converting them into other values.
If I say that John has $20 and Mike has $10. I have the exact information.
If I say that the average they have is $15 it destroys the original information. It could be that one has $30 and the other has nothing. Or that the amounts are inverted.
So, resampling is the one that compromises the information.

mainly from stretching pixels.

Here you are probably referring to the aspect ratio. Which is another thing to consider. It can be a resampling maintaining the aspect ratio. Keep that in mind.

I know anecdotally that if you take a 320x240 video file and upscale it to 1920x1080 that the quality is lost

Not really.
First of all, you perceive it as low quality because you are now used to see HD images, so you are adding how you perceive the resulting image.
Again, see that image on a watch, or use it on a nanotechnology screen on a label on a soda can, and you would find it impressive.
Quality is a process, not an end result... necessarily

The algorithm
Our capacity to percive information depends on the information itself.
Our eyes can detect detail if there is contrast. And we percive this contrast on the edges of a shape.
Some resampling algorithms try to enhance the detail on the borders of the shapes. Some try to enhance it, some try to generate new information guessing what values should be there.

At the end there is always a compromise on what do you expect to see, what tools are at our disposal, and how much of the original information you can, or want to keep.

P.S. Downsampling always reduces the ammount of information, but it is only important if the information is relevant.
A 4k video file of a completly white wall will probably not have relevant information, so we can resample safely to SD. But if we have a small text painted there, probably this text will be lost on the downsampling.

May i understand your question as

How do i have someone/something that understands the missing puzzles from
my upscaled images?

If so, you are talking some intelligence/experience in upscaling or AI-upscaling. Then, plz take a look of AI Upscalers; it mentions

An open source AI upscaler (super sampler) based on a generative adversarial network architecture.
An open source image enhancer that seeks to restore lost texture details from known types
Commercial super sampler that uses artificial intelligence

Good luck!


text:
Is there a way to cut a layer according to the another, all at once in Premiere?
I'm using Adobe Premiere CS6, and I have a bunch of layers that I cut hundreds of times, but I had the audio track on lock by accident. Is there a way I can just have that layer cut the same as the others all at once and now have to cut them one by one?


text:
Software to create transparent GIFs?
I have to create high quality GIFs with transparent backgrounds for a gig, Blender can render transparent videos with the quicktime codec, but do you know a tool to convert them to transparent GIFs, without quality loss? The only one I heard about is Photoshop, all online tools lower the resolution, and Virtualdub reduces the colors and doesn't convert to transparent GIF.

Based on your post, You have the wrong expectations, and for that, a wrong workflow. Let me explain.

Blender can render transparent "renders", they can be PNG sequences or can be compiled in a video that supports transparency. NOt every video file can support this.

"convert them to transparent GIFs, without quality loss?"

Quality is a process, it is not something that you "lose" somewhere. What you can potentially lose is information.
If you generate a flat colors animation on Blender when reducing the palette to the 256 allowed by gif format you would still have enough room because you actually planned the animation to have flat colors and just some of them.
But if you generated a photographic image or one with gradients, you did not plan them well enough considering the limitations of the GIF format. The Gif format is popular again because of the Flat design look.
If you have a gradient it needs to be adapted to a limited palette.
So, using GIF files as an output format requires a very controlled workflow.

The same with transparency. You can only have 1 of the 256 colors transparent. You can not have gradients.
If you need the gradients and smooth transparency you have some alternatives:
https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/121859/creating-high-quality-animated-backgrounds-from-illustrator-files/121890#121890

And answering the question, you can assign a transparent color using Gimp.
Another option, if you like to write instructions: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11389721/how-do-i-set-a-colour-to-be-transparent-in-a-gif-using-imagemagick
You can also look for some simple GIF makers, some can be free. https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=Gif+maker%2C+Gif+creator

Export at ProRes 4444 "millions of colors+" with Alpha.
If you’re not on a Mac you can still use QuickTime based on these settings:
￼
More info here:
https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/2050/any-video-formats-that-render-with-alpha-channel
Use something like GIF Brewery to make the conversion. GIF Brewery is free and available for Mac.
On a PC you could try https://www.screentogif.com/ or an online gif converter such as https://ezgif.com/optimize (if you don’t have access to Photoshop).
GIFs are an old format, and the quality for the file size is never great... Choices about resolution, file size and palette size can improve quality considerably. Examples based on Photoshop: https://blog.bannersnack.com/reduce-the-size-animated-gifs/

I'm not a mac user

Ok- improved the answer for non Mac users

Is it actually available for PC? All I found was an android emulator for the app.

You’re right. Updated with alternatives.


text:
Add audio bulk in the video file
Good Day. I have 1000 Video files ( without Audio ) I want to add audio in the video. same audio for all the videos. Any software suggestions?

the Linux script should be
#!/bin/bash
for filename in /Videos/*; do
    ffmpeg -i $filename -i <audio_file> -map 0:v -map 1:a -c:v copy -shortest OutputWithAudio_$filename
done

Not just linux, that will work on macs and Windows computers with bash installed.

Ffmpeg is by far the best software for this kind of thing. Here's the Powershell version for windows to add to @xer-rex's answer:
get-childItems "c:\path\to\videos\folder\"|%{
  ffmpeg -i $filename -i <audio_file> -map 0:v -map 1:a -c:v copy -shortest ("OutputWithAudio_" + $_.name)
}


text:
Which free video editing software do you recommend?
I need to make a simple video for my current work and I am looking for a decent free video editing software. In the past I used Adobe Premiere and I am used to it. But I probably won't have to do any video editing in the future and it is not worth paying for a software. It would also be better if the software were not very simple, since I could use it also for more ambitious personal projects.

I suggest you can google it, my finding is https://www.lifewire.com/best-open-source-video-editing-software-4590219

If you search this site you'll see that this question has been asked and answered quite a few times.

Thank you xer-rex.

stib, I know, but the question was asked a couple of years ago and I suppose there is always something new or something better.


text:
Is it possible to extract frames from corrupted mp4?
I have an mp4 file that I'm trying to recover. The file is missing a moov atom. I've tried all the usual utilities like ffmpeg, remoover, untrunc but all of them failed. I'm wondering now if it is at all possible to just extract a few frames from the video. It is timestamped security footage so any frames I could pull could be useful.

Try TMPG Smart Renderer https://tmpgenc.pegasys-inc.com/en/product/tmsr5.html
If anything is recoverable, this tool should work. If it can't pull anything from the file, I don't know of any other tool that would. The trial version should work fine for you to get what you need.


text:
Merging sequences and files from one project into another in Adobe Premiere Pro
I have a project that I am working on which required a number of sequences creating in a short time frame. A colleague assisted and I would like to merge his files into the project I am currently working within. The aim is to have well ordered final project with all assets in one place.
There are a number of offline links when I bring the camera footage across from his project. The original file paths are pointing to his local machine.
In Adobe Indesign, there is a feature called "relink to folder" which is very useful to link up multiple missing image links that have been moved to a different location. Is there an equivalent feature in Adobe Premiere Pro? At the time of writing, it appears I need to relink one at a time and I was hoping for a more efficient way to do this. Any suggestions would be good.

If you are using project , it is because all projects are built on a different system
With its features, the operating system is embedded. Therefore, while running the project on your operating system, you may encounter messages such as the image below, and you must act on the option that you see in the image.

By clicking this button you can search for your missing files, you can even create a file with missing names and paste it in the project
Also, if you need a sequence, enter the items of one templates in another premiere pro templates First you have to run the main project, then import the project from the file menu to get a message like the one below.

I hope I was able to help
Ask if you have any questions
Good luck


text:
Crop HD (1920x1080) video ratio from the center in ffmpeg
I have an HD video (1920x1080). I am trying to crop the video from the center so the resolution is (960x1080) and looks like a portrait video. I have tried the following command with no luck:
ffmpeg -i in.mp4 -filter:v "crop=960:1080:480:0" -c:a copy out.mp4
This just outputs a video at the same size: 1920x1080
Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Share full log.

Your command is doing fine, and ffprobe will show the resolution as 960x1080
  Metadata:
    major_brand     : isom
    minor_version   : 512
    compatible_brands: isomiso2avc1mp41
    encoder         : Lavf57.83.100
  Duration: 00:10:45.14, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 1969 kb/s
    Stream #0:0(und): Video: h264 (High) (avc1 / 0x31637661), yuv420p, 960x1080 [SAR 1:1 DAR 8:9], 1838 kb/s, 25 fps, 25 tbr, 12800 tbn, 50 tbc (default)
    Metadata:
      handler_name    : VideoHandler

My suggestion is to go through some of the examples from https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-filters.html#crop to see if you have any expected result.

Try this:
ffmpeg -i in.mp4 -vf "crop=960:1080" out.mp4


text:
How to preserve colorspace in ffmpeg
I have a x264 video with yuvj420p(pc, smpte170m) color space and i want to convert this video to x265 and reduce its file size. I have used this command ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vcodec libx265 -crf 20 output.mp4 but the video got darker and when i runned ffprobe i saw the colorspace changed to yuvj420p(pc, progressive) How can i preserve color space while transcoding?

This command preserved the colorspace and also video didnt get darker after transcoding
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -color_primaries smpte170m -color_trc smpte170m -colorspace smpte170m -r 25 -crf 18 output.mp4

source: https://kdenlive.org/en/project/color-hell-ffmpeg-transcoding-and-preserving-bt-601/
more about colorspace: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/colorspace


text:
Is there a way to delete cache files on a per-project basis in After Effects?
Is there a way to delete cache files per-project in After Effects, instead of by date or by size of the cache?

Have you tried going to the cache folder and seeing if there's an identifiable projectfolder structure? I don't have an AE machine in front of me, so I can't check.


text:
How to fix this screwed part of Audio
i am new to video production , and i know that audio is a big part of the production process and cannot be messed up .
here is a audio that i recorded and then reduced the noise from audacity and exported
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1a5ZelYB6noyZhrVenkins0wZI62GC4Yj/view?usp=sharing
how can i further improve this audio

Audio is not my expertise, i try my best.
The problems of your source are

volume is low
speech is fast
sound is dull
bass is insufficient
treble is high

Therefore,

I use the command to find the max volume
ffmpeg -i source.wav -af "volumedetect" -vn -sn -dn -f null /dev/null
, which is -6.4dB, then i transform the max volume to 0dB by using audio filter volume=6.4dB

I slow down the speech by using audio filter atempo=0.8

I make it lively by using audio filter aecho=0.06:0.9:50:0.7

I boost the bass by using audio filter firequalizer=gain_entry='entry(0,24);entry(250,12);entry(500,4);entry(1000,2);

I decrease the treble by using audio filter firequalizer=gain_entry='entry(4000,-4);entry(16000,-20)'

In conclusion, the command is
ffmpeg -y -i source.wav -af "\
volume=6.4dB,\
atempo=0.8,\
aecho=0.06:0.9:50:0.7,\
firequalizer=gain_entry='\
entry(0,24);entry(250,12);entry(500,4);entry(1000,2);\
entry(4000,-4);entry(16000,-20)'" \
output.wav

Hope you like it, good luck.

I share the code https://colab.research.google.com/gist/xer-rex/fc1ea362f27699cfe2375d71332a0a10/audio_transform.ipynb
you can just do the playback on output.wav

i don't think that the audio has a lot of reverb or echo(idk the difference between reverb and echo) it would be helpful if you could check if it is same in your system. My desired result is something suitable for Youtube :)

The aecho document is https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-filters.html#aecho; it might help you get to the point of your "desired result", or not. I have no further comments on the subjectivity of hearing.


text:
Search two hour video for a specific five second clip
I have a five second clip that is stripped from a much longer video.  I need to identify exactly where in the longer video this clip begins/ends.  There could be multiple occurrences of the clip, I would like to identify them all, not just the first one.  How would I go about doing this?
I have used the mpdecimate filter in ffmpeg to identify repeated frames before, but I can't quite think of anything to use for this specific task of searching for a video within a video.

I can think you should try this project, https://github.com/nielstenboom/recurring-content-detector. I would recommend trying the Color Histogram or Color Texture Motion algorithms. The Convoluted Neural Network one is quite compute intensive and the results haven’t been that good for me. Since your looking for such a small clip, you might need to reduce the frame skip parameter to get more accurate timings.

Exactly what I am looking for, but not setup to do any Python development.  Thank you!  I will take a stab at making a wrapper

I believe you can run it as a docker container, if you don’t want to setup a full python environment with all dependencies.

Perhaps you can export both videos (long and short) to frames and then use duplicate image finder software to identify the matching frames?
I don't have concrete suggestions, but overall the process would be:

Export the short video to frames to one folder, the filename of every frame should be the timecode of that frame for easy identification and sorting. This answer on StackOverflow explains partially how to do this with ffmpeg.
Export the long video to frames in a similar way
Get a duplicate image finder, a web search will turn up many. Ensure that the software uses the content to identify duplicates, not the metadata. This Photo.SE question has some suggestions.
Take the first frame of the short video and set it as your reference image in your duplicate finder and run the software in the folder that contains the frames from your long video.
If all goes well the software will return a set of frames that visually match the reference frame. From the filename of those matches you can identify the timecode.

Thank you for the reply, I am looking for something much more efficient.  I was thinking some way to hash a sequence of frames and scan for it with a filter.  The video equivalent of the classic Shazam app, if you will.  I know it will be an intensive operation, but I can not consider exporting every frame.

I would also prefer a shazam like app, but I was not able to find one. Hopefully someone else can suggest it. But exporting every frame maybe sounds a more labour intensive than it is: ffmpeg can do this fairly quickly, you just need some spare harddisk space (relevant question on SO). Perhaps you can indicate in your question why exporting every frame is not an option? Is there some diskspace requirement?


text:
Add external mic using Sony "A/V R" plug
I have a Sony HDR-CX100 video camera that I would like to connect an external mic to (3.5mm plug), but the camera has no dedicated mic input.
However, it as an "A/V R" plug:

Before you say "it's not possible", I also have a Sony Sports pack SPK-CXA that plugs into that port which includes it's own microphones (in addition to remote controls). So technically it should be possible to input audio through that port.

So my question is has anyone seen a cable / dongle / adapter that would allow me to go from that A/V R plug on the camera to a simple 3.5mm mic port? Or would anyone have an idea on the pinouts to build one?

I could buy a new camera, but this one does everything I need otherwise, and seems a shame when a "simple" adapter should suffice.

Do you have the A/V cable for the camera? A quick google search shows a fairly standard breakout cable with RCA & S-Video plugs? So an RCA to 3.5mm converter should work with the existing AV cable? i.e. https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/142242765540

Thanks for the suggestion; I have the original output cable, and figured maybe in recording mode it would provide input, however I tried that and it still used the internal microphone.

In that case, my guess would be that the AV cable is "all" or "nothing" (which isn't uncommon). It will likely activate if there's a video signal there, like with your sports pack, but you can't use it as an "audio only" signal without a video signal as well. A quick search shows there were some proprietary Sony mics that could be used on this type of port, and some people even hacked these to make a standardised connector - https://www.camerahacker.com/Forums/DisplayComments.php?file=Video%20Camera/Sony/converting_AIS_to_mic_audio_jack. That might be the only way.

Note that I'm assuming based on this post that the camera has an AIS port https://www.cnet.com/forums/discussions/need-help-with-sony-hdr-cx100-camcorder-my-question-is-becau-344545/ - it doesn't seem there would be any way to get audio only in via the AV port, based on your tests.

Thanks for the suggestions. No, my camera does not even have an AIS port. It appears Sony must have specifically made this difficult in order to sell higher end cameras. I guess I'll have to upgrade my camera in order to use a separate wireless lapel mic as an audio feed.

Bummer, the CNET discussion made it sound like it had an AIS port, but if not, you're likely out of luck. Sony likely just don't expect that port to be used to do audio only input, I've got a couple of older cameras that work the same way via the AV cable (all or nothing), although they all have a separate mic input elsewhere on the camera - that not being available as an option is the odd part to me.


text:
What I want is free video editing software , I should be able to pick or cut video parts from any timeline by typing or moving the digital timeline?
ie.,
a)If I want to keep from 10 seconds to 20 seconds of the video then I should be able type “10” , “20”;
b)I don’t want 21 to 35 seconds;
c)If I want from 36 to 43 seconds of the video then I should be able type “36” , “43”?
d) combine (a) & (b)
You might be wondering why I require to type the numbers ?
This is because , if I don't type the timeline numbers. the clipping is not very accurate. In  YouCut Android App this option is there. But not 100%. Similar thing I am looking for in Windows for free.

the ffmpeg commands are
ffmpeg -y -i Sony_HDR_AX2000.mts -ss 10 -to 20 -c copy out_a.ts

for the case of a), and
ffmpeg -y -i Sony_HDR_AX2000.mts -ss 36 -to 43 -c copy out_b.ts

for the case of c)
Then, prepare a list.txt file as
# this is a comment
file './out_a.ts'
file './out_b.ts'

the ffmpeg concat files command is
ffmpeg -y -f concat -safe 0 -i list.txt -c copy out_d.ts

for case d)
References:

https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Seeking
https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Concatenate


text:
Does sound from boom operator mic end up being used in final mix in high end production or only used as reference for voiceover?
It seems like it is usually very noisy on set, I hardly can imagine that the sound from boom mic is good enough, so I wonder about its true purpose

It depends on the type of production and on the local traditions.
In the late fifties, the "Nouvelle Vague" in France and then in many other European countries changed the way many feature films were made. This was also made possible by new equipment like silent cameras, the portable Nagra sound recorder, and more light sensitive film material.
Since then, most features films in the countries influenced by this tradition use the direct sound recorded on stage. They only use dubbing exceptionally in scenes where the direct sound could not be used for whatever reason.
Other countries however, like the US, mostly use the direct sound as guide and do dubbing afterwards. But maybe that is only the case on big productions, and indie films are done differently.

Thanks! That's what I had suspected while watching those dubbing backstage videos on youtube... now I realize those were mostly with the scenes where it was shot on the move for example where it's impossible to record on stage

I'm not sure what sets you've been on, but usually if the sound is being recorded you can literally hear a pin drop. The whole point of a boom operator is to get the mic in a position where it can record good sound. Dubbing is used for some scenes, but for dramatic dialog you get better results recording the performance audio.
The theory behind the boom mic is that sound falls off in an exponential fashion, so the closer the mic is to the sound source, the louder that source will be relative to the background noise. Since you're also recording pictures you can't plonk a mic right in front of the actor as you would in a sound booth, you have to position it outside the field of view of the camera. Since the sound source is usually an actor's mouth, and the actor's mouth is usually near the top of frame, the best way to get a mic close to the sound source is to hang it over the actor, just out of frame. The boom operator will check with the camera operator to find the edges of frame before each shot.
Generally boom mics are directional so that they are more sensitive to sound sources in front of them, which also helps to reduce background sound. Another advantage of having a directional mic over the actor's head is that this means that it is then pointing at the ground, where there are less likely to be sound sources. A mic say, where the camera is will be pointing horizontally, and will pick up whatever is behind the actor.
For studio shoots where dialogue is recorded a sound stage is used. This is a studio that is sound-proofed to reduce both outside noise getting in, and reverberation from inside. Scenes that don't need recorded audio can be done on a silent stage, which is a studio that is not sound-proofed. For location shooting the sound recordist will often use sound treatment to reduce background noise and reverberation.

Thank you for such a detailed explanation and it all makes sense now! I haven't been to an actual set, was just watching backstages, so if I understand right while shooting they try to minimize all the background noise as much as possible and shut down diesel generators etc.


text:
Virtual webcams under MacOS 10.15 or later
Has anyone managed to get a virtual webcam functioning under MacOS 10.15 or later?
I used to use CamTwist but it doesn't seem to appear as a source in Google Hangouts any more.  Apparently WireCast works, but I'm looking for a free solution if possible.

Just noticed that 'OBS mac virtualcam' is now working on 10.15 - would be interested to see any alternative versions
https://github.com/johnboiles/obs-mac-virtualcam


text:
Generating thumbnail from only the first megabytes of a video file
I want to create one thumbnail consisting of the first frame of a video for arbitrary video files. I do it like this:
ffmpeg -i video.mkv -vf scale=w=300:h=300:force_original_aspect_ratio=decrease -frames:v 1 thumbnail.png

For performance considerations I was experimenting with only loading the first megabytes of a video instead of whole video files for this task.
In my experiments this works fine with some formats like mkv and mts and only sometimes with mp4 (I get errors - and no thumbnail, when the moov atom is not at the beginning of a file)
With what video file formats is it possible to generate thumbnails only from the first megabytes of a file, and with what formats is it not possible? Does it only depend on the container type or also on the codec? Can there be a reliable answer?

Can there be a reliable answer?

No.
As with almost everything is video. The real answer is: It depends.
With mp4, the moov must be at the beginning, AND the mdat must properly interleave tracks. For example, If the there more than one megabyte of audio before the video, Then it won't work even with the moov at the start.
For TS, there must be a SPS, a PPS and and IDR in the first megabyte. That is probable, but not guaranteed.
For Mkv Interleaving matters.
The codec, codec configuration, and even bitrate will also matter.
If the first keyframe is over 1Mb, no container will work.
If the codec is using periodic inter fresh, it would probably take more that 1Mb, unless the video bitrate is very low.
Writing all the permutations would take a book.

I could extend the size of the fragment I use, it does not have to be 1MB. Everything that keeps me from having to deal with the video as a whole is a performance win. So a better question would have been probably: Under what circumstances does FFmpeg need access the end of a video file, just to produce a thumbnail of the first frame.

Same answer. It depends on the container, the codec and encoding settings. There is not one size first all answer. Why not just give ffmpeg the URL, and let it figure it out?


text:
Hello ffmpeg heroes - please help me with ffmpeg/ffprobe commands to decode a video for me?
I have a sample.mp4 which is currently not playable on VLC or media player and I've checked the FFmpeg values and get the below result? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

It would help if you would post your ffmpeg command. Preferably as text.

Apologies. it was just ffmpeg -i sample.mp4

It is all about the proprietary codec, i.e. IMM5. The VLC and FFMPEG can't deal with it except patching the avcodec manually using https://patchwork.ffmpeg.org/project/ffmpeg/patch/20190716170703.10960-1-onemda@gmail.com/. Of course, you need to re-compile the ffmpeg using the IMM5 supported avcodec lib.
Good luck.

Thank you! I'll try my luck.


text:
Using ffmpeg to get the actual video resolution
Well, this is my first question in this community. I have asked it in SO but it was considered out of scope there.
Anyway, I am trying to decode an avi video but when I pass it through ffmpeg to check the encoding parameters I got this outcome which confused me:
$ffmpeg -i video.avi
...
Stream #0:0(und): Video: mpeg4 (Simple Profile) (mp4v / 0x7634706D), yuv420p, 1280x720 [SAR 1:1 DAR 16:9], 2501 kb/s, 30 fps, 30 tbr, 15360 tbn, 30 tbc (default)

I guess yuv420p means something like 746x420 pixel (I made the multiplication myself, so I am not sure it's exactly this one using the ratio of 1920x1080 and 1280x720) but anyway much less than 1280x720 which is 720p. So, what does exactly means those two together?
yuv420p vs 1280x720?
Can someone explain which is the actual resolution of the video (and why I get those different resolutions)?

In yuv420p, 1280x720 [SAR 1:1 DAR 16:9],

yuv420p indicates the pixel format and chroma subsampling scheme.

the video's raster resolution is simply 1280x720.

the video's Sample Aspect Ratio (width of pixel : height of pixel ratio) is 1:1 (square pixels)

the video's Display Aspect Ratio is 16:9


text:
Schedule a live stream of a pre-recorded video
I have a pre-recorded (edited from dozens of sources) event that I wish to play as a "live stream", i.e. the video starts streaming at a specified time, and viewers must watch it in sequence - you can't fast forward to the end. I don't care if they start watching part way through and rewind to an earlier point, or watch/scan through the whole thing later. But the initial play must be "live".
The finished video is about 3.5 hours, and the file is about 10GB. I could likely just feed it into OBS (I've not used OBS, but it seems straight forward), and feed that to a streaming service. But if anything faults my end, the stream goes offline. For something pre-recorded, it seems there should be a safer way.
Looking through various streaming services, none seem to offer the ability to upload the file, and schedule the streaming time. streamingvideoprovider.com lets me upload in advance and schedule a time, but once the stream goes live, viewers can immediately view any part of the stream. Vimeo doesn't seem to allow pre-upload that I can see. Checking others, either I can't see the feature listed, or it appears to be the same functionality as streamingvideoprovider. Have I missed any that are providing this? I would have thought there would be other demand for this. Note that I've excluded Facebook & YouTube from my list, maybe they provide this, but there is background audio in some parts of the video which those services are likely to flag, resulting in muted audio or the stream going offline.
The other services I've found are restream.io and onestream.live, which appear to let you upload a video file, and schedule to stream to various services. They can stream to Vimeo directly, and both offer an RTMP option that I should be able to use with any other streaming provider. This basically ends up being the same solution as me streaming from my own equipment with OBS, except I can pre-schedule the stream, and their equipment is likely to be more reliable than mine in terms of speed and uptime. In the absence of an all-in-one solution directly with a streaming provider, I'm leaning towards this. Either that, or OBS myself and risk it.
Does anyone else have experience doing this on any of these services, or with any other services I've missed in my research? I'm guessing mostly people just OBS the file themselves, but we've got some pretty poor internet here in Australia sometimes, and I just don't trust that for a 3.5 hour stream.

So I ended up running the streams through Vimeo, who provide their own "Livestream Studio" software, which lets you stream from a pre-recorded file. They don't let you pre-upload the video, but it is apparently an often requested feature that they are "looking at".
Vimeo also advised restream & onestream as existing services to do this with - but without being able to verify the reliability of those services or get feedback from anyone, I was hesitant to use them. I tested Vimeo's software prior to airing the first stream, and that all worked smoothly, so in the end I just went with that. Out of 4 events/streams, the connection speed here did flake out a couple of times on one occasion, which is what I was worried about, but it otherwise worked.

For anyone else looking to accomplish this, I've used both restream and onstream.live for this, with good success.  There are some video encoding requirements for each that you need to stick to.  I recommend a test stream to ensure your video works well with their service.

Aslo StreamYard will do this job for you. It's similar to Restream.

This sounds exactly like the YouTube premiere feature.  You can set an uploaded video to "premiere" at a scheduled date and time:

When the countdown is over, viewers watch the video together in real time. Viewers can rewind the video, but cannot forward past what’s been shown live.


text:
How to set up Trapcode Particular as a bounded text object, then disperse it
Can anyone point me in the direction of how to set up Particular to generate this text effect?

In particular (pun absolutely intended) how to contain particles within the boundaries of the text before dispersing them.
I'm using Trapcode Particular v16.

You can use the layer-emitter for that. Particular will look for the alpha and spawn more particles where areas are more opaque. Just make sure that your text-layer is precomped and set as a 3D-layer. Then, from the drop-down menu of particular, choose the layer-emitter, open the tab of the layer-emitter further down and select your text-precomp. You might wanna up the particle count as thin text may not cause a single one to spawn, and you will think you did something wrong. Alternatively, use the layer-grid-emitter to significantly up the particle-count. Just make sure to disperse the particles using wind or Spin-Amplitude down in the physics->Air tab.
I hope I was able to help you, have a great day!


text:
NDI vs RTSP/RTMP in PTZOptics cameras
I am working on building a live streaming system for my church and have settled on using PTZOptics cameras for the project. Our AV dealer wanted to set them up with SDI connections and then go through a capture device.  For cost reasons I am looking at using the IP video capabilities of these cameras instead. We are currently using OBS to combine the sound from our mixer with the feed from a webcam before sending it to Facebook.  As I've looked over the options from PTZOptics I have a question about the advantages/disadvantages of using NDI over RTSP/RTMP?  The closest I've come to an actual comparison is a PDF of talking point slides that simply said "NDI evil" - not very helpful.

We used RTSP and it works fine.  There are a few benefits of NDI (like doing PTZ controls over that protocol) but not worth the price jump for the cameras, in my opinion ($600 to upgrade each camera to NDI).
We do notice a ~200 ms delay in the video reaching the mixing PC behind the audio so we just use Vmix to delay the sound and match them up.

NDI is currently not so great at PTZ.  The zoom speed ends up being a constant speed no matter what speed value you send.  I'm pretty sure it's a bug in the current SDK, because I've seen it with cameras from three different companies.  They all happily handle VISCA-over-UDP, however, so that's what I use for everything other than storing positions and retrieving stored positions (and I think I could do that with VISCA; it would just take a decent amount of code).


text:
Change project settings after footage is all cut up on Premiere Elements
I've spent a couple of hours cutting and editing gopro footage, unfortunately the first file I added to the timeline was the soundtrack.
Now my project resolution and frame rate are wrong and I can't adjust it in order to just select "4k UHD" in render options using mp4 - XAVC-S because it defaults to 60fps
Two questions :

Is there a way, even hacky, to change project settings for an existing project?
If not, how can I render with same UHD xavc-s settings but just change the frame rate? It's not always letting me select even the correct resolution in 'custom'.

Any help is greatly appreciated!
Thanks

you should be able to adjust everything just from the project panel.
See this, I dropped mp3 into 'new timeline' button and got this sequence -

All you need to do is go to sequence and select desired output

You can set everything here

For me, making the MP3 file into 'New sequence' defaulted in 1920x1080 29.97 sequence, but if you have issue that it made different format and you want to skip changing scale of every individual file (I'm assuming you might have got different format, like 1280x720, although unlikely), you can just setup an adjustment file above your edit, select 'distort - > transform' from effects and adjust scale to fit to your desired resolution.


text:
ffmpeg - concatenate files, BUT strip the last few frames from the end of each one
I am trying to find the best way to automatically concatenate a large number of files that have been recorded with an overlap within them.
In the process of 'glueing' the video files together, to get a smooth playback, I need to strip 5 frames from the end (or from the beginning) of each clip.
This post suggests a few ways of concatenating the files, and this post on processing a timelapse video has an excellent advise on using filters for truncating media. But I am wondering
whether I could avoid re-encoding at all? All files are in the same format.
The ideal answer would include an ffmpeg command.
Thank you in advance!

See https://video.stackexchange.com/q/25096/

Thank you, @Gyan, that is very close. I looked through the manual and couldn't find a way to specify a relative ("from beginning to 3 frames from the last frame") way of defining the outpoint. Is that possible if you don't know the duration of the clip?

No, outpoint has to be measured in seconds from start.

OK, thank you! Will use workarounds and assumptions ;)


text:
How to fix the difference between duration of ffmpeg input and output?
I am trying to generate a video from a bunch of png images and audio using the command:
/usr/bin/ffmpeg -y -framerate 30 -pattern_type glob -i 'images/*.png' -i audio.wav -c:v libx264 -b:v 0 -crf 18 -g 300000 -pix_fmt yuv420p -shortest output.mp4

There are a total of 52 images with their FFprobe output as below:
Input #0, png_pipe, from 'images/0000000.png':
  Duration: N/A, bitrate: N/A
    Stream #0:0: Video: png, rgb24(pc), 1200x1000, 25 tbr, 25 tbn, 25 tbc

And FFprobe output for audio.wav is:
Input #0, wav, from 'audio.wav':
  Metadata:
    encoder         : Lavf58.29.100
  Duration: 00:00:01.74, bitrate: 256 kb/s
    Stream #0:0: Audio: pcm_s16le ([1][0][0][0] / 0x0001), 16000 Hz, 1 channels, s16, 256 kb/s

At 30 fps, the length of output video should be 1.734s, but actually, it is 1.80s.
FFprobe output for final video:
Input #0, mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2, from 'output.mp4':
  Metadata:
    major_brand     : isom
    minor_version   : 512
    compatible_brands: isomiso2avc1mp41
    encoder         : Lavf58.29.100
  Duration: 00:00:01.80, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 1627 kb/s
    Stream #0:0(und): Video: h264 (High) (avc1 / 0x31637661), yuv420p, 1200x1000, 1603 kb/s, 30 fps, 30 tbr, 15360 tbn, 60 tbc (default)
    Metadata:
      handler_name    : VideoHandler
    Stream #0:1(und): Audio: aac (LC) (mp4a / 0x6134706D), 16000 Hz, mono, fltp, 74 kb/s (default)
    Metadata:
      handler_name    : SoundHandler

Can someone help me understand why is there a difference and how can I remove it?
My use case requires that the video is of the same length as that of audio otherwise it will cause issues. Any help will be appreciated.

Have you got any explanation?

What you can do is use -shortest to stop encoding once the shortest stream ends. This option needs to be given before the output file.


text:
How to broadcast on Instagram via obs?
I've seen a bunch of paid services that provide the ability to stream to Instagram via obs, but how are they arranged? How can I implement this myself?

A quick google search gave me dozens of options. You can use yellowduck for example. Here's a tutorial on how to use it. An alternative is promovgram. There really are a lot of options, so I would recommend just googling yourself.

You are not answering the question posed. I'm asking how exactly to implement this myself, and not use a third-party service

oh right, sorry for misreading. From what I've read, you need to use an API from instagram which only seems to be accessible to companies that apply for it.


text:
obs resize output (source size) feature
I use the resize output (source size) of the obs studio to fit the canvas size to windows. Unfortunately, sometimes this feature is grayed out and I cannot select it. See the below screenshot.
Why this happens and how to fix it.

I had the same thing; starting OBS in administrator-mode worked for me.


text:
FFMPEG: Timing wrong in output
one question that currently drives me crazy. I used the following command to cut a video:
ffmpeg -i origin.mp4 -ss 00:09:53 -to 00:11:53 -async 1 output.mp4

However, the output does not start at 09 minutes and 53 seconds, but at 10:38 of the original mp4. The length (2 minutes) is correct in the output... I don't get the problem.
Any ideas?
Thank you!

that's very strange. Have you tried this on a different file? Maybe the mp4 is corrupted and thus displays a wrong timecode... or could it be that there is a timecode already embedded, starting at 2:00 ?

Share the input if you can.

I checked the input file and it has a strange behaviour: It starts at 00:00 and after two seconds it jumps to 00:23. And, if I open it with a different media player, it skips the first 40 seconds... strange. Can I repair that with ffmpeg?

Ok, I got it - the input file war indeed broken! Thanks!


text:
ticker text does not run really smooth
I want to create a ticker text video like the news ticker you see sometimes in TV. So I use
ffmpeg -loop 1 -i Transparent_800x20.png  -vf drawtext="fontsize=16:fontcolor=black:fontfile=FreeSansBold.ttf:textfile=deutsch.txt:x=w/2-125*t:y=0" -t 125 output.mp4

with a background PNG file and a text file deutsch.txt. However, because of x=w/2-125*t the ticker text is not running smoothly enough. I got it smoother when I increased the time of the video and decreased the 125 to 60. But the total length of the video should be only 125 seconds to show the whole text.
I tried to increase the frames per second from 25 to 35 (with "fps=35"), but it did not really help. And higher fps lead to duplicate frame messages.
Any other suggestions?
Sigbert

If running on a PC screen, your best bet for a smooth playback is probably 60fps.