text:
Easy script for making and overlaying video counters?
I wanted to make a family of videos like

and I was wondering if there were any easy plugins/scripts to be able to create and increment the counter while watching a video. I envision something that operates like a little html/java script that increments on a keystroke as you run through the video, that you can later style something like CSS. I obviously am not saying it has to be exactly like this, but in essence I want to know if there are any bits bits of software like that. If not I might just try making it.

What exactly are you searching for, do you want to know what software to use to create similar videos or how to make this interactive in the browser?

I want a script that lets me easily create some like an .ass or .ssa subtitle overlay for when  I am producing videos. Let's say I'm using VLC, or maybe Lightworks. I watch a video and with the push of the button I increment a counter that corresponds to a number in some kind of soft sub. I say soft subs so that later I can go and adjust the styles of the subtitle.

Do you want to create this a subtitle just so you can adjust the styling at a later point?
Why would you want to adjust the style later on and not just finalize style in the video software and render it into the video like in the youtube video?

Looking back at your first comment, yes, can you list what software can easily make this effect.

In that case Adobe After Effects can do this easily, which probably also produced the effect in the video.
It's actually the only software where I know you can do this without too much manual labor. Other products usually only offer a timer effect which would be tedious to use for these kind of things.
Though if you want to do this based on just a single key press and don't want to set keyframes manually you will have to write a script for After Effects, this can be done either via Adobe ExtendScript which is a subset of JavaScript or alternatively Windows Batch and Apple Script. I'd suggest using ExtendScript, it has better documentation and is relativley easy to use.
Be advised that this won't be a task that you can finish in 1-2 days if you haven't worked with After Effects yet. Especially the scripting part. Do it manually first and then look how you can automate it via a script.

what would people call this type of effect anyways: video counter/tallying/tracking?

I wouldn't say there is a specific name for it but usually you call that simply a counter

that was what i originally tried looking up but everywhere people are just asking about how to maximize their view counts for videos -_-

It's not something you do often, so googling this might be indeed a bit tricky. Maybe this question gets a good Google ranking so other don't have it so hard :P


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How can I achieve the Ken Burn Effect with greater control or in other software?
I am using the Ken Burns effect in Final Cut Pro X, however it does not allow me enough control over how it behaves.  I end up having to cut the video in to multiple clips in order to get the effect to work the way I want.
How can I achieve multiple different Ken Burns like zooms without having to cut my video in to multiple pieces to make the adjustments.  What about other software when Ken Burns isn't an effect that it has?

What you like to accomplish is a zoom?
In that case you can just add keyframes on the position of the video within your canvas/composition.

Find the moment where you want to zoom.
Add keyframe on the scale / position
Add keyframe on end of the zoom
Set preferred value
Add keyframe one frame before zooming out
Add keyframe on that next frame.
Add keyframe at the end of the zoom
Set the value of that keyframe back to 100% (original value)

That's it!

Don't use the Ken burns effect.  Animate the transform controls, setting keyframes for scale and x/y position.  By default, the keyframes will ease in and ease out, giving you a Ken Burns like effect, but you'll be able to control it more precisely.

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


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Can you mask a parent null object in Adobe After effects?
Is it possible to create one mask or track matte mask on a parent null layer that applies to all child layers? Only way I've figured out is to apply a track matte to every layer I want masked which seems very inefficient.
Cheers.

@Joonas not sure where this is coming from. I am usually pretty good about marking an answer as helpful or editing my original post to clarify questions...

Yet a month has gone by since you asked this question and you still haven't clarified anything or selected a correct answer. You sure proved me wrong...

@Joonas Sorry I ruined your day, man.

Like S-ed mentioned there are many ways.
I would Pre-compose all the layers I want masked.
2 steps:
1) Select all layers you want masked, then click the menu item Layer -> Pre-Compose (or shift-command-C).
2) Then apply your mask to the Pre-comp that you just created.
This keeps the workflow simple.
Keeping things simple would allow you to create more complex effects.
Good luck with your project.

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


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What is the Marketshare of the big three video editing (NLE) software packages?
Cannot find a source to see market share or change for top video editing software tools used today.
The big three are:
Avid
Final Cut Pro
Adobe Premiere Pro (after effects)
I know Avid is still used by large film and movie productions.
But from the grass roots perspective, every day users, it seems to be overwhelmingly Adobe products. But this is based on my anecdotal personal perspective. Wanted something more concrete.

This kind of data is actually remarkably hard to come by.  There are a few industry reports available for thousands of dollars, but the best free resource I could find when I was searching was an informal poll that Dave Dugdale did.  It was an imperfect test by his own admission because it allowed both voting up and voting down, but it gives at least some kind of an idea of the rough market share.

Yes, I also found interesting survey by PBS, were they sampled a small number of filmmakers, producers, editors (those that work in the documentary field). Interesting to see the gear used and NLE used. http://www.pbs.org/pov/filmmakers/2013-documentary-equipment-survey.php

I really liked the google trends tool, but the interesting thing if you localize the region to the United States, FCP and Premiere are practically neck and neck in search interest (I used the software term instead of local search to get a better range of interest). I never realized that FCP was that big. Avid was almost non existant but sony vegas pro came a decent 3rd. Worldwide Sony Vegas was number 1.

Another interesting survey.
On a youtube talk forum, a straw count was taken asking users what their favorite editing software was (NLE). Out of a sample size of 104 this is how it broke down below (I added my preferences as well, premiere pro and screenflow)
23% Sony Vegas Pro
23% Premiere Pro
13% Windows Movie Maker
8% Final Cut Pro X
6% iMovie
4% Camtasia Studio
4% Corel Video Studio
3% VideoPad
2% Lightworks
2% Magic Movie Edit Pro
2% HitFilm
2% Power Director Pro
2% ScreenFlow
1% Sony Movie Studio
1% Kdenlive (Linux)
1% Filmora
1% ffmpeg
1% VirtualDub
1% AVS Editor
1% VideoStudio
Notable mentions:
1, Avid, 1 person mentioned it, but they were forced to use it in a university program, otherwise at home, for actual video editing work they used another tool. So I left it out since it was not exactly a glowing endorsement.
2, Davinci Resolve, another surprise. A wonderful free program that came out when black magic 4K video camera came out. But no-one in the youtube community is using it yet. Actually I use premiere pro myself, but still thought more people would be using this one.
(Source: http://yttalk.com/threads/what-does-everyone-use-for-editing.171578/)


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What do you call the video effect where water looks like it's standing still when filmed
I found a few interesting effects, which was labelled under the rolling shutter effect, however I was told that this was NOT an example of rolling shutter effect, what would you call this effect?
The question is 3 fold: I heard they used this effect in movies, which ones, an example clip would be nice, what do they officially call it, and why does this happen?
These are the examples I am referring to:
REALLY interesting effects:
For example, the water looks like its static. [PetaPixel][1] explains it; "by pressing a water tube against a speaker, bibio was able to control the vibration frequency of the water flowing through the tube. He then adjusted the pulses of the water to match up with the frame rate of his Canon 5D Mark II."

Another example was the static helicopter:

Do you just seek for the word for it or an explanation why this happens?

Ideally what I am looking for is the explanation, examples of usage in movies, and what is the official word used to describe it. (Especially since its used in movies, they must have a term for it)

I think the second video is mistitled. Shutter speed is the time the shutter stays open for every image. Here, what matters is the framerate, that is, the number of images in one second, which has to be equal to the frequency of the cyclic movement you are filming.
In the first video, the person applies to the water some sort of movement based on the frequency of the sound in the speaker, and this frequency is set to be the same as the camera framerate (usually 24, 25 or 30 i/s)
In order for this to work nicely, I guess the shutter speed has to be very short, or there will be blur motion.

This is called stroboscopic effect.  It refers to when the sample rate is synchronized or very slightly out of sync resulting in a much slower representation of the motion that results from taking a picture that is at the same point or slightly advanced point in a subsequent cycle of a higher frequency cyclic motion.
You can actually do the same exact thing in real life for your own eyes by using a strobe light, which is the more common demonstration, though frame rate can be used too if you can adjust it closely enough.

From old western films, this became known as the 'wagon wheel' effect, where the spokes of a forward-moving wagon's wheels often appeared to move backward. When that happens it's technically equivalent to 'aliasing' since the sampling frequency (frame rate) is insufficient to resolve the frequency of interest -- it violates the Nyqvist limitation.

I'm unsure if there is a specific "official" word for this effect. I guess I would call it frequency synchronisation.
This effect appears whenever the framerate (e.g. frequency your camera takes a picture) of you camera matches the frequency of another recurring action.
It doesn't have to be the exact same frequency but a multiple of it. So if the rotor of the helicopter is turning at 50 rotations per seconds, filming this with 25 fps would theoretically be enough for the effect to appear (not accounting for motion blur and other artifacts when dealing with fast moving objects).
So the camera always captures a frame when the moving object completed a full movement giving the illusion that it doesn't move because we only capture it every time its at a specific position. Being slightly over or under the frequency of the object will make it look like its moving in slow motion forwards or backwards because we only increment in the position by tiny amounts.
The movement has to be an exact recurring loop, otherwise this can not work.
In movies you can see this in tire movement but usually its not a desired effect, I haven't seen a movie where is effect was deliberately used.


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Create a movie file from a set of pdf files
I have a set of files from which I would like to create a movie file with a certain frame rate. I can, however, not seem to find software that is able to do this.
I'm working under Ubuntu Linux. Ideally the movie would maintain the vector graphics format from the pdf. But I do not know if software exists which makes this possible. If this is impossible, I could also convert the pdf files to a nonvector format and produce a movie from it.
Does anybody have experience with this?

Using the latex package animate, a movie consisting of vector graphics can be made.
Construct a set of, for instance, pdf files with a base name img- and construct the file main.tex containing the code
\documentclass{standalone}
\usepackage{animate}
\begin{document}
    \animategraphics[controls,autoplay,loop]{10}{img-}{1}{20}
\end{document}

. Compiling the main.tex file produces a pdf file with an embedded vector graphics movie. For playback, either Adobe Reader or PDF-XChange Viewer is needed. For more details, consider the manual of the animate package at The animate Package. For Linux users, I believe only Adobe Reader is an option. Follow the instructions at How do I install Adobe Acrobat Reader?.

+1. I like! No unnecessary and complicated installing of ffmpeg necessary for this one.

A tool to do that would be FFmpeg but unfortunately it does not support PDF decoding.
Though you can convert your pdf's to png's using imagemagick (relevant question on askUbuntu).
And then create a movie out of those PNG's with ffmpeg. This guide on the ffmpeg page explains how, here an example command:
ffmpeg -r 1/5 -i img%03d.png -c:v libx264 -r 30 -pix_fmt yuv420p out.mp4

This read images from the current folder with the prefix "img" and a following number of 3 digits and display them for 5 seconds (-r 1/5) with a frame rate of 30 fps (-r 30).

Useful answer ;). Ubuntu does however state This program is only provided for compatibility and will be removed in a future release. Please use avconv instead., so this solution might not be useful anymore in future releases of Ubuntu. Furthermore, the -c:v option is not recognized.

Adobe Flash is designed to work with animating vector graphics and allowing playback of vector animations, but it requires that a user have Flash Player installed.  I know there are third party Flash authoring applications out there, but I don't know what, if any, exist on Linux, or if they are still maintained as Flash has been falling out of favor all over the place and is completely unsupported on most mobile platforms.
Outside of that, video is generally a raster format, so you can't work directly with vector graphics without rasterizing them.  If you rasterize your PDFs to an image sequence, then many video players and/or encoders can work with an image sequence.  A lot will even automatically recognize it as a video if you name them the same with numbering.  (Such as "myvideo00000.tga, myvideo00001.tga, myvideo00002.tga, etc.)
As Professor Sparkles pointed out, imagemagick and FFMPEG is one such option, but any combination of a tool that can convert PDFs to images and then a tool that can play or convert a series of images in to a video would work fine.  (For example, in a pinch you could print the PDF to an image driver and then use Premiere or something similar to open the image sequence and output a video as well.

Should note that he is working on Linux, so working with Flash Pro is probably not an option.

@ProfessorSparkles - right, any idea if there is any flash authoring alternative on Linux?  I don't know linux well enough.

Not that I know of, pretty certain there is nothing native with even a huge lack of decent video cutting tools on linux.
The only solution would be to user an old version of Flash Pro in Wine.

Assuming your PDF files are in your working directory, to create a movie file from a set of PDF files you can simply execute:
mogrify -verbose -density 500 -resize 800 -format png ./*.pdf
convert -delay 600 *.png movie.mp4

This requires  Imagemagick  and  Ghostscript to be installed. Works on Linux/Mac OS X/Microsoft Windows. Not vectorial.

FYI:

Imagemagick Convert PDF to JPEG: FailedToExecuteCommand `"gswin32c.exe" / PDFDelegateFailed --> that's the error message you get if Ghostscript is not installed.
Convert every pdf in the current directory to png --> convert doesn't support batch conversion, unlike mogrify.
ffmpeg requires the images to have some very specific naming convention, unlike convert which simply takes the lexicographical order.


text:
FFmpeg encod set of time stamped images as Iframes
I have a set of images that are in time stamped order ( the unit is seconds ) but not in a set interval
012.png
017.png
024.png

etc.
How can I encode them so that each image is an Iframe at that given interval ?
Also possibly this is not what I want to do . I'm not sure if its mandatory to have videos have their Iframes at a fixed interval ( forgive my naivety about the subject )
Hopefully the images would interpolate between each other smoothly ( with a feel of motion ) . I can imagine a way to do it by just creating my own in-between images by interpolating in some way between two frames ( no chance I do as good a job as encoders already do ).
I feel like though that this is exactly what an encoder does and am trying to figure out if I can leverage it to do this frame generation work for me by handing it a list of Iframes with timestamps .
If this is something that needs to be done at a lower level c++ or by working directly with an encoder ( if thats the right term ) I would certainly be willing to work on that level . I am really unsure of the approach to take .
-------- Additional Information
I took a look at
http://theora.org/doc/libtheora-1.0/group__encfuncs.html#gdbe7dd66b411c2d61ab8153c15308750
But there doesn't seem to be a way to insert a frame at a target position .

Well, you should not know what exactly it is you want, otherwise no one can really help you with your issue.
Do you want the specific images to be still frames until the next image shows?

@ProfessorFartSparkle I hopefully improved my question a bit .

There are three options here.  One is to use a variable framerate format that can play back each frame for different lengths of time, however this would result in each frame jumping from one to the next which might not keep the illusion of motion if the frame rate is too low.  This would also be the smallest file size, but I'm not aware of any easily available encoders that would let you specify the length each frame is exposed.  (Granted, I haven't looked seriously for one.)
The second option is to simply place each frame on a timeline at the appropriate time in an editor and leave it up until the next frame is reached.  This can then use a traditional encoder, however it still requires a fair bit of manual work to layout the frames and results in a larger file than the first option.
The final option is to use interpolation software to interpolate objects out of the frame and generate between frames to smooth the motion.  This is by far the most complicated, but would also produce the smoothest results if done well.  If the gap is too wide, you will probably need to manually define objects in the scene with advanced interpolation software and have it generate the in between frames.
Note that, as Jim Mack said, this is NOT something an encoder does.  An encoder only encodes the frames it is given, it makes no attempt to interpolate.  The closest to interpolation that an encoder might come is adjusting framerate on the fly (typically using a fixed conversion) or applying a de-interlace filter, but they do not offer a complex or particularly high quality interpolation solution.  Certainly not enough to handle what you are talking about.

Cool, I have been looking at image magiks morph and distort options as a way to fill the gaps .

Your understanding of what an encoder does is incorrect. It doesn't make up images to fill in the time between I frames. It does somewhat the opposite: it takes a full series of complete images and decomposes them so that only the I frames and the differences between them remain.
What you're asking for is, in animation terms, called tweening. The linked article will point you to some software that can do automated inbetweening, but it's usually not useful for real-life images over the durations you seem to have. For smaller intervals (a frame or two) the process is called interpolation.

This is much clearer to me now . Thank you my . It still seems to be something that is built into the encoder though .

no Jim Mack is completely correct, you don't fiddle with the internals of the encoder to create a movie. FFmpeg offers a lot of editing capabilities maybe thats the reason why you got confused.

I generally like this answer, but your description of tweening and interpolation is a bit off.  Interpolation is the process by which an image is grouped in to distinct elements that can be moved and the results are then tweened.  This is generally just called interpolation though.  Tweening is generally used when you already have distinct objects that you are generating in-between positional data for.


text:
Is there a program for automatic clip creation from scene detection/recognition result?
I want to parse a large set of movie/advertisement mixture in one video file, i.e. some hours of video, and separate not only movie and advertisement, but also split/cut different advertisements into clips (I'm only interested in advertisement clips separated into different files). Is there a tool which allows to do such thing without interaction (most tools, e.g. kdenlive, have great scene recognition, but only split the clips into logical units for editing in the GUI)? Of course, scene detection isn't deterministic and some clips will require cutting, but that shouldn't matter.
The important thing is the separation of clips into files and the automatization (might be done within the program or on the console with Linux command pipes or an API for - lets say - python).
The program should run on Linux and be FLOSS software.

So you want to automatically cut tv footage by scene and seperate ads from the movies and ditch the movie part?
What do you mean "automatic clip creation" in that case? Auto cutting based on scene detection?

I found out about melt and created video-splitter which is a command line wrapper around the former. There might even be a very elegant way to do everything in a command pipe with two or three commands or even everything with one melt command.

Note this comment from the video-splitter's readme: "Currently I didn't figure out melt yet, so there's no sound in the output."

I had a similar need as yours - to produce shorter videos with different scenes from a single large video. I came across PySceneDetect which provides two kinds of cutting method:

threshold scene detection (detect-threshold): analyzes video for changes in average frame intensity/brightness
content-aware scene detection (detect-content): based on changes between frames in the HSV color space

More information can be found on their website.

The only recent tool I know is a plugin for After Effects called Magnum - The Edit Detector. While After Effects isn't exactly the most suited program for these kind of tasks it would do what you want with some sort of control over it.
You can export the resulting clips/layers in After Effects via a script like redefinery's Layer Render script (seems the site is offline at the moment). You can also write your own scripts that suit your tasks in After Effects with the JavaScript based Adobe ExtendScript.
After Effects is very "batch" friendly and allows you to automate a lot of things and many people made cool scripts for similar tasks, so in the automation regard After Effects is definitely a nice tool.
Sadly After Effects isn't running on Linux, only Windows and OSX.
With Wine its running badly or not at all in the recent versions.
There is also a very outdated tool called ScenalyzerLive, maybe it does the job, I haven't really used it but it does auto scene detection and cutting based on that, not sure about mass exporting every scene to a file.

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


text:
After Effects - Element 3D: Text arranged in a circle/ring form
I need to dispose some letters extruded with Element 3D plug-in in After Effects
Like in this fast example:

I'm going crazy! Thank you in advance!


text:
AE Expression: Define FontSize
I'm making a complicated watch UI with a lot of expressions linked to different values of the display.
As you can see from the image below, 9hrs isn't bonded to an expression yet, but it's graphically correct: 9 and hrs have different font sizes.
100min instead is bonded to an expression and it does disrupt the font formatting making min the same size as 100.

//This is the expression
Math.round(thisComp.layer("Orange").content("Trim Paths 1").end.value.toFixed(0)) + "min"

Is there a way to tell that string that the font size for 'min' needs to be of 40px?
PLEASE, EXPRESSION ANSWERS ONLY
Thanks!

Have you tried the parameter fontSize (note the lower case at beginning and upper case in the middle?)
https://community.adobe.com/t5/after-effects-discussions/expressions-accessing-text-property-fontsize-from-another-layer/m-p/10727207

The problem is isolating the font size expression on a portion of a text layer! So '#' is one size and 'mins' another.
I don't know how to integrate it into that expression I posted.

Would it work to right-align the number text layer, make a second left-aligned text layer for "min" and pick whip the position to the number text layer position?
If you wanted a different alignment you could grab the number layer width and add that to the position so it would always be offset correctly.

Thanks for your reply! I know this would work but I need expression solutions only.

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


text:
Lightstreaks on Video Footage
I'm trying to make this effect for a car video, you can imagine the camera movement for this kind of stuff.
I was going to try this technique which is simply a 3D shape layer in After Effects with a taper.
Right now, I'm doing this above with a 3D Camera Tracker effect which seems to do the job so far, but in the case that I need extra movements such as overtaking the car and going off-screen might be hard to do with a shape layer.
I will be on a deadline and I would like to not follow the wrong strategy wasting time.

Is there anyone who could help me understand the best thing to do?
Thank you!

Could you describe "this technique" in words so you're not forcing people to go off-site to watch up to 7 minutes of video to know what you mean.

Thanks @Tetsujin, I've just edited my post!

I think you could get 90% of the way towards the example shown in that video using the free Saber plugin from videocopilot. It can't do 3D strokes (for that you would need to use Red Giant's 3D stroke, or some other elaborate method).

I don't have Trapcode unfortunately, I was thinking of Saber but it only works on masks which are terrible in terms of control and animation.


text:
Why does compressor output 960x540 when frame size is specified "up to 1280x720"?
Is there any way to produce output video at 1280x720 resolution using the "Apple Devices HD (Most Compatible)" setting in Compressor? When I specify a frame size of "up to 1280x720", the output renders at 960x540. This screenshot shows what I'm talking about:

By contrast, if I specify a frame size of "up to 1920x1080" or "up to 960x540", Compressor produces output at the specified resolution. My source video is at 1920x1080 resolution.

The original AppleTV could only playback at 1280x720 at 24fps. Because your video is at 25fps, it has to use a slightly lower resolution. If you either lower the frame rate (probably not an option) or exclude the original AppleTV, it should export at the higher resolution. I believe there's another setting than the "Most Compatible" one which excludes the older AppleTVs.


text:
How to set a specific ffmpeg Decklink device output format using format number?
I am working on an IP-SDI decoder using ffmpeg and a Blackmagic Decklink Mini Monitor card.
If I list ffmpeg supported output modes with this command:
ffmpeg -i test_1.mp4 -f decklink -list_formats 1 'DeckLink Mini Monitor'

I get these:
[decklink @ 0x39b8c60] Supported formats for 'DeckLink Mini Monitor':
[decklink @ 0x39b8c60]  1       720x486 at 30000/1001 fps (interlaced, lower field first)
[decklink @ 0x39b8c60]  2       720x486 at 24000/1001 fps
[decklink @ 0x39b8c60]  3       720x576 at 25000/1000 fps (interlaced, upper field first)
[decklink @ 0x39b8c60]  4       720x486 at 60000/1001 fps
[decklink @ 0x39b8c60]  5       720x576 at 50000/1000 fps
[decklink @ 0x39b8c60]  6       1920x1080 at 24000/1001 fps
[decklink @ 0x39b8c60]  7       1920x1080 at 24000/1000 fps
[decklink @ 0x39b8c60]  8       1920x1080 at 25000/1000 fps
[decklink @ 0x39b8c60]  9       1920x1080 at 30000/1001 fps
[decklink @ 0x39b8c60]  10      1920x1080 at 30000/1000 fps
[decklink @ 0x39b8c60]  11      1920x1080 at 25000/1000 fps (interlaced, upper field first)
[decklink @ 0x39b8c60]  12      1920x1080 at 30000/1001 fps (interlaced, upper field first)
[decklink @ 0x39b8c60]  13      1920x1080 at 30000/1000 fps (interlaced, upper field first)
[decklink @ 0x39b8c60]  14      1280x720 at 50000/1000 fps
[decklink @ 0x39b8c60]  15      1280x720 at 60000/1001 fps
[decklink @ 0x39b8c60]  16      1280x720 at 60000/1000 fps

Ok. I can set my desired output format using -s for output size and -r for frame rate:
/home/ffmpeg/bin/ffmpeg \
-i udp://224.168.240.69:2069?buffer_size=262144?fifo_size=4525000&overrun_nonfatal=1 \
-threads 0 -vf setpts=PTS-STARTPTS \
-pix_fmt uyvy422 \
-c:a pcm_s16le -ac 2 -ar 48000 \
-s 1920x1080 -r 30000/1000 \
-f decklink DeckLink Mini Monitor

Is there a way to set my desired output format using ffmpeg's Supported number from the list [1..16]?

I don't see any option in the source to set output format parameters via the serial number.

Not sure exactly if this will help at all but you used to be able to do something like this:
ffmpeg -f decklink -i "DeckLink Mini Recorder (1)@7"
Where 7 is the number that is outputed in the supported formats list and the (1) is used if you have multiple decklink cards.  Again not sure if this helps you or not as I was using it for capture cards.
Note on Aug of 2018 I updated my SDK version for Decklink and the firmware on my capture cards and lost the above ability.  I was still able to select the format in ffmpeg but I had to use the following:
ffmpeg -format_code Hp30 -f decklink -i "DeckLink Mini Recorder (1)"
I got the Hp30 from the output of the command:
ffmpeg -f decklink -list_formats 1 -i "DeckLink Mini Recorder (1)"
The command also now does not output the numbers for the formats but instead has the format_code and description.


text:
Simulate parenting, (or un-parent) in after effects
I have a flat layer in AE that is parented to another flat object in 3D space (both are .ai files).
The trouble is when I export to Cinema 4D Lite, the motion of the parented object is not the same as it is in AE.
I expect this has something to do with translating the keyframes on export, so I'm wondering if there's a way in AE to un-parent an object, and add keyframes to retain its motion as if it were still parented.
EDIT: On further research, I've found the Bake Parented Transform script. Is there no built in way to do this?

The only solution to do this without an extra script/plugin is to use expressions and then convert the expression to keyframes via Animation->Keyframe Assistent->Convert Expression to keyframes.
The big downside is that you have to "build" the parenting yourself, if you parent the position of one layer to another it will result in an expression like: thisComp.layer("Black Solid 2").transform.position. You then have to manage your relative position manually by changing the anchor point which is tedious, then you have to basically parent each transform property manually if you want rotation, scale and opacity as well.
So unless you can't spend the 15$ or can't use plugins for any reason I would always go for the script solution.


text:
Using triplehead2go with ATEM 1 M/E
We have a triplehead2go digital edition that we would like to use with a ATEM 1 M/E video mixer.
We tried setting the th2g to 3x 720 50p and the ATEM to 720 50p, but it didn't work.
This was our setup:
Computer -> TH2G -> Projector
                 -> ATEM -> Projector
                 -> Projector

Connecting the ATEM directly to a computer with the 720 50p works, and the TH2G works also.
Have anyone tried this?

So you set the resolution of your TH2G to 720p50? In that case you don't get 720p on every output but 1/3 of that vertically. You have to set your th2g to 3840x720 so you get three 720p signals on your outputs.
I also recommend using the Matrox App for setting resolution modes instead of the windows/osx display manager.

Sorry I was unclear. We set the TH2G to 3x 1280x720/50p = 3840. We did this in the Matrox App and confirmed the resolution and refresh rate in OSX display manager.

Do you have any hardware at hand to check and confirm the HDMI signal that is coming out the triple head?
I can also recommend doing a firmware upgrade if one is available, we often had weird issues with older firmware versions.

Thanks for the answers. I might be able to check that in a week or so. I think we have the latest firmware. Do you have any experience with this?

With the triple head in general? We use it a lot at my company and hate it a lot because the make tons of problems but is the only feasible solution on the market if you need one big high-res renderer for your software.
Upgrading the firmware is very easy, you just download an updater software from Maxon and feed it with the latest firmware file from their website.


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Where do I find the standard licensing agreement on a video that's on YouTube?
Where do I find the licensing agreement on a video so I know if I can use it or not?

From YouTube's help pages:

The standard YouTube licence remains the default setting for all uploads.

And Fair Use typically does not apply on the standard licence. See here for specifics, and when it does apply. The other option is Creative Commons:

Creative Commons licences provide a standard way for content creators to grant someone else permission to use their work. YouTube allows users to mark their videos with a Creative Commons CC BY licence.

Videos licenced under CC by Attribution 3.0 have this in the info under the video (you may need to click on Show More)

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.

Most videos aren't free to use.
The ones specifically made for free use often have a CC or Free Use in the title or in the description.
CC standing for creative commons.
If not, you may need to contact the creator


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How to remove an annoying zinging noise in an audio track
I recorded a video and its soundtrack using the Logi Capture software that comes with the Logitech C920 webcam. In the sound track there's an annoying occasional zinging noise when I speak into the microphone.
Is there a web site where I can get help cleaning up the audio? I have a brief audio clip to demonstrate the issue if it helps.
I tried the band-pass filter on the soundtrack with Audacity WevPad and it seems to lock the noise frequencies around 3.1 kHz - 5.1 kHz. When I cut this frequency band, the noise disappears. Interestingly, the noise is present when I record sound with either the C920's own microphone or a Samson Q2U USB dynamic microphone. At the same time, when I record with Audacity and the Samson microphone, the noise is not present. So, it must have something to do with the Logi Capture software. I also recorded video with other software and didn’t have this issue with noise.
In my video setup, I'm either capturing the screens or C920 webcam video. For some reason, the video ends up having multiple audio tracks. I wonder if it creates an audio track for each computer monitor. One of the audio tracks is empty, and the other three are with sound recorded that has this annoying noise.
At the moment, I record a sound track separately with Audacity and replace the one captured with Logi Capture. For already recorded videos I was able to filter out the noise, but it changes the sound of videos a little bit.

Post the clip. "Zinging noise" is not really enough for us to answer your question.

where to post it or how?

You could put it on any sharing service and provide a link. Soundcloud or Youtube for example.


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How can I make professional video using an iPad?
I am willing to make an educational guidance video. And since I want to make it using an iPad, what things should I keep in mind?
And which specific camera app will be better over the inbuilt camera app? With that how could I improve audio quality of my video?

You can import movies from other cameras and edit them.

Trade in the iPad and buy a desktop or laptop that you can edit on.  You will not produce professional results entirely on an iPad.  I am not aware of any good video editing options for iPad, certainly none of the big names have a product available.  There simply isn't enough horsepower on a tablet to perform the hard, complex operations involved in video editing in a smooth and timely manner.
(Minor correction: There is a version of iMovie available and Pinnacle does have a video editor available as well.  These are both makers of some of the better consumer focused stuff and could be considered big names, particularly since Pinnacle was previously held by Avid for a while, but I would still consider these cumbersome and limiting.  It probably IS possible to produce a professional quality result, but you'd have to work really hard at it.)
You could use the iPad for shooting the video and get decent results with proper usage, but you will still need a lot of other equipment to compensate for the iPad's camera short comings.
Lighting will be super important.  You will need lots of light, placed well so that there is sufficient light for the sensor and no shadows that the camera's dynamic range can't deal with.  This is also more than just having lamps, but also the stands to position them where you need them and modifiers to adjust the way the light falls on the scene to make good, even lighting.
Sound will also be another issue.  You will want an external mic.  People have reported being able to use USB mics with the iPad Camera Connection Kit, but I couldn't find anything verifying if it would work with professional audio interfaces or a microphone more designed for video situations.  Another option (which is what you will commonly see in more professional productions) is to use a separate audio recorder, such as a Zoom h4n to record audio and sync it up in post production.  Even if you really wanted to stick with your plan to use the iPad for the editing, you could transfer the files off the SD card using the previously mentioned camera connection kit.
You will also need a stand and tripod that can hold the iPad securely.  There are numerous options available and I don't have any particular experience with any particular model, but being able to shoot stable smooth video is an absolutely critical aspect of any high quality video shoot.  If you shot is purely static, you might be able to prop it up like Jason suggested, though it also then runs the risk of slipping or more easily getting jostled, and as he points out, you won't be able to do a shot with any movement, so I'd highly recommend a tripod.
If you can handle those three things, that should allow for decent quality footage to be shot on the iPad, but you are probably looking at between $450 ($200 dirt cheap lighting, $50 tripod adapter, $50 dirt cheap tripod, $100 - $150 relatively cheap usb consumer audio mic) and $1300+ ($500 ok lighting, $250 basic pro audio recorder, $150-$200 decent video mic, $50 tripod adapter, $250-$350 ok tripod) of gear to supplement it.
I want to emphasis that the $450 is about the cheapest you could possibly go while still calling it "professional video".  You can make something that looks ok for a consumer project for less, but really pulling off professional video is unfortunately not particularly cheap even if costs have dropped like a rock in the last 10 to 15 years.  (You can now do for $15,000 what used to cost $150,000+.)
Finally, practice and experience is key.  There is more to producing professional results than the right equipment, you also need to know how to use it properly.  There is far too much to doing this to summarize in a single QA post, but pre-planning is really key.  If you know your shots and plan the video out before you shoot, you can make sure you get all the shots you need and make sure that they flow well from one to the next.  You can plan the angles to shoot from and what you want the end product to look for.  Even with hundreds of thousands of dollars of high end professional gear, the result will look like someone's home movies without planning and organization to accomplish a consistent vision for the video.

So i guess i will get a pretty decent slr camera by investing little more which will give me a better video than ipad. But what i was thinking is to make a video using ipad which would have been a quite off track video making. like in my country few people have experimented things like making a video using mobile phone and those were pretty decent videos. btw thank you very much. i will think over it again

@dking - yeah, I would not recommend it.  There are probably some apps available that can do a marginal consumer focused job of clipping some video clips together, but I don't know that I would consider them professional tools.  They are more designed to let people post youtube clips of their vacation than allowing careful planning and organization of a video.

And basically i wanted to do it for an experimental purpose. And educational video will need clear sound quality if usb mics really works then i will go for it.

@dking - see my update.  I did some more fact checking and found a couple decent consumer focused video editing apps, but I'd still recommend against it since I think the headaches it will induce are likely not worth the effort.  For example, both require rendering for previews during editing.  It basically sets editing software back to the mid to late 90s.

thank you very much. yeah you are right about rendering. That will become a headache. But as i said i wanted to do it for experimentation purpose only. If in any case i would make the video i will let you know. And i dont want to lose reputation just for doing experiment. btw if i opt for ipad can editing on my computer will make it little better?

@dking - yeah, there are plenty of people who shoot high quality video with an iPad.  A DSLR would certainly do better, but the camera, particularly on more recent iPads is decent enough for what it is.  I don't know how good the render quality is for either of the apps.  You may actually get cleaner results on a desktop, but I don't know.  At $5 and $12 for the apps, it may be worth trying for yourself.  (I'm a PC/Android guy, so I can't try it.)

ok that's pretty helpful. I will try it.

There are already 2 great answers, I just wanted to add some input that would be too much as a comment.
Firstly it highly depends on which iPad you own, the camera in the first 2 generations were "garbage". I think that changed a bit with the iPad 3 and iPad Air.
If the quality of your iPad camera doesn't produce suitable material you can stop right there, a different app won't make it look any better.
If we look at smartphone/tablet cameras in general, they have developed tremendously in the last 3 years and you can shoot very high quality videos with some extra equipment like a tripod and an external mic (usb or for the mic jack, doesn't matter really) plus some lightning equipment.
If you happen to have a rather recent "high-end" phone from last 2 years you might want to opt for that instead of the iPad and then only cut the footage on the iPad if you don't want to do that on a full fledged computer.
Generally the camera built into modern phones are quite a bit better than what gets built into tablets as most people don't really use their tablet for making photos or videos, they mostly just use it for the occasional snapshot when they happen to have their tablet in their hands. My totally not fact based guess would be that about 70-80% of all photos today are made with a smartphone, just because we have them on our hands nearly all the time.
I own a Galaxy S4 for example and the videos I make with it during daylight have a quality of some 200-300€ FullHD camcorder from 3-4 years ago, even better I'd say. So I'd definitely say that professional video with smartphone technology is possible today, definitely not on a high-end level but definitely for low cost productions, granting some experience with video and some extra equipment as mentioned before.
And my phone is really just an example from my personal experience, it's not extraordinary, a lot of other phones from other manufactures like Apple or HTC have a very similar quality level. Especially the higher-end Nokia phones feature an absolutely impressive camera nowadays.

+1 for the details about cameras in the various generations of iPad.  I knew it had an improved but wasn't sure when it had.

Yeah i have iphone 4s and it has pretty decent camera. Before few days i tried photographing few pictures with my brothers galaxy grand 2 and they were really very good pictures. But i am not sure about video quality. so which option will be a better using ipad or some camera mobile. I just have iphone 4s with me.

Just try it out. Make a video of the same scene with both devices and see which device makes the video with the least noise/best sharpness/color etc. and make sure not to use any of those software camera filters to boost color or anything, get a "raw" video of both cameras.

Ok i will try. but since both devices have cameras with different megapixels will that matter?. will it be better in day light? or artificial light? (i mean will it really matter?)

What matters is that there is enough light, the type of light is not that important.
They amount of megapixels matters but only to a degree, the "quality" of the pixels matters aswell e.g. noise and color accuracy.

The type of light does matter.  Sunlight is full spectrum.  If you're going to use indoor lighting, you want your lights to have a high CRI (color rendition index).  Essentially sunlight is %100 CRI and good indoor lights are around %95.  Typical fluorescents can range anywhere from %65-%85.  In order to have good color accuracy, you need good lights.  Often, it's easier and cheaper to use sunlight.

Yeah thats right and so i have decided to shoot complete video in daylight. hope that will help me. And currently i am working on audio issues.

We are talking smartphone video here @JasonConrad, you won't get good color accuracy with any light setting. It's just to see which one is better and the quality on those tiny cameras is completely dependent on a good amount of light.

"What matters is that there is enough light, the type of light is not that important. They amount of megapixels matters but only to a degree, the "quality" of the pixels matters aswell e.g. noise and color accuracy."  You cannot have accurate color, or anything that approaches it without a decent quality light source.  It doesn't matter if I'm filming on a red epic or a smartphone, if the only light in the room is red, everything's going to look red.  Period.

Sure, what I was aiming for is that he should look for washed out colors and color noise, thats something you can determine under a lot of circumstance as long as you have a well lit room that is lit by light source that can be called somewhat white :)
I guess the term color accuracy was to broad in that case.
We are talking about a relative difference, so the overall quality/accuracy does not matter when choosing a device over the other. That would be important when you need to decide if you want to use something at all.

There are plenty of camera apps in the app store that will let you lock of the exposure and focus of the iPad's camera.  These are the features that I'd consider most important.  Locking focus and exposure keeps the camera's settings from "breathing".  This forces you to think about focus and exposure before you start shooting.  This forethought is the single most important ingredient for producing quality video.
Improving the quality of your lighting will probably give you the highest Return on Investment.  Again, good lighting depends on pre-planning and forethought, but no one can tell you which kit is going to give you the magic results, especially without details about what you're shooting.  If you plan to shoot outdoors, you're going to need an entirely different setup than what you'd use indoors.  For outdoor lighting, look into scrims, diffusers, flags, bounce cards, and reflectors.  If you're shooting ENG style, you'd probably want a light attached to the camera.  If you're doing indoor interviews, you'll probably want to research "three point lighting".  Whatever the case, it's likely that a nice soft light source should be one of your early investments.
Sound is the next area you can improve to make better quality video.  The first item on the sound chain is a microphone, and -- like choosing a light -- choosing the right mic for the job depends entirely on the job.  Professional recording environments usually have a huge selection of microphones just to get the right sound.  You'll probably want to invest in a lavalier or shotgun microphone early on.  Once you have room for more kit, consider mixers, preamps, and recorders.
Camera stabilization is also very important for professional quality video.  Again, a little pre-planning will go a long way here.  Is your shot going to be static?  Propping your iPad on something stationary will eliminate the hand-held look.  Are you going to pan?  You're probably going to need a tripod or monopod for that.  Is the camera going to move?  You're going to want to increase the camera's rotational inertia somehow.  This can be as complicated and expensive as buying a stedicam or gimbal rig, or as simple as duct-taping your iPad to something more massive, like a heavy dictionary.
Anyway, the best thing you can do is to research yourself into these areas and find which solutions work best for your situation.
Oh, but here's a gadget that you might find useful.  padcaster

Dang, talk about close timing.  +1 for the points about locking focus and exposure and the forethought thing that I completely forgot to mention at first.

Yeah my video will be static. Since we are going to shoot in a classroom . But basically i want to cover a lot of area for movements so that it will become a more appealing video.

BTW is that gadget padcaster available in india? and how much it will cost?

No idea.  I'm not affiliated with that company in any way.  That's just a link my boss sent me to something he thought I might find interesting.

This is actually the original link he sent me, if it helps.  http://www.tuaw.com/2014/05/30/tuaw-takes-a-second-look-at-the-padcaster/

Wanted to chime in,
Did you know that Bentley Motors ad, was filmed using an iphone. Using an iphone 5s to sell their $300,000 car. You heard right. I was quite surprised. Below are the details.
Here is the commercial (after 3:15 mark you see behind the scenes footage)

"the filmmakers used an iPad Air to assemble all of the footage, and edited the entire thing in the backseat."
The software they used was iMovie. A quit and dirty edit tool.
They used the beastgrip universal lens adapter for the iphone, costs around $75

To that they added a $37.50 fisheye lens

They added a Thunderbolt/HDMI split cable to add a field monitor to their iPhone rigs in order to monitor their shots.
Also added a $4.99 iOS video app that helps turn your mobile device into more of a video camera "FilmIC Pro" ... “We used 24fps, 50mbs setting,” he says. “We always lock white balance and focus on every shot.”
The big expense was the steadicam rig, by freefly Movi M5, $5000

Reza (the director) did reveal that they used Final Cut Pro for finessing, adding titles and color timing. (So they did not just use iMovie).
So, yeah. Much to my surprise, it looks like you can use your ipad/iphone to shoot commercial quality footage. If you have the right gear attachments.
Source:
http://reza.la/portfolio/bentley-intelligent-details/
http://www.hdvideopro.com/blog/editor/2014/06/intelligent-details-this-short-documentary-shot-with-an-iphone-5s-and-edited-on-an-ipad-air-will-blow-you-away.html#.U74WDo1dXfa
http://appleinsider.com/articles/14/05/17/behind-the-scenes-of-bentleys-iphone-filmed-ipad-air-edited-ad

I wonder how much Apple paid them to do it. :)  It certainly shows the limits of what is and isn't possible.  I'm curious about how they handled audio and would love to see higher quality copy of the footage (if it exists).  Noticed a lot of artifacts in the video, but some of that may be Youtube garbling.

Oh, hey, minor corrections from doing a bit more digging.  They didn't do the full edit on the iPad, only the rough cut and production reviews.  They finished it up later on a full system with FCPX.  More details available on the actual production company's site here.  The big thing seems to be the camera app they used that enabled 50mbps video encoding and more direct sensor control.

Another article with some more detail.  Apparently they also hooked up field monitors to the iPhone for monitoring as they shot.  Not that it makes the project any less impressive, but a lot of the publicity is slightly less than honest.

Those are good finds! :) Let me add them to the article, I think the one on apple is too much of a puff piece promoting their hardware.

thats amazing, i have never seen anything like it before. And if a big company like bently makes a successful video using iphone so i think at least should try making one by ipad. thank you very much for sharing these video, it is very encouraging. Btw we are going to start working on my video in 5 days. will comment you my experience here.

@AJHenderson those are nice finds. But we must appreciate there work.

@dking - yeah, it's an impressive accomplishment, though there are actually a pretty good number of projects that have been shot at professional quality using smartphone cameras.  That's not all that uncommon (though large commercial projects are), particularly with the more recent cameras becoming really high quality for their low price point.  The big thing is the power required for editing and finessing doesn't fit well in to an iPad (which is why they did everything other than the rough cut on a FCPX rig.)

@dking, let us know how your shoot goes, and show us a video sample as well. I am curious as well.

@eLouai i will get back to you as soon as video is done.


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Create a Video File or PNG Sequence of Writing Out A Word
I  was wondering if there is a generator, or something out on the web where you type a word, and it would create a video file of it being written out.
I want to embed the file on a site, so when you go there the first time, it's not just loaded, it autoplays the video, so it starts to write the word and finishes writing the word.
How could I get something like this?
If there is no generator, could I accomplish this in photoshop? I'm not sure what to search
Thanks
Ermm Not sure Video Production is appropriate for this...
It can be done in flash,

Please migrate back to graphic design.

When you say "Write the word" what are you envisioning?

Not sure why this got migrated. You can try using the flag button to get a moderator's attention.

@Peege151 - this fits fine on video production.  It deals with animation, which is covered in video production.  Also, in addition to Flash, After Effects can also be used to accomplish this without needing to embed a flash animation.  I can reject the migration if you really want, but we do have very similar questions here.  (In fact, I'm pretty sure this is actually a dupe, but I need to go dig up the original.)

Might not quite be an exact dupe, but http://video.stackexchange.com/questions/10814/how-do-i-create-a-video-of-typing-math-symbols is very related.  The big trick is that you have to manually establish stroke data somehow since fonts don't have stroke data.  That's normally done through masking it.

It depends on whether you need to to do this based on a raster image of a finished typeface design or if you are starting from scratch.
For both cases you can use flash like shown in the video you linked or you can use After Effects to have some more control over the look, doing this frame by frame is no that easy if you are after specific timing, instead you probably want to keyframe this.
After Effects is pretty great for this job, it has the so called "Stroke" effect where you can let After Effects draw a line based on a vector shape or "Masks" in After Effects.
You basically draw a vector path and the effect will draw along that path based on keyframes you set, you can also alter the line width of the "pencil" and have overall a much larger control of the look of the "writing".
Here is a small tutorial explaining the basics of the effect:


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Awful Audio in Video post-render (Premiere Pro CC)
I'm trying out Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2014 and I have a video with three audio tracks. The quality of each track is as follows (listed as the "Source Audio Format" in Premiere):

48,000 Hz 16-bit Mono
16,000 Hz 16-bit Mono
44100 Hz - compressed - Stereo

The sequence settings for the audio is "48,000 Hz, Stereo, and Audio Samples". When I render what I'm trying to use is h.264 and for audio my settings are "AAC, 48,000 Hz, Stereo, High, 320 Kbps, Bitrate"
I've tried numerous other settings as well, including different encodings, and whenever I render out the video the audio sounds thin and echoes a ton. It is really awful. The only way I'm able to get all three tracks to play together nicely, is if I render them as an uncompressed .wav file, but obviously I'll get no video then. Another strange thing is that all the other tracks (in camera audio, music track) sound completely fine, but the one that's really important, the narrative voice over sounds awful.
What am I doing wrong?!
EDIT: Here are some pictures of the settings

OK, after using different encodings, recording in different modes, trying different field recorders, trying different NLEs, I refreshed my PC (Windows 8 Refresh), reinstalled my drivers, updated, reinstalled AE and PP and it works. So it was a confliction with some sort of 3rd party program, driver, or errant system file, etc.

Do they playback properly in Premiere before you render? If they playback fine when you export them as uncompressed wav, try exporting them to wav, then import that single wav back into your project, mute the other 3 channels, and then export your single wav and single video.

Yes they playback great in premiere. When I render them all as .wav and add that file back into the editor I get the same thing. Something that's weird: all the other audio tracks sound completely fine. It's just one track that's getting messed up even when they're all mixed into one track!


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Screenshot - what is this on my layer?
I followed a similar process of precomposing a number of layers but the last time it gave me something I hadn't seen yet and I'm trying to understand what happened.
In the image you see a green bar about 5 cm wide. To the right you see a further extending semi-transparent bar that extends off the screen. What is this?

That means there's extra media after the end of the clip.  If you hover the mouse over the intersection of the semi-transparent part and the opaque part, it will turn into a double arrow <-->.  If you then click and drag to the right and play back the file, you'll notice extra media appear as part of your composition.  I.e. something more will happen in the video.  Drag it to the left, and the clip will disappear when the playhead hits that part of the timeline.  The transparency just lets you know that whatever recorded the media file (a camera, for example) recorded something more than what you're seeing play back in the viewer.  In other words, you could potentially extend the edit.


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Does the screen resolution override the source resolution?
I'm trying to figure out what is more important - the screen resolution or the source resolution?
OK, so a Full HD 1080p file might be able to be played on a small HTC One mini screen, but due the the screen only being HD (1280 x 720) is there any scaling back? Or is there no scaling back and it plays the normal file but can only actually see the 1280 x 720 resolution? (I guess it also depends on the playback application...?)
On a screen that size, can anyone actually tell the difference between a 1280 x 720 HD and a 1920 x 1080 Full HD movie?
Further to this, what's the difference between a screen resolution of 1280 x 720 on a 4.5" screen than to a 50" screen? The pixels are bigger on a 50" screen so it looks 'worse' (Or pixels are smaller on a 4.5" so it looks 'better')?

If you're only delivering to the HTC One mini, then yes, screen resolution overrides source resolution, as you put it.  Your assumptions are correct about 1080p video either having to be scaled or cropped to fit the display, and you're right, whether the source media is scaled or cropped does depend on the playback application.
As a general rule, you should try to match your final output to the format upon which it will be viewed.  In your case, because the HTC One mini is only capable of displaying 1280x720 (roughly 900,000 pixels), there's no need to send it 1920*1080 (about 2 million pixels).  Doing so is certainly a waste of bandwidth, and arguably a waste of CPU cycles and battery life.
But to be clear, this advice only applies when you know the video will never be displayed on any other device.  If your final output is 1280x720, then anything with a better display will have to scale the image UP, making it blurry or blocky.  By limiting your resolution to the HTC One, you'll notice sub-optimal performance on HD-TVs, for instance, or perhaps next year's model phone.

On a screen that size, can anyone actually tell the difference between
  a 1280 x 720 HD and a 1920 x 7080 Full HD movie?

Probably not.  It depends on the quality of the phone's onboard scaling vs the quality of whatever application you'd use to scale from 1920x1080 to 1280x720.

Further to this, what's the difference between a screen resolution of
  1280 x 720 on a 4.5" screen than to a 50" screen? The pixels are
  bigger on a 50" screen so looks 'worse' (Or pixels are smaller on a
  4.5" so it looks 'better')?

Yes. If you have the same number of pixels on a bigger screen, the pixels themselves will just have to be bigger.  But you have to remember that a 50" screen isn't meant to be viewed at arm's length like your phone.

Thank you very much. Upvoted. If you don't mind, I'm going to wait for other answers before I accept this answer.

They both matter.  What really matters is the combination of the two.  Scaling always produces a loss of quality unless you are using an even multiple of the resolution.  This is because interpolation must occur during a scaling operation that isn't an even multiple or divisor of the original resolution.  This is due to the fact that some pixels must contribute to two different new pixels.
That said, it is even more complicated when deciding what to shoot with for your camera if it is coming from a camera.  The actual imaging sensor has a native resolution itself and will internally apply scaling to fit to whatever size you need.  In some cases, like DSLRs, all formats actually end up getting scaling applied since the actual sensor is much higher quality, but that also means the down-scaling can be more accurate if implemented properly.
If you know that you will only ever use output in a given resolution, start with that resolution as early as possible to make use of any source side optimizations that may exist rather than going to an unnecessary intermediate format that will only be scaled again (resulting in another interpolation).
If you are targeting multiple output formats, then use whatever the highest quality format you can is (even if it exceeds the maximum format you intend to output) since the more information you have, the more accurately you can downscale later.
The exception to this would be if the majority of your usage will be on the highest quality format that you will be distributing, then go ahead and use that quality for source since you will gain a little quality at that level at a cost of a little quality on the lower end videos.
As for the side question about screen size, yes, it can make a difference, but angle of view is what matters.  A 50 foot screen two miles away is still going to have less visible resolution than a similar pixel count screen that is 4 inches across and 3 inches in front of your face.  I touch on this in a little more detail in this answer.

As for the side question about screen size... This part of the topic has been covered extensively on the site already though. Can you please link?

@BBking - perhaps extensively was a misstatement, I remembered more questions about this somewhere, but it might have been on photography.SE.  I did find one answer that talks about it a bit though which is probably what I remembered from here when writing my answer.  I linked it above.  For related reading, you may also find this post interesting.

Good answer, clearly worded, probably better than mine, but I do feel like I disagree on your third point, or maybe I just misunderstand.  That is, when you say, "If you know that you will only ever use output in a given resolution, start with that resolution as early as possible, [...]"  Say he's shooting a greenscreen in 4k and delivering to SD.  Wouldn't it be better to 4k->GS_composite->SD than to 4k->SD->GS_composite?  Maybe I just misunderstand your point, or maybe you have a situation in mind which I haven't considered, but I'd appreciate a little more on this point.  Thanks.

@JasonConrad - maybe, effects work might justify having the additional detail, but if you can't do an even multiple, you are going to end up blurring the whole thing a bit when you down-scale.  I was mostly just talking about if you are going direct from source to encode though.


text:
Program to convert videos by interpolating 30fps video to 60 fps similar to Splash Pro video player
If you have tried Splash Pro video player, you will see that it will play 30fps videos in 60 fps by using some kind of motion interpolation technology.
I want to somehow use that technology to process my 30fps videos to 60 or higher fps.
I tried Smooth Video Project(SVP) and I don't know what to do with it. It seems to only convert only Youtube videos.
How do I get this technology and apply it to my videos? Can I do it in Sony Vegas?

Out of curiosity, what is the objective of trying to up the frame rate?  All it really gains you is interpolation artifacts that will reduce the overall quality of your video.  It may help the smoothness a little on high frame rate LCD screens that don't have their own interpolation, but it will come at the cost of artifacts on screens that aren't LCDs or that apply their own interpolation to a higher frame rate than 60fps.

I want to make a 60 fps video. I have some 60fps videos available but I also have older 30fps video where I can't reproduce in higher fps. I can accept some visual artifacts as long the whole video I'm planning to make is consistent with frame rate.

Ah, in that case, you may want to consider frame doubling.  It's kind of a toss up on how noticeable it will be vs the artifacts, but frame doubling wouldn't produce motion artifacts and would still allow for incorporation of 30fps footage in a 60fps sequence.

If you're exporting your finished project to a 60 fps format, your editing or compressing software will generally do some sort of conversion for you. It's not usually necessary to conform all your clips before editing.
If you have different options for how to handle the conversion, using "Optical Flow" or "Motion Estimation" options will interpolate frames. Depending on how good the interpolation is and the nature of the footage, this may look perfectly acceptable or horrible. As mentioned, you can try frame blending, too.
If your software doesn't do the conform automatically, you could try 3rd party tools. I know many people who have had good success with Twixtor from RE:Vision Effects. But there are others you can try as well depending on which application you're using.

usually there are two ways to convert videos from 30 fps to 60 fps. Firstly simply copy every frame to the missing frame, in this case, you can watch video with the same quality. Secondly, interpolate the missing frames using Sony Vegas or Splash Pro video player, which will playback video with poorer quality probably. Therefore, it is better to film videos at 60fps.
Still, I have tried to use some conversion tools to convert video to 60 fps and surprisingly found the video quality is good. Maybe you can find some alternatives like this for solving your problem.


text:
How can I freeze motion with a high shutter speed in low light?
I'm trying to film guitar strings moving. So, I'm putting high shutters peed (1/1000) and slow frame rate (25). This is working. But the problem is when I'm doing it in the evening. The image is to dark. I'm putting iso up to the limit and open the lens to the maximum.
Is the only solution to put more light??

This is typically done with a stroboscope synced to the frame rate.

Yes. 'The only solution to put more light', so 1/1000 of a sec collects enough to create an image from it. You can put more light by strobes or flashes, or just switch another lamp on, but you need more light

Maybe use a faster lens?  If you're using a compatible lens mount, you could try a metabones speedbooster.  Aperture, shutter, ISO, ND, actual light.  Those are the 5 things you can change.

Thx guys, i think i'll go with additional lamp/spotlight. As i'm not a professional movie maker, I'll not invest in extra hardware.

"Is the only solution to put more light?" - you can get a more sensitive camera like the Sony a7s. As an a side, 25 fps at 1/1000 would be hard to watch.

Put on more light and darken the shot in post production

"Is the only solution to put more light??".

No.
This is explained here and many other places: https://photo.stackexchange.com/questions/6598/what-is-the-exposure-triangle .
There are three ways, the three factors are:

Shutter — how long you let light in
Aperture — how large of an opening you let light through (how much at once)
ISO — how sensitive your film or sensor is to light

Half the Shutter Speed will double the brightness, a lens with a larger Aperture will let in more light but also reduces the Depth of Field and is more expensive, finally a camera with a more sensitive sensor will also result in a brighter image at a greater cost.
Reducing the Shutter Speed is likely the better method if you want the strings to have a bit of blur and depict motion. IF you actually wanted tack sharp frames of the strings moving you would not want to film at 25FPS but instead at a very high Frame Rate.
Do you need to do this only in the evening?, if most of the Film is set in the evening then do a few closeups during the day and use multiple lights to remove all shadows and increase the light so it's extremely bright; film that and rely upon the darkening of the fast Shutter to make it appear dark.

As it is stated in the question the aperture is set to max and the iso also. Shutter and FPS are set to these values to achive the effect.


text:
Advertisement Video For App
I would like to build an advertisement video for my app similar to this one that Waze made:

Any suggestions on what software I should use?

Please add your expectations of future video.

I would like to create something similar to the advertisement video that Waze built, thanks in advance. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhKiJOX6zfo

In my opinion, you're asking the wrong question. Which software they used is fairly irrelevant. What's more important is the skills and techniques they used. Do you have a background in graphic design or other visual arts? If not, this video is probably beyond your skill level. You might be better off hiring someone to do it for you. If money is an issue, perhaps you could find a student who would be willing to do it for either less money, or for the experience and to build their demo reel.
If you do have such a background yourself and are interested in making similar videos, you should check out any number of motion graphics applications such as Apple Motion or Adobe After Effects. It could also have been done with a 3D application such as Maya, Modo, Cinema 4D, or 3D Studio Max. If you're on a budget, you can look into Blender, which is a free 3D modeling application.


text:
Scrolling Text Looks Bad
I want to have a text scroll through a video. I use Kdenlive for editing and rendering and it supports having a scrolling text and simply made it black text on a white background.
It scrolls very fast, way faster than would be readable. Which is intended. However, it should still look crisp (appearing clear, sharp, etc.).
When I stop at any point in the video, the text is as sharp as it could be. However, when playing the video, the text looks blurry.
It doesn't appear to be a player issue. I tried 3 different players, same thing. When I take a screenshot while playing the video, the text looks sharp, too.
I use a 60 fps LCD laptop monitor with 4 K resolution scaled to 1920 px x 1080 px by the operating system and tried 30 fps and 60 fps video.
The problem vanishes when I stand 4 m or more back.
Is this a known problem and is there a solution? Like using colors which aren't as different as black and white for the text and the background or actually lowering the frame rate or showing smaller/bigger text or anything?

Some general advice on motion graphics / rolling text, i dont know KDEnlive so i dont know how to achieve that in your specific software.

Make scrolling speed fit your framerate. If your framerate is 25fps, the text should scroll at 25 / 50 / 75 / 100 / 125 etc. pixels per frame.
If you are using a progressive scan playback device like a projector or a computer screen, make sure your project is set to be in progressive and not interlaced. If necessary, de-interlace video that was shot interlaced before using it in the project.
Never use fonts or graphics that have lines which are only 1px, if you need to do that, duplicate the layer and put a copy of the graphics with a very soft gaussian blur (1 or 2px blur) in the background.
Put a soft shadow around the font, also very subtle, 1 or 2px dissolved shadow.

Did I understand this correctly? Given I use frame rate f, I should let the text scroll n*f px per frame with n∈ℕ? I don't really see how that would matter.

You cannot get smooth motion if the text movement is not synced with the framerate, or what would you imagine the NLE would do i.e. when moving 27pixel / frame at a 25fps framerate?

Quote from: https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/creating-editing-text-layers.html
When animating text to move vertically—for scrolling credits, for example—move the text vertically at a rate in pixels per second that is an even multiple of the field rate for the interlaced video format. Such a rate of movement prevents a kind of twitter that can come from the text movement being out of phase with the scan lines. For NTSC, good values include 0, 119.88, and 239.76 pixels per second; for PAL, good values include 0, 100, and 200 pixels per second.

but yes, i mixed up px/frame and px/s ;)

Ah, ok. That makes sense. So for non-interlaced video, it just means that one should move the text an integer number of pixels per frame. I find this description way more intuitive than bringing seconds in for no reason whatsoever and it's less prone to error.

I tried moving the text at exactly 10 px per frame (which is considerably slower than what I used before but makes the math really easy) (only viewed it on my laptop display) but it didn't help at all.

I think it would be easier if you uploaded an example clip somewhere

The original one (30 fps). The original one with double speed (60 fps). The one with 10 px per frame. (30 fps). All are 1080p clips.


text:
Making the camera travel through a hole in a letter
I need to know if there is a way for a camera to travel through a hole in a letter or something flashy like a portal in After Effects CC.

You need to explain your question a bit more. If you mean can you move a camera through a transparent part of a layer, then yes, it can.

Here's one idea for the effect, which you can even do in Premiere:

Get a live-action camera shot where the camera is slowly trucking forward.
In post-production, create a title that has at least one letter with a hole in it (A, B, D, O, P, Q, etc.).
Lay the title over the top of the trucking-in shot.
Animate the scale and position of the title over several seconds, so that the title gets larger and larger, and the hole stretches towards the edges of the screen. Since this is happening while the camera in the live-action scene is trucking forward, it will appear that the title is hovering in the air within the live-action scene.
When the hole in the letter is larger than the screen (because of the increasing scale), the animation is done.  At that point, it will appear as though the camera has traveled "through" the hole in the title, and is continuing to move forward.  (You can cut the title from the timeline at that point.)

if you can, make the letters 3D so as you pass through the hole you can see the depth of the character... but I would do the exact same thing BrettFromLA just said.

Yeah, 3D letters would look cool!


text:
Need to learn about Video stitching
I need to start learning about video stitching. I have studied about this and have some knowledge that the video should be converted into image sequences, then image alignment is done [geometric and photometric correction], and feature matching is used to match two video frames which are then blended together.
I don't know whether this is correct and I need to know if this process is correct and is there anything I missed? Is there anything I need to learn? Also I need to learn from basics. I want some knowledge about this.

Can you post a link to an example of what you're looking to do? There are lots of papers from SIGGRAPH on topics like this, but I'm not sure which ones to point you towards because it's not clear what your goal is.

http://www.airpano.com/360-videos.php

Note a video is a image sequence so expanding it into individual files or reading individual frames from a stream is the same thing in a different wrapper.

I've found 2 useful references:
LEVIN, A., ZOMET, A., PELEG, S., AND WEISS, Y. 2004. Seamless image stitching in the gradient domain. In European Conference on Computer Vision, 377–389.
and
PÉREZ, P., GANGNET, M., AND BLAKE, A. 2003. Poisson image editing. ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH ’03), 313– 318.


text:
Morphing software in Linux
I'm trying to morph from one video to another (not just two photographs). At the moment I'm using gtkmorh, but AFAIK it only allows photograph morphing and not sequence morphing.
Does anyone know what options are available (if any) to morph video sequences in Linux?

I don't have lot of experience in working with video in Linux, however, there is Blender, which is capable with video editing, and it also can morph still images and meshes. And of course more complex 3D objects.
Maybe you can achieve your goal, by combining those techniques.

Thanks for your answer, but I am aware of Blender and the posibility of morphing still images modifying the vertex of a plane, the problem is morphing from one video sequence to another. If you know a method for doing that I would really appreciate you pointing to that method.


text:
How to force Adobe Media Encoder to use 100% CPU and memory?
On my machine, Adobe Media Encoder is very slow. It takes 12 hours to render 4 minutes of 1080p video for YouTube (the video is based on Adobe After Effects project with an original MOV file and four effects: curves, remove grain, unsharp mask and hue/saturation.

I noticed that it doesn't use all the memory available, nor does it try to use as much CPU as possible. Here's the actual usage during the encoding process:

Is there a way to speed up the encoding process by convincing the application to use all CPU and all memory available?
As a side note, is it expected to be that slow? I can't possibly imagine movie making companies using it to encode a movie which usually is slightly longer than 4 minutes and has slightly more than four basic effects, even with a whole data center. Removing "remove grain" effect speeds up the encoding from 12 hours to 3:30.

There is absolutely no reason it should need all memory available.  Encoding video is a linear process of opening any input frames, applying processing and then saving the output frame.  There is no reason this should take much memory at all because it works as a stream.  Some memory is used for pattern matching, but even that is fairly limited.

try ffmpeg. The payoff for having to learn how to use it is that it is way faster than any proprietary (software) media encoder I've ever used.

adding any type of effect that needs to be rendered will add time onto the export, some effects will render in real time as such but others like "remove grain" will have to reference every frame before to match them up, this will take time to complete. I found that when I was using PP just adding a LUT or simple effect even on my 8 core mach with 16gb ram would take time to render. Sometimes you just have to suck up to the render and leave it doing its thing, Ive had it say 12+ hours to do an export but then once it finished a section it dropped massively as the effect had finished rendering a

FYI if you're exporting an AE comp from AME you're not actually "encoding" the file so to speak, you are first rendering it THEN encoding it. The distinction is important because AME is presumably running a sub-process of AE to get those frames out, to then encode them. So the bottle-neck is actually AE's internal renderer which is horribly inefficient as I think we all know, and definitely does not hit 100% CPU. That is why degraining makes such a big difference! And FYI I believe Adobe moved that to the GPU in the last release...

There might not be a way.  Based on your description of the problem, it sounds like the processing is the slow part.  While the video encoder itself is able to do multi-threaded processing, the image processing you are doing may not be able to.  By default, Premiere has always done as much parallel processing as possible for me and I frequently see it hit 99% CPU usage on my hyper-threaded quad core desktop.
The problem is most likely that some of your effects require the result of the previous frame to begin processing on the next frame.  If this is the case, there isn't an easy way to break it down across multiple threads and that would make it impossible to hit 100% CPU usage on a multi-core computer.
Similarly, RAM wouldn't be expected to cap on encoding as it is a stream operation.  There are some things that may need to be tracked over time, but for the most part, it is a stream operation with data going out as fast as it comes in, so there isn't much accumulation of data.
There are two main things that can improve the performance.  The first is GPU processing.  General purpose CPUs aren't really ideal for many audio/video processing tasks.  They are designed for doing a wide variety of general purpose operations, but aren't super efficient at basic operations.  GPUs, on the other hand, are designed for doing simple operations very quickly.  They can often reduce video processing tasks quite a bit.
A further improvement can be found in purpose built hardware.  There are professional cards designed specifically for processing video and provide real time processing and encoding of video.  These are often included in high end professional video editing workstations, but the price can be quite high.  It isn't unheard of for a professional video editing workstation to be able to get up in the $15,000 to $20,000 range or even higher, just for hardware.  They can go for a lot less if you don't mind waiting for renders (I work on a $2,350 system for my video work) but they can also get very high.

I'm not happy when I'm rendering unless I can actually smell burning plastic, nothing is more frustrating than AE telling you that your render won't complete until the heat death of the universe, while at the same time your CPU is barely raising a sweat. However there is something you can do about it.
After effects comes with a command line renderer called aerender.exe  plain ol' aerender on mac). It's in the AE program folder. Using it is a bit challenging for people unused to the -=awesome -=power of the command line, but it is definitely worth doing if you're doing some heavy lifting in After Effects, and you want to be able to harness all the power of your machine.
The beauty of it is that you can run as many instances as you like. What I normally do is keep adding instances until I start running low on memory. I have a 40 physical core machine and it takes a lot to max out the CPU but here's a screenshot where I finally managed it. Each one of those windows is a new instance of the AE render engine:

In that example the per-frame speed of each renderer barely decreased compared to a single instance, so I achieved a speed increase of roughly 4000%. YMMV, depending on how many cores and how much ram your machine has. I went to the effort because I had a project involving very long and and reasonably complex comps. The project would simply not have got done without this technique, or I would have had to farm it out to a commercial render farm.
Of course the speed-up comes at a price, which is a slight increase in complexity of your workflow. You need to set your comps to render as image sequences, and use the multi-machine settings so that each renderer will look for the next unrendered frame. At the end if you need a movie file you'll have to do a compression pass, but in my case I usually master to a png or tiff sequence, and then run off h.264 encoded copies for clients from the master.
And you need to know a little bit about the command line. Stop looking so glum—that's a GOOD thing, that's a GOOD thing.

Windows
The powershell command line I used in that scenario was:
for ($i = 0 ; $i -lt 40; $i++ ){
  Start-Process 'C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe After Effects <<version>>\Support Files\aerender.exe'-ArgumentList '-project', '"c:\path\to\project.aep"'
  sleep 5;
}

This is executed in a powershell window (type in WindowsR and then type powershell.exe). This is a shell scripting language integrated into modern versions of Windows that can be used for all kinds of stuff.
Mac
Using Bash version > 3 (default shell in current versions of OSX), or indeed with cooler shells like zsh, you can use this script:
for i in {1..40}; do
  /Applications/Adobe\ After\ Effects\ CC\ 2017/aerender -project ~/Path/to/myproject.aep &
  sleep 5
done

The script works thus:

starts a loop which goes for 40 repeats, you can change the 40 to whatever you think is a sane amount.
Then it starts aerender as a new process either with the start-process command in PS or with the & in bash, Obviously change the path to aerender.exe / aerender and your project to whatever it is on your machine. A quick and accurate way of filling in paths with the command line is to drag files and folders into it. Also using the tab to auto-fill paths saves a lot of typing and typos.
Finally it sleeps for 5 seconds—I found that opening too many instances of aerender too quickly was a reliable way to bluescreen / kernel panic my computer.

If you have multiple comps you can render them as movies but start a new renderer for each one. If you invoke aerender.exe like this
aerender.exe -project "c:\path\to\proj.aep" -rqindex 3

it will render the third comp on the render queue. Putting it into a script you can do:
Windows
$numcomps = 12
$projpath= "C:\path\to\project.aep"
for($i=1; $i -lt ($numcomps+1); $i++){
  Start-Process 'C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe After Effects <<version>>\Support Files\aerender.exe' -ArgumentList '-project', '$projpath', '-rqindex', '$i'
  sleep 5;
}

Mac
for i in {1..12}; do
  /Applications/Adobe\ After\ Effects\ CC\ 2017/aerender -project ~/Path/to/myproject.aep -rqindex $i &
  sleep 5
done

That will start a new aerender instance for each comp–once again, change the 12 to however many comps there are in the queue. Note that this technique can run into problems if you have lots of comps in your queue–if you use all your physical memory things will come to a shuddering halt pretty quick. To keep the number of instances down you have to check how many aerender processes are running and only start a new one when a running one finishes. A simpler workaround is to make as many copies of your project as you want there to be instances, with the render queue divided up between them, and then render them all concurrently. So render thread one would be rendering comps 1,2,3, render thread two would be doing 3,4,5, and so on.
More details here (my blog).

you are a legend!

that's what I keep telling people.

@stib is there anything similar for Premiere Pro?  I'm having similar problems as OP between AME and PP.  Example from today: AME will take 1h 20m to export a video, PP will export it in 5-10 mins - all at same quality etc.

Unfortunately there is no command line renderer for PP.

@5Diraptor I had the same issue, if you "render in AME" from PP it opens AME, allocates the leftover resources (after it's reserved them when you opened PP) to AME, which are now shared with PP, so you end up not utilising your full system. You have to close PP and re-open AME and it should (in my case, does consistently) then allocate the full amount of resources (according to your preferences for RAM allowance) to AME now and in turn be much quicker, I saw a 400% increase, huge.

While this question has already been answered; my recommendation:
Use AfterEffects for your rendering if you have a system with a high number of cores and a lot of RAM.
My main workstation is a Dual E5-2697 v2 (24 Logical / 48 Hyper Threaded Cores); with 128 GB of RAM.
If you have to do simply a transcode of a file; or can use Bridge to import your PPro Project into AE (barring your edits will remain intact); the feature under Memory (Edit -> Preferences) allow for you to use Multi-threading.
That being said:
If I am doing just a straight render; or something simple; I can use AE to allocate 32 of my 48 HT cores; additionally; I can allocate 3 GB of ram to each Thread; which is depending on what type of encode I'm doing, anywhere between 2-100x faster in terms of rendering even with my Dual Titan Black GPUs.
This of course; only applies if you have a LOT of cores; and a LOT of ram...
Premiere; rendering through AME; will be limited to using only 1 Thread unfortunately; and will rely on your GPU unless you have that disabled to use software rendering under Project Settings.
Hope this helps!

Close After Effects while rendering with Media Encoder.
By doing so my CPU usage went from 30% to 60%.
I guess because Adobe isn't sparing CPU power for working simulatiously in AE.

I believe this is due to the dynamic way that Adobe allocates RAM in the background. It will limit the amount of RAM per adobe process, to prevent overflow and whatnot. So by closing one Adobe app you theoretically free up more RAM for another.

Its always best to use the command line Aerender.  Personally, I have a single user account with adobe, which allows me to install and run AE GUI on one, while using AERENDER on the other.  No longer need to put in a text file for render only.  Here's the only issue you will run into: Some plugins require separate licensing for each machine, or even render only licenses.  The other issue you will run into is that each set of license for adobe software with 2 running seats (1 gui\commandline, 1 commandline render only) will require its own email address.  I miss the days when you could have unlimited command line renderers so long as you had the licesnses for your plugins, but they are long gone.  Adobe has also forced us to maintain multiple email addresses for this purpose, which defeats the purpose entirely.  If they sold off multi-render seating, which would allow more instances to be run concurrently under the same user, similar to their institutional licensing, it would allow them to retain the email address license model, bring in more revenue, and return a once powerful function to the user community.  But hey, I'm just sayin...  You might, and I wouldn't bet the farm on this, but might, get around it using a set of VM files to host your software on multiple machines with one vm copy holding the software and multiple machines with copies of that VM on a closed network.  You only need to update one VM, then copy it over to other machines and run it all inside a closed network with no internet (no way to limit license use).  Not perfect but it might work if you only utilize it on a per project basis, allowing the main vm to connect to the internet once every week or so to update etc, and then back to the closed network and copy the vm over... ...Just sayin...
There are other ways around this.
Look up online render farms.  They will take in your project files and render them out quickly.  Some even support Premiere Pro and other applications beyond adobe software, and their pricing is pretty fair for the most part.  Much faster to run a render with 20 cores and pay $5 to $10 US, get an output file in your desired format and go to print.  For 10 bucks, I'll save the headache and just do the upload.  Of course, you're best off with a wired network and a ton of bandwidth.
Option 2:
You could find a boxed CS6 with a valid key, apply it to your licensing online, and install the full on your main box, then buy a bunch of i5\i3 machines slap some nvidia 1-2gb cards in them, add 4-16gb of ram, and network them together.  Then you could hook them to RAID NAS drives, one input, one output, and use the Render only setting from cs6 to have your very own render farm.  This isn't cheap.  About 5 grand for all of it with a 20 core running farm.  You then have to install something to initiate the farm on each machine.  There are some good softwares for that too.  Then, open premiere, save project and files to input RAID, send the entire sequence to after effects, save that file with a render queue, and put into your farm initiator, let the other 10 machines work on it, Have one machine set up with media encoder to watch the folder and compress the output to a final file on your main machine.  You can have a coffee (or a beer), then start the next project, and since there is only one set of writes going to the input nas, but many reads, it will be slow going at first.  I suggest a third device for cache files, and raid-ed ssds on all of them (get cheapos, it'll be okay, just factor in the wear and tear to your pricing for clients; for personal work or sidehustle, you're better off with used disks, as cheap as you can get them, and replace them when they begin to have problems).

Can I suggest this is still an issue 5 years on! You need to close all Adobe apps and then open Media Encoder (if that's where you're rendering from) FIRST, then it'll assign the full resources available to that app, I haven't seen it dynamically share resources, it simply allocates CPU-time according to the number of apps open when you start the Adobe app (this is repeatable, try opening LR for example before rendering, it'll only use 10% of the CPU - then open AME first then lightroom and you'll get 100%)
I got a 4x increase in render times because of this. Hope it helps. Adobe's "resource management" sucks.

Well, that seems to be a USP for AE. So they have every incentive to keep it that way. Unfortunately. Also, there is hardly any competition. And don't even mention the open source products... OpenShot has no proxy support, Blender cannot time stretch properly... and none seems to properly support multicore systems outside of the encoder/decoder: parallelizing video processing would be trivial - just use key frames to split the work into work units (more or less)... or on the app side this wouldn't even be necessary because the key frame distinction is often not relevant there.

How to speed up Media Encoder to use 100% of your cpu?
Here is an example:
Create a file: settings.ini
place inside of it
[Settings]
mode=developer
mthread=enabled
mthreadcount=3  (for a 4 core 8 threaded machine say, 7)
sli=false
slimode=all
priority=high
scaling=low
cloud=false
loadwhenneeded=true
speakers=2

Place in Adobe Premiere, After Effects, and Media Encoders executable folders.
For a quad core / 4 threadded machine like mine, this made Media Encoder jump from 1 core to using 96% of all four.  You must watch the youtube video "Render 300X FASTER | Premiere / After Effects / Media Encoder "  I'm successfully using this with CC 2018 products.

Wow, now that's interesting!