text:
What are obsolete effects?
I'm trying to make an animated slideshow in Premiere Pro, and the examples I've found on the net all use the motion effect. However I noticed that it doesn't do anything, and I noticed it's in the obsolete folder. There are a bunch of other effects in that folder, does that mean that they don't work anymore?

I think it means that they've been replaced by other in house effects made by Adobe which work better (ie less processing/rendering needed to create the same effect).  Adobe tends to keep the old versions around for backwards compatibility in case you need to open an old project.
This link is to After Effects, but it's the same issue:
https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/obsolete-effects.html


text:
Need to concatenate several MP4 from Garmin dashcam with telemetry
I have a Garmin 66W dashcam for my work (street mapping surveyor) which produces several 1min. MP4 videos of my journey (60 min. = 60 videos).
All these videos have telemetry data on it as metadata (GPS location, speed, etc...).
I want to concatenate every 5 files excluding the audio but preserving the video and the telemetry in the metadata.
What I have tried:

Export GPS information as GPX file (result: successful)

exiftool -p gpx.fmt -ee X:\video_place\videos_1m\GRMN0005.mp4 > GRMN0005.gpx

Merge MP4 videos as a single MP4 video (result: partially successful)

ffmpeg -f concat -safe 0 -i X:\video_place\videos_1m\mylist.txt -c copy X:\video_place\videos_1m\GRMN0005to0011.mp4
When I use above command on ffmpeg I loose all my telemetry data.
I tried in several different ways for days, searching on several forums, I even tried to export all GPS data from each single 1min. file merge them, and them merge the videos and put the telemetry back.
The ffprobe output of my 1min. video is as following:
  Metadata:
    major_brand     : avc1
    minor_version   : 0
    compatible_brands: avc1isom
    creation_time   : 2021-07-26T17:08:23.000000Z
  Duration: 00:01:00.06, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 19553 kb/s
  Stream #0:0(eng): Video: h264 (Main) (avc1 / 0x31637661), yuv420p(tv, bt709), 1920x1080, 19182 kb/s, 29.97 fps, 29.97 tbr, 30k tbn (default)
    Metadata:
      creation_time   : 2021-07-26T17:08:23.000000Z
      handler_name    :  Ambarella AVC
      vendor_id       : [0][0][0][0]
      encoder         : Ambarella AVC encoder
  Stream #0:1(eng): Audio: aac (LC) (mp4a / 0x6134706D), 48000 Hz, mono, fltp, 128 kb/s (default)
    Metadata:
      creation_time   : 2021-07-26T17:08:23.000000Z
      handler_name    :  Ambarella AAC
      vendor_id       : [0][0][0][0]
  Stream #0:2(eng): Subtitle: mov_text (text / 0x74786574), 0 kb/s (default)
    Metadata:
      creation_time   : 2021-07-26T17:08:23.000000Z
      handler_name    :  Ambarella EXT

When I use the ffmpeg code above to concatenate the videos, I get the following ffprobe without the telemetry:
Input #0, mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2, from 'X:\video_place\videos_1m\GRMN0005to0011.mp4':
  Metadata:
    major_brand     : isom
    minor_version   : 512
    compatible_brands: isomiso2avc1mp41
    encoder         : Lavf59.4.100
  Duration: 00:07:00.42, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 19313 kb/s
  Stream #0:0(eng): Video: h264 (Main) (avc1 / 0x31637661), yuv420p(tv, bt709), 1920x1080, 19178 kb/s, 29.97 fps, 29.97 tbr, 30k tbn (default)
    Metadata:
      handler_name    :  Ambarella AVC
      vendor_id       : [0][0][0][0]
  Stream #0:1(eng): Audio: aac (LC) (mp4a / 0x6134706D), 48000 Hz, mono, fltp, 127 kb/s (default)
    Metadata:
      handler_name    :  Ambarella AAC
      vendor_id       : [0][0][0][0]

I have tried as well with following code, but none of them seems to work:
ffmpeg -f concat -safe 0 -i X:\video_place\videos_1m\mylist.txt -c copy -scodec copy X:\video_place\videos_1m\GRMN0005to0011_scodec.mp4
ffmpeg -f concat -safe 0 -i X:\video_place\videos_1m\mylist.txt -c:s copy -c:v copy X:\video_place\videos_1m\GRMN0005to0011.mp4
ffmpeg -f concat -safe 0 -i X:\video_place\videos_1m\mylist.txt -c copy -c:s mov_text X:\video_place\videos_1m\GRMN0005to0011.mp4
Can a good soul please guide me on how to perform this? I thought it was going to be simple...

add the tag operator and read the file in as text format.
ffmpeg \
    -y -f concat -i test.txt -c copy \
    -map 0:v -map 0:a -map 0:3 \
    -copy_unknown -tag:2 gpmd \
    test2.mp4

otherwise something like this might do the trick: http://www.dashware.net/how-it-works/

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


text:
I'm trying to figure out what the easiest way to go about creating this type of video would be. I can't find a tutorial. Please help!
This video I'm trying to recreate seems like an insanely time consuming process in after effects.  Is AE the right way to go about it?  Does anyone know of a process or tutorial that may help?  I'm new to video production so any sort of direction would be greatly appreciated.  Here is another similar type of video.  Generally speaking a VoiceOver text video.  Thanks!

The Typemonkey script will get you most of the way there, but ultimately there is no “just animate” button in After Effects. It’s designed to give you lots of control over how everything looks and moves.
http://aescripts.com/typemonkey/
Otherwise look for Kinetic Typography tutorials like this one:

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


text:
Hue Cycle .gif files with ffmpeg as percentage of duration
Suppose I have a set of 1000 .gif files, each of different durations, and I want to cycle the hue (hue as in the HLS color space) of each .gif file once over its duration. So, for example, at the beginning, (frame 1) the hue angle should be zero, halfway through (frame n/2) it should be 180 degrees, and at the last frame it should be 360 degrees (frame n). Is this possible to do with ffmpeg? Can you provide an example?

Assuming you have bash or similar *nix shell. If you are on Windows, try using Cygwin, or translate the script to PowerShell.
While I haven't tried with ffmpeg, I have came up with a solution that works with ImageMagick, here is the script
#! /bin/bash
framecount=$(($(identify -format "%n\n" $1 | head -1)-1))
startcommand="magick convert $1 "
for frameno in {0..$framecount}
do
startcommand+="\( -clone $frameno -modulate 100,100,$(echo $framecount $frameno | awk '{ printf("%.2f \n", 200*($2/$1)) }') \) -swap $frameno +delete "
done
startcommand+="-layers OptimizeFrame huecycled-$(basename $1)"
bash -c $startcommand

Note that it doesn't work with GraphicsMagick. You can use a for loop to run it over all gifs.
for i in *.gif; do huecyclar.sh $i;done
Explanation:
Line 1: Get number of frames. -1 for 0-based indexing
Line 2: Initial command, invoking convert of IM and the file.
For loop: For each frame, add command to clone the frame change hue to 300*(current frame number/number of frame)  but keep same brightness and saturation. 300 means 300% of original or 360 degree IM docs on -modulate
Line 8: Add command to optimise frames and set output name to huecycled-<input filename>.
Line 9: Execute the command.
Hope it works.
Here is a demo. First image is a gif consisting 360 frames, all of same image, rose.

Now this is the output of the script.


text:
How to get external mic working through DSLR camera on Zoom on Mac?
I have tried taking the advice and plugging my mic into my camera, but it is now not working, for the question Noticeable video delay when connecting to laptop and DSLR + external mic. Now I am not getting any sound signal coming in from Zoom. How do I wire things up correctly?

I have my Rode mic wired to the Rode USB audio interface.
I have that plugged into my camera with this.
I have the camera using a mini HDMI to HDMI, plugged into an HDMI video capture device.
The video capture device is plugged into a USB hub.
The USB hub is plugged into my M1 MacBook Pro laptop.

How do I get the audio to play so it (hopefully) syncs with the video? What am I plugging in wrong and/or doing incorrectly? Should I even be using the USB Audio Interface at all if I have that 3.5mm plug to go straight into the camera? Should I be having some sort of Mic-to-camera direct adapter or something? What should be done to get this system to work? Are things plugged into the right places on the camera and such?

Unfortunately there's multiple possible points of failure here - the splitter cable might be faulty, settings on the camera or mac might be incorrect, there might be no audio signal coming through your HDMI, etc. It will need narrowing down with further testing to determine where the audio is being lost.
Do you have a basic 1/8" male to male cable that you can take audio output from another device to test the camera audio with? i.e. plug it into a headphone jack on a phone or similar device, and see if that audio is coming through on camera? Does the camera have any kind of monitoring facility, either on screen showing levels, or through headphones? I would also try making a recording on camera, and see if that has audio with it - perhaps the camera is getting the audio fine, but it is not passing through to the mac via the HDMI interface.
Next check your HDMI interface. If you plug the camera HDMI out into a TV, do you get the sound through there? If you plug another HDMI device into the laptop, is there any sound on the capture? Under "System Preferences" / "Sound" on the mac, what is being shown as the input device? Is the volume correctly set, and is the monitoring showing active audio from the microphone?


text:
How can I create an overlay in davinci resolve that I can use on multiple projects
I would like to create an overlay for my youtube channel that I can easily put into all my videos without having to set it up again and again.
I know how to add a video track and stick an image in there, but how do I save it as an effect?

The simplest way to make it available across all projects in your current database is to add it to a power bin.
To do this, make sure power bins are visible in the media pool by enabling "Show Power Bins" in the View menu, then drag your picture from the timeline to the power bin.  Then, to use it, you can access it like you would any normal clip.
This works well for simple .png images with an alpha channel, or even moving video with an alpha, and it's good way to work with frequently-used brand images, logos, bugs, etc.
But it's not technically a dynamic "effect" and won't show up with Resolve's other effects.  If you need more control over the elements in your asset -- say, you want to be able to change the text, for example -- you'll need to save a Fusion macro as a .setting file in the appropriate template location for your system.  The paths are different, depending on your operating system, but specific details are available in the Resolve Manual.  See the chapter, "Converting Fusion Compositions to Edit Effects," for example.


text:
Export brush stroke animation from Photoshop to a PNG sequence? Is there a script to do this?
We can use tool recording in Photoshop Actions to record the animation of the brush stroke and play it back, right? Can we export the playback in the form of a PNG sequence?
Is there a script perhaps to do this?
For example, the action shown here:

Can this playback be exported to a png sequence via a script?


text:
Camcorder Tape Capture
So, I want to capture from my analogue camcorder tapes using the RGB and from my digital camcorder using the mini-dv output so it never leaves the digital domain.
I recently bought a device that seems to be ok for capturing the analogue though there may be better options out there. I don't have any way of capturing the digital so if anyone has advice that would be good. My laptop is a dell latitude 5480 running windows 10.
I've considered trying to get a high spec PC with xp, if that's possible, as later versions of windows don't have movie maker. My brother transferred his tapes using that setup. Again, any thoughts on this or alternative capture software for windows 10 would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Rick

DV can be captured off tape with a firewire interface. Firewire was a data transfer protocol created by Apple, Panasonic and Sony that enabled the transfer of digital Video and data.
Firewire plugs look like this

The era when computers had firewire connections out of the box has passed, so unless you can find an older machine (particularly a mac) with a firewire socket, you'll have to get either a firewire card to install internally, or a firewire to USB converter. Then you will be able to transfer the DV streams to HDD.

Movie maker is so not worth using XP for. There is better free editing software, like DaVinci Resolve which is a professional grade program with a very capable free version.

A lot of info there. Thank you, much appreciated!


text:
Name of type of video about many people saying short words to make a long speech
Thanks for taking the time
Im looking for the name of type of video/transition where you have many clips from many people saying many words. So you can grab all of the (every word they pronounce) and make a long speech made from many shorts of every person saying 1 one word...
I remember one that was made time ago of Obama or Trump (or both)
Im making a birthdate video card :) =)

I've found jump cuts to be related, but after googling couldn't find much, under "jump cuts words"

Ok closer closer xD almost!!! I've found the Trump video, turns to be a "Mashup" video-link


text:
How to add black bars to top and bottom for one h264 video with FFmpeg without re-encoding?
I want to add a 22 pixel horizontal black bar to the top and bottom without re-encoding. I know it is possible to crop the black bars without re-encoding, but also to add them?

You've been lied to. You can't crop a video without re-encoding. You can't add areas to a video without re-encoding. At best you could add metadata so that some players will do the cropping or expansion on playback, but it would only work on specific players.

No-one will die if you reencode your mp4, people.


text:
Linux mkv packages for VLC
The video converter incorporated in VLC warns me when I select the MKV format with the message: This muxer is not provided by VLC. It could be missing.
Is there an official list of these MKV-related packages?

I'm using VLC 3.0.9.2 in an Ubuntu based distro.

It is not an issue. VLC has many built-in codecs. MKV is not in them. So VLC rely on libmatroska to manipulate MKV. As VLC cannot know if you have it installed, it gives a warning. Check if libmatroska is installed or not, using dpkg or apt.

Using apt, it seems to be libmatroska-dev instead of libmatroska. I know it's not an issue, I just wanted to know the name of the packages. Does VLC need other packages for MKV appart from this one?

I found libebml is required by libmatroska. But there may be other packages requred to play MKV. MKV is basically a container, so obviously demuxer for audio and video codecs like mpeg, flac, ogg is required.  Again it need to Qt to draw the windows to display your MKV, so you may call it a dependency. Then comes PulseAudio/JACK to play sound. So your question is quite tricky.

You may ask VLC devs on this matter.


text:
DaVinci Resolve 16 playback sound not working (Linux)
With default configuration there's no sound present.

I've tried different speaker configuration without any difference.

It is working for me in dr 17.4.3.
Also note, that aac is not currently (if ever will be) supported. Check with wav file.


text:
After Effects: gradient overlay on multiple shape layers
I have a basic animation in After Effects which I want to export in a white version, a black version, and a colored version with a gradient. A frame of the animation is shown here:

I can link all the fills and strokes of the individual shapes to a Color Control in an adjustment layer and as such easily change the color from black to white, no problem there. However, I am stuck with creating the gradient version of the animation. It is important that the gradient blends well within the different shapes, i.e. all shapes should follow some global gradient so that it seems like it is one shape instead of a collection.
I tried putting a gradient ramp in an adjustment layer and link a gradient fill for a shape to that, but I can't link the colors of a gradient fill to the colors of a gradient ramp. I wondered if there is some solution to this.
What I want is similar to the feature in Photoshop where you can put a gradient above some shape layer and clip it by holding Alt/Option and clicking between the two layers. If there's some way to do this in Premiere Pro by exporting my animation in black and fixing the colors afterward in Premiere, that's sufficient as well.
Is this possible? Any help much appreciated!

After some trying out, I found a solution that works for me: I can make a new composition containing my existing composition and an adjustment layer and put a Gradient Ramp on the adjustment layer. Works perfectly!


text:
kdenlive screen grab on ubuntu stopped working with display changing from :0 to :1
I've been using kdenlive to make videos on ubuntu for a while and the screen grab has been fine but, for some reason (probably something I did to try to get the desktop start button to work on ubuntu 20.04) my display has changed from :0 to :1
I have been able to muddle on by starting screen capture in a terminal with
ffmpeg -video_size 1306x745 -framerate 25 -f x11grab -i :1.0+60,23 ./scrgrab01.mp4

Then importing each of the clips into kdenlive. But it's a bit messy having to edit a terminal command and remember which clip is which. Also I have now set up a desktop computer with more muscle and want to use that for rendering but that too has the display :1 not :0
I tried going into configure->capture->manage encoding profiles and trying to add ffmpeg arguments like
-crf 25 -i :1.0+60,23 -vcodec libx264 -preset veryfast -threads 0

(and lots of different permutations of that) But nothing has worked so far.
Is there something really obvious that I have overlooked?

From what I can see, kdenlive is hard-coded to use DISPLAY :0, while ubuntu and gnome/gdm have switched (around ubuntu 18??) to put the user on DISPLAY :1. When I tried the lightdm manager, I found that it still has the older convention of putting the user on the :0 DISPLAY, which is compatible with kdenlive screen grab. So if you don't mind switching window manager, that could be a way to do it.
I also tried to understand if it is possible to have gdm3 put the user on DISPLAY :0 as a default at boot time through some custom configuration, but couldn't figure it out.
In the user's gdm3 session that is on :1 by default, I also tried to set DISPLAY :0 in an xterm and start kdenlive from the command line in that xterm. However, for some reason I got a Qt error doing that, and so I couldn't tell if that was a useful workaround or not.
Note that kdenlive screen grab has some wonky behaviour, which made it harder for me to understand this problem. The 21.12.3 version I was using didn't show me the error output from the ffmpeg command, and it was only by chance I tried the 22.04 version this evening (which was scheduled for release tomorrow but I guess it went out early) and it did now show that error output.
Note also KDE documentation talks about a need to obtain an ffmpeg binary compiled with --enable-x11grab (or more properly, --enable-libxcb) in order for kdenlive screen grab to work. In fact, I don't seem to need this ffmpeg option to get a screen grab. It was just the DISPLAY business that had to be fixed.

Thanks for suggestions @JB it might be worth doing a few tests, but for anything too complicated it will be easier to just middle on with ffmpg


text:
Using Knoll Light Factory and AE's Fractal Noise to improve volumetric lighting in Trapcode Lux
What are the steps necessary to create this?
https://twitter.com/RedGiantNews/status/1425145716675125251
Specifically how do you use the built in fractal noise plugin to create what looks like volumetric smoke effects in Lux? (And how do you get the text to appear as a black shadow before the third light comes on).


text:
Kind of "chroma key" using a key frame
I am a professor at the university. I have been recording my lectures and using Kdenlive for editing. See this example of my videos.
I am starting a new course, and this time I will have more time to do the editing. I would like to be able to, at a certain time, substitute my background (the wall and the white board) by some image (a slide with mathematical content made with beamer).
Is it possible with Kdenlive?
It would be nice if, for example, I could use a keyframe where I do not appear as a map on what to erase. Of course, I would have to shave off the writing on the board. I thought of, for example, computing the difference and changing the color balance to make myself white and the background black, so I could use the result as some sort of mask.
I am new with Kdenlive and video editing in general. Is this a good approach? How exactly can I do it in Kdenlive?


text:
ffmpeg and ffprobe existing library or an add-on, pros/cons of building one myself
I work with video creation, animation, or fix video elements for several broadcasters in my area. My pipeline includes ffmpeg suite of libraries, and I have written one plugin specifically for ffmpeg to take care of one of the elements of my video editing.
One thing I found myself struggling with is to preserve the format of the original video, and since this is one of the requirements to return edited video in the same format as the source, my biggest challenge is to:

programmatically extract parameters of the source video (I use ffprobe)
run my editing pipeline, one of which is my ffmpeg-plugin, then
re-compress the video using the parameters extracted in step 1.

I've managed to automate big part of steps 1 & 3 with python, and I have a series of calls to extract elements of each video, my code  looks like this:
color_string = 'ffprobe -v error -select_streams v:0 -show_entries stream=' \
                   'color_space,color_primaries,color_range -of default=nw=1:nk=1 "' + filename + '"'
# following running of subprocess:
color = subprocess.run(color_string, shell=True, capture_output=True)
# then parse:
color_array = str(color.stdout).split('\\n')
    color_primaries = color_array[1]
    color_range = color_array[2]

The problem is, every broadcaster uses their own coding standards, and while I don't care about audio at all, meaning, I can -c:a copy,  all the video parameters are different from broadcaster to broadcaster.
progressive/interlaced, DVCPRO which sometimes includes screen sizes of 1280x1080 (which drives me insane), prores with all its profiles and even deeper with -qscale and -bits_per_mb options, some codecs have vtag and some don't, and there are about 100+ others. And my list of ffprobe queries keeps growing, I have about 1k lines of extraction and then putting it all together for ffmpeg to run.
My question is, is there a library to extract video parameters from a source, then once the processing is done, use that library to populate all the arguments for ffmpeg?
As it turned out, I'm building one for myself, but I have a feeling I'm wasting my time.
I know that many adobe applications use this logic, and provide an option to preserve source on re-encoding a video, but I am building one with python, and I believe this would be a great utility application as an open source, since there are simply too many options to consider for one person.
I originally posted this question on superuser site, and was advised by @Tetsujin to migrate my question to this site, since it is specifically video related.

Which parameters do you wish to extract? Certain ones are universal, like resolution or bit depth and will be printed by ffprobe whereas others are codec-specific and are only relevant for the decoder.

@Gyan thank you so much for your response. Well, the resolution is printed by the ffprobe, that's correct, and then I use that information to encode back. That is especially important if I do DVCPRO formats with weird ratio. But then, things like interlaced vs. progressive, top or bottom first, etc.
For ProRes, this is profile + vtag, + sometimes qscale or -bits_per_mb, which I started using to match the filesize, more or less.
For x264, a whole bunch of other parameters to keep track of.

timecodes with or w/o dropframe, -color_primaries, -color_trc, & -colorspace, max & minrate

ffprobe can output json, making it a lot simpler:
import json
from subprocess import run, PIPE, DEVNULL
import sys

def ffprobe_json(filename):
    proc = run(
        [ "ffprobe", "-hide_banner", "-print_format", "json", "-show_format", "-show_streams", filename ],
        stdin=DEVNULL, stdout=PIPE, stderr=PIPE
    )
    proc.check_returncode()
    return json.loads(proc.stdout.decode(sys.getdefaultencoding()))


text:
Overlay transparent image (png) over video (mp4) with ffpmeg?
We would like to overlay an image throughout the whole video file we have. We no longer have access to the original source, so need to modify the video we have. The current video is in MP4 format.
The way we are thinking of going about it is taking an image, in PNG format with transparency, in the same dimensions of the video and then combining it with the source video to create the output we need.
Can anyone suggest how to go about this with ffmpeg?

Have you seen the docs, especially the docs?  http://www.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-filters.html#overlay-1

Based on answers elsewhere and the docs referenced by Gyan:
ffmpeg \
 -i inputvideo.mp4 \
 -i inputvideo-mask.png \
 -filter_complex "[1:v]format=argb,geq=r='r(X,Y)':a='1.0*alpha(X,Y)'[zork]; \
   [0:v][zork]overlay" \
 -vcodec libx264 \
 outputvideo.mp4

This takes a input video inputvideo.mp4 and the overlay image inputvideo-mask.png, combines the two and then create the output video outputvideo.mp4.
Note, you can change opacity of the layer by changing the 1.0 in the 1.0*alpha(X,Y) part of the parameters, where value is 0.0-1.0. For the other parameters I can't provide more information, without needing to refer to the docs.
Tested with ffmpeg 4.4 on macOS 11.4.


text:
FFMPEG Audio Stream lengths
Ill make this as quick as possible. I recorded with obs, used ffmpeg to convert from .mkv to .mp4 with 3 audio tracks in .aac
Command:
@echo off & setlocal enabledelayedexpansion
for %%v in ("*.mkv") do (
  set FileName=%%v
  set name=!FileName:~0,-4!

  set outname=C:\Users\Ashto\Videos\actual obs\!name!
  echo Remuxing: !name! to !outname!

  ffmpeg -i "!FileName!" -map 0:v -c copy "!outname!.mp4" -map 0:a:0 -c copy "!outname!_0.aac" -map 0:a:1 -c copy "!outname!_1.aac" -map 0:a:2 -c copy "!outname!_2.aac"
)
pause

After doing this, for the first bit of footage I got a video output of 24:31, which was correct. However the first audio track was 23:04, the second audio track was almost 12 hours (it was just looped) and the 3rd was 24:39. The second bit of footage wasn't as extreme, however the 3rd audio track for it was missing 10 minutes of audio. If anyone knows why, I would love to know.

Save to .m4a not .aac, and check.

@Gyan That worked, i dont know why it worked but it worked, i am extremely grateful


text:
Change single keyframe value using expressions
I'm making a preset for my video projects. It's a shape layer that takes dimensions from a text layer, so the text fits accurately in the shape.
For this, I'm doing the following:
Shape Layer > Contents > Box > Box shape (X, Y in pixels) >
width = thisComp.layer("Text").sourceRectAtTime().width;
height = thisComp.layer("Text").sourceRectAtTime().height;

[width, height]

Wich, as I said, it makes the text fit in the box. It works all fine here.
What I want to do is to animate the shape's dimensions (X and Y property, as said above) using keyframes instead of linear() or other expressions. I want to modify only one specified keyframe (in this case, the last one).
Thanks in advance!

With my current understanding of how After Effects expressions work, I don't think that can be done.
According to user Mylenium in this comment thread,

Keyframe values are read-only


text:
Is there a standard for multi-camera, high-speed video?
I develop an application to record from multiple high-speed (e.g. 200 fps) cameras simultaneously. Typically, the frame rate of these cameras is constant but this is not necessarily the case. Typically, these cameras have synchronized acquisition (from a trigger "GenLock" cable) but this is not necessarily the case. Up to now, I use a self-developed method for ensuring accurate timing is kept across the video clips saved from the different cameras (described below). This works but I would like to use standard tools to be able to open my multi-camera data and have the clips automatically synchronized. Is there a standard to store multi-camera high-speed video so that the relative timing between the cameras and individual frames is maintained?
I understand that timecode tracks in the clips may be able to fill this role nicely for "normal" video. These generally seem to use the SMPTE standard. While I have not used this method myself, I am concerned that only common frame rates (like 24, 25, 29.97 and 30 fps) are supported, especially across different software. I have also read a little bit about the IRIG standard, but I have also not used it.
Does an existing standard file format fill the role I need? Is there a some established solution which may not be "standard"? Can you point me to any example videos stored with relevant data and any example applications which can open such data? Does the solution allow for variable frame rate, or is the frame rate fixed? Ideally, the solution would involve open standards and would be widely compatible and understood by various software.
Here I describe my existing solution. I save video from each camera in a separate file using the MKV format which has the (unique among container formats?) characteristic that the "creation time" in the metadata can be specified to the nanosecond level. This is what I do for the first frame. (I additionally save this information redundantly by making the automatically calculated filename have the creation time also to a high precision.) Then, each subsequent frame uses the PTS (presentation time stamp) to indicate the time it was taken relative to the first frame. This works nicely and individual videos are compatible with existing tools like FFMPEG and VLC. However, this scheme is fragile. Many standard video editing programs (e.g. DaVinci Resolve) do not open MKV files and the creation time metadata is saved only to the second (not nanosecond) upon conversion to MP4 container and consequently I loose synchronization across multiple cameras if I convert them to MP4 containers.

There is the MISB Standard 0604.2 which specifies how MPEG-2 transport streams can store UTC-referenced precision time stamps in the user data field between the picture header and the picture data for frame. Commercial products advertise support for this standard. So far, I have not found sample videos with this standard. The MISB Standard 0604.2 also specifies how H264 streams can include a time stamp.


text:
Adobe after effects edit templates
im struggling to edit the template of an intro. Im quite new to adobe after effects, ideally i want to change the logo and text. Ive managed to change the text underneath the logo but no the logo itself. I tried to remove the logo, but it says "Are you sure, this logo is used in 10 other compositions"
Any suggestions?
https://motionarray.com/after-effects-templates/glitch-logo-476737/

You would need to replace the logo within its source composition, which is normally just a single instance. The screengrab shows a subfolder "Images" - the "Logo" composition is what you need to open.
Replace what's in there with your own logo, following any guidelines provided. This should update all instances of the logo throughout the project.
These template projects usually have a folder in the Project window named "Edit These", or something similar, so you shouldn't need to mess with any layers or pre-comps directly - apart from editing text.


text:
Using ffmpeg to strip image based subtitles
Is it possible to remove only image based subtitles using ffmpeg? I know that you can manually select/exclude streams using -map, however I'm trying to automate this process, and the input files have a mix of image based subtitles (pgssubs) and text based subtitles. Since I'm trying to encode to an MP4 container, the image based subtitles are incompatible.

Sorry, I cannot write the script but here is the idea. First get the codec_name of your text-based subtitle from a video
ffprobe -v error -show_entries stream=codec_name -of default=noprint_wrappers=1 <test video name>

Now replace  with that with that codec name in te following script.
Usage: imgsrtremover <file name>
Output: <filename without extention>.mp4

#! /bin/bash
imgsrtstreams=$(ffprobe -v error -show_entries stream=codec_name -of default=noprint_wrappers=1 $1 | grep -n "<codec>" | cut -f1 -d:)
cmd="ffmpeg -i $1 -map 0"
for i in $imgsrtstreams
do
cmd+=" -map -0:$((i-1))"
done
$cmd -c copy $(echo "$1" | rev|cut -f 2- -d '.'|rev).mp4


text:
ffmpeg - sweeping opacity
I have two videos of 1 minute each one. I would like to start the second video at the 50 seconds of the first one.
Then I would like to decrease the opacity of the first video from 100% to 0 in the 50-60 seconds range, and to increase the opacity of the second video from 0 to 100% in the same range.
Is this possible with ffmpeg?
If yes, could you give me a code for that?
Thank you

This is a crossfade. Use the xfade filter - http://www.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-filters.html#xfade.

Thank you, it is solved


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Motion in an adjustment layer in Premiere Pro
Is it possible to have motion, scale and position, that is, zooming in in parts of the video, in an adjustment layer in Premiere Pro? I tried it and it seems the effects I add to the adjustment layer from the list of effects apply to the video, but the motion changes don't. Am I doing something wrong?


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ffmpeg best parameteres for fastest compression on FullHD mp4?
I need to compress a bunch of FullHD(1920x1080, 3Gb, mp4) videos, each ~2 hrs long. Some loss of quality is okay as is the lower resolution. I'm shooting for a 500Mb output video in ~10 min processing time (2080TI Ryzen 9 3900X). It is important for the videos to be completely in sync, so frame x in the input video matches frame x in output. For this, I'm using -vsync 0
My current working settings which get me to ~500MB size in 20 minutes.
ffmpeg -i input_fullhd.mp4 -vcodec libx265 -crf 28 -vsync 0 -vf scale=800:-1 -preset medium output.mp4
I'd like it to be faster with potentially slightly better quality.
My concern is that I'm not utilizing my GPU at all and my CPU shows only 30% utilization. So feels like it should be possible to speed this up. I tried adding -hwaccel cuda but that made things a bit slower.
Are there any other settings I can try that I'm missing to either improve my conversion or utilize more resources for speed?
Thanks

If you want to use the GPU, there is a different codec hevc_vaapi or hevc_nvenc. You can see some examples here and here. I got it to work once but the quality was much more terrible, so I didn't use it much.


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How can I "copy" a zoom from another video?
This question might sound weird but I've had it for a LONG time.
Basically, is it possible to "track and copy" a zoom from a video and save it as a preset, so I can apply it to other videos?
For example, you can easily "track and copy" the motion of a video. All you need to do is to place trackers everywhere, and you can then paste that onto another video to make it move exactly the same way.
But is the same possible for zoom? So, for example, can I copy the iconic "zoom into face" zoom of The Office, then use that on another video?
I am talking specifically Adobe Premiere Pro or After Effects.
This question might already have been asked, but I can't find any - Everything that comes up is simply about "zoom transitions", not "zoom" itself.
Thank you! I wish I can find an answer here!


text:
Does optical image stabilization also work in video?
I read about optical image stabilization for the first time today.
I would like to know if it can also work to remove camera shaking while recording a video.


text:
Composition Flowchart in After Effects
Need your expertise. I can't seem to figure out how to delete Scene 07 in Media 3.3 and to reference it to another Media. Is there a way to edit the composition flowchart? Thank you

You can't edit the flow chart directly, but you can duplicate any comp from the project window, then replace another comp with your duplicate - see this answer: How to duplicate composition and subcompositions?


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How do I get the best reproduction when playing a digital video on a PAL CRT monitor?
I have a digital video that I need to show on a CRT monitor (PAL). It will play from a digital player and be fed to the monitor via s-video or composite video.
What should I think of to get the highest possible playback quality on the monitor?
I guess that it would be best to transcode the video an interlaced PAL video file in the right resolution so that the transcoding won't be done sloppily by the digital player?

Yes - if the monitor is Standard Definition PAL, then you should make sure the source video is 25fps 720x576 with interlaced fields at 50i, lower field first.
S-video should give a better image than composite, as the luminance signal is sent separately from the colour signal (which is combined into a single signal, reducing the original quality).  Component should give a better signal than s-video as the red, green, and blue signals are all sent separately.


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Decode Multi-Layer HEVC
I'm trying to decode an HEVC/H.265+ rtsp stream to an image using ffmpeg as follows:
ffmpeg -rtsp_transport tcp -stimeout 10000000 -i 'rtsp://user:passwd@url:port/Streaming/tracks/101?starttime=20210826T130000Z&endtime=20210826T130010Z' -vframes 1 -y image.jpg

but I'm getting the following:
[rtsp @ 0x56031fe7f500] Multi-layer HEVC coding is not implemented. Update your FFmpeg version to the newest one from Git. If the problem still occurs, it means that your file has a feature which has not been implemented.

[rtsp @ 0x56031fe7f500] Multi-layer HEVC coding is not implemented. Update your FFmpeg version to the newest one from Git. If the problem still occurs, it means that your file has a feature which has not been implemented.

[rtsp @ 0x56031fe7f500] Multi-layer HEVC coding is not implemented. Update your FFmpeg version to the newest one from Git. If the problem still occurs, it means that your file has a feature which has not been implemented.

[rtsp @ 0x56031fe7f500] Multi-layer HEVC coding is not implemented. Update your FFmpeg version to the newest one from Git. If the problem still occurs, it means that your file has a feature which has not been implemented.

[rtsp @ 0x56031fe7f500] Multi-layer HEVC coding is not implemented. Update your FFmpeg version to the newest one from Git. If the problem still occurs, it means that your file has a feature which has not been implemented.

I tried using the latest version of ffmpeg but still the same issue.

I think FFMPEG logs had provided a pertinent answer; do you think so?

I tried using the latest version of ffmpeg but it still the same, when investigating deeply I found that the first frames are not decoded correctly but the next ones are decoded normally. If I reference this paper, seems like ffmpeg is extracting just the residual part


text:
Grab the positioning of a layer inside a precomposed layer?
I have a precomposed layer that contains many shapes. Inside my global comp, I have various positions being applied to the precomposed layer. Unfortunately, I need everything in my precomposed layer to go to the global comp due to lottie requirements. I am now looking for a way to grab each position of each layer inside this precomposed layer. How can I do that?
I have tried with this expression:
comp("precomposedcomp").layer("precomposedcomplayer").transform.position
This expression works, but not the way I intended. It grabs the position of the layer inside the precomposed layer. The issue is that the positioning is set in the global comp... How could I possibly get this position? Assuming comps are exact same size.

I think this is related to Layer Space Transforms:
Parenting a null causes unexpected results
https://thatsmadden.wordpress.com/2014/12/31/tocomp-and-toworld/
https://ae-expressions.docsforadobe.dev/layer-space.html
I think you could use "toWorld" to determine where the layer is in your outer comp.


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Keep or Remove Black Bars from Movies?
I have been re-encoding some movies using FFMPEG. I've noticed some movies have the black bars embedded in the video stream, while others don't. Should I keep the black bars in the videos that have them and/or add black bars to the videos that don't have them, or should I use FFMPEG to crop the black bars out? I don't notice any visual difference in any video player I've tested between a film with or without the black bars, so it seems the players are able to display the video properly no matter what.
I know the reason why black bars exist (difference in aspect ratio between movie and display), but I fail to see the purpose of having them baked into the video stream. I know some movies (like the Ghostbusters reboot) use that space for visual effects, and so I wouldn't want to crop movies like that, but otherwise, wouldn't it just be a bunch of wasted storage space otherwise if I kept that padding in, or is there some technical reason why I should leave it?

It depends on how you intend to watch them, and whether or not the intended player is intelligent enough to recognize the blanking for titles which have them, and whether or not it will alter the aspect ratio of ones that don’t.  Most players today would be fine if you removed the bars, but the best way to know for sure is to test it yourself.  Videos have bars baked in when the destination format isn’t adaptive, and the viewing a/r doesn’t match the original a/r.  If a player can’t detect the presence of bars, but is supplied bars, and it tries to display an a/r other than the one supplied, it will “double window” the material.  Conversely, a player expecting bars, which receives the wrong material will display a cropped image.


text:
Repeating/looping a clip in the timeline
I have a short clip, 10 seconds or so. I'd like to loop in/down the timeline to create a 6-hour video (for sleep music on youtube).
I can do this in Davinci with the Loop effect in a Fusion composition. Only thing is it takes a very long time to even pre-render and the CPU is maxed for 4+ hours (Macbook Pro w/ 16g).
Premiere doesn't require that kind of pre-render but I can't find a similar way of repeating. The only answers here are around copy/paste which would take a half hour just to do for this length of video.
Any ideas?

I vote copy paste. If you [select all] first, then the number of clips pasted doubles with every third keystroke, so it won’t take long. Cmd-A, cmd-C, cmd-V, repeat…. After ten cycles, you’re pasting over a thousand clips. No question, it’s faster than using Fusion.

You could also always try to loop your player instead.

If you have After Effects, you can set a file to loop indefinitely by right clicking the file and selecting Interpret Footage:

But I suspect rendering out may take longer than premier for a long comp.
You may find that copying and pasting over and over in Premiere is quicker (ie paste two copies, copy those, paste four copies, copy those, paste 8 copies, etc etc) is quicker than using AE.


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How were the "glowing lights" made for the classic The Simpsons episodes?
Today's episodes of The Simpsons are bleak, washed-out, standardized and soulless. But for the first several seasons, possibly even roughly up until the late 1990s, they clearly used a completely different, "organic" technique to produce them.
In particular, all of the many lighting effects seem to really "glow" and stand out in a very appealing manner. They are not just flat colors filled perfectly into areas surrounded by sharp, thin, black lines -- they are actually "glowing" out from the cells/frames somehow. I love that look. It really adds so much visual interest to many scenes.
But how was this effect achieved? And why don't they use the same look now that it's all digital and they could probably easily apply various digital filters to make the episodes resemble the classic Simpsons look?

I can't speak for how the Simpsons was done, I've never seen it shown, but the 1980s Hitchhiker's Guide TV Series had a lot of similar "glow" effects in the book animations, which are all traditional animation techniques, multiple exposures, etc.
The following interview with Rod Lord runs through how that was done, hopefully it is of interest, in the absence of something more Simpsons specific:

I do not have direct experience with the Simpsons, but my photographic experience tells me there are a few factors involved. For one, the early episodes appear slightly blurry because of the lower resolution and photographic processes used, compared to today's vector computer graphics. And the objects that appear to be light sources become additionally softened (seem to glow) because they are relatively overexposed compared to the rest of the colors in the scenes. Several techniques can be used with physical, transparent animation paintings ("cells") to spread colors -- brighter backlighting, diffusion lenses, frosted mylar. I suspect the light sources like neon signs and flames were on separate layers from the characters and were photographed using different exposure settings and focus.


text:
How do I properly de-interlace footage in Premier pro ( without scan lines)
I has some super 8 footage digitized a few years ago, unfortunately they captured it then encoded it to a DVD. I first experimented with handbrake to extract the footage then imported it to Premier. The results were fine but it occurred to me that I could make the edits directly from the VOD files rather than converting it to mpeg 4 first. The issue I'm having is with interlacing. Handbrake seems to have run a deinterlacing filter that did a pretty good job, you only see lines in some high motion frames.
When I follow the instructions and simply click "always deinterlace" under the field options of my sequence containing the VOD file, the scan lines are still apparent even in low motion frames. When I export the sequence as pro-res, the same lines appear.
Am I doing something wrong? is there a filter I can run inside premier to get rid of the lines an maximally preserve the information, or am I gunna have to get the footage re-digitized.

It's possible the footage on the originally digitised version was incorrectly imported, so the interlace lines can't be removed.  Super 8 video is inherently not interlaced as it's a series of film frames, but when they encoded the DVD, it may have been encoded as an interlaced video.
Handbrake may also have incorrectly decoded the interlacing, which would mean anything you try to do in Premiere won't work.
I think it's possible now to directly import .VOB files into Premiere now, so maybe try that - skipping the Handbrake stage.  Then check the interlacing options in Premiere, try "lower field first" if it's UK footage, "Upper Field First" if it's not (or just try either and see which one works by rendering a little section with lots of motion in the shot.
There used to be a setting to ensure highest quality when de-interlacing in Premiere, but either it has disappeared or I can't find it.


text:
Confusion about Floating Point in Color Space Transforms
To explain my confusion I'm going to use an example with a hypothetical sensor which clips at a max 1000% scene linear reflectance and crushes blacks at 0% light (I know there is no such thing as 0% light but it just makes the numbers easier to deal with). I've attached below a hypothetical 10bit Log Transform and a 16bit Linear RAW graph of the Input of Linear Light and Code value output(The so called OETF). The output values are both in Code Value (and Normalized from 0-1)

Now, when the 10bit Log encoded image goes through a Color Space Transform the first thing that happens to it is that it gets "Linearized" to a 32bit Floating Point(this is Davinci Resolve) before any other thing happens to it. Now, I'm not a software developer or video engineer or anything of that sort but having read about Floating Point(which is much more confusing than integer values) it's been said that Floating Point allows for values greater than 1 and less than 0. The problem I'm having is understanding how does this relate to Scene Linear Reflectance getting matched to the output in Linear Floating Point? For instance is 100% light reflectance giving an output of 1(the highest possible value in integers)? Does a 500% reflectance give an output of 5?What about 1000% reflectance, would that be an output of 10 and would the graph end there?? Or am I completely way off and 1000% reflectance would still be an output of 1 just that between 0 and 1 there'd be approximately 4 billion values worth of data.
The thing that's tricking me is that the entire dynamic range of the camera gets squeezed into a 0-1 range in the integer encoded camera files, but I can't understand what's happening with this Linearized 32bit Floating Point. How is this 32bit Floating Point any different than the Linear RAW(Other than it being 32 bit rather than 16 bit?). What's the significance of having values greater than 1 and less than 0? Just very lost on this. Thanks

Linear vs log(arithmic) are shapes of curves. Floating point and integer are data types, I.e., different approaches to storing numbers on silicon. 32bit vs 16bit is bit depth, or how precise a number can be.  These concepts are each independent of each other; your data can be any combination of curve, type, and depth.
Light in the physical world behaves linearly; if you combine two sources with exactly the same output, you get twice the number of photons.
But human vision doesn’t work that way, which is why shining two identical spotlights on the same target doesn’t appear doubly-bright. AND, the more spotlights you add, the less you’ll notice.
Human vision is extremely complex and doesn’t map perfectly to any mathematical model, but computer scientists try to approximate it when data optimization is critical.
So, while light in the real world goes from zero to infinity, the pixels on your screen might only go from zero to 255.  If that’s the case, developers get more bang for their buck by biasing the numbers to represent more change where it’s less noticeable, and more subtle change where people are more perceptive.
This practice was born of necessity, as older technology had lower bit depth, and couldn’t (or wasn’t practical) to represent as many discreet values as is possible today.  As display, storage, processing, transmission, and compression become more efficient, the resulting image becomes more “HDR.”  As this trend continues, the need to convert between log and linear gammas diminishes.  One day, displays might be nearly linear, at least through the range of human perception.
So as bit depth becomes more of a thing, gamma curves become less of a thing.
Whether you use floating points or integers to store and process a number is more of computer science question; you can store either log or linear curves of lower or higher bit depth in both floating point or integer data types.
A “floating point” in my naive understanding of the computer science term is sort of like a “sliding scale.”  You basically re-purpose some of the numbers’ digits as an exponent.  It makes sense for data that needs an exponent (nits), but less for data which doesn’t (code values).
But in the context of DaVinci Resolve, “32bit Floating Point” refers to the internal processing precision that Resolve uses to approximate (reasonably) the linear mathematical behavior of physical light.
Similarly, “Linear RAW” refers to unmodified, bare sensor data, which is naturally linear, but varies in constitution between camera vendors, and usually ranges between 12 to 16 bits.
The terms are similar because they both refer to linear, physical light, but Resolve’s own internal calculations otherwise bear no correspondence with camera manufacturers’ external RAW data.


text:
ffmpeg video command still with black screen
I am using a screen capture component in delphi that I will use in my program, by enabling the recording option with the command ffmpegLGPL.exe -re -i% PIPE% -c: v h264 -threads 8 -profile: v baseline - loopfilter 0 -b: v 10M -an -f mp4% FILENAME% video streams with dark screen and audio only

Share full log. Your command has -an so how do you get audio?

ffmpegLGPL.exe -re -i %PIPE% -c:v h264 -threads 8 -profile:v baseline -loopfilter 0 -b:v 10M -an -f mp4 %FILENAME%

yes , the audio comes out, but the video doesn't

Add -report to your ffmpeg command and run. Share report.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NEdoQuD5JIr6enwci7l0SI91-CgAMDl7/view?usp=sharing


text:
what is aspect ratio and how i can increase the width and height to match the aspect ratio?
I have a video with 480x480 width and height and my friend asked me to look if I can change it to the aspect ratio of 16:9 but he said that it will become 848x480
How can I calculate that?
if i am doing 480*16/9 then the answer is 853.3333333333334
how can I make it 848x480 and even 848x480 is 16:9?

848 x 480 isn't an exact translation of 840x840 to a 16x9 stretch.
To think about aspect ratio, you need to consider what shape your image is now, and what shape you want it to be. If you have a 480x480 image that looks correctly proportioned on your computer screen, then it is using square pixels (ie each pixel is the same height as it is wide).
Imagine your footage showed a circle.
When you play back your footage correctly, it should still look like a circle.
If it was filmed at a different aspect ratio, then you may need to squash or stretch it to compensate for the change when you play it back.
480x480 stretched to a 16:9 aspect would become

16/9 = 1.777778
480 * 1.77778 = 853.333

So your new aspect ratio might be approximately
854 x 480.
But you need to look at it and confirm what looks right. Often with old footage, aspect ratios aren't quite right, or aren't exactly 16x9 or 14x9.
The correct way to do this in a video editing app would be to create a sequence with the settings your video should be delivered at (e.g. HD video at 16x9 with square pixels is 1920x1080), and then place the source material into this sequence, and adjust the source video until the scaling is correct, either by maths or by eye.


text:
When I play two or more audio tracks at the same time, is there a formula to reduce volume so it does not clip?
When I play two videos e.g. side by side, the summed up volume sometimes ends up clipping.
What I normally do, is lowering the volume of both the audio tracks (which have the same loudness), say of 1dB, and that usually sounds good enough.
But, is there a formula to know exactly what is the volume reduction I need to apply on the tracks, to keep the same loudness of the individual audio tracks?

Video editing software usually measures amplitude not loudness on its metering, so 0dbFS (decibels to Full Scale) is the largest amplitude it can play back without clipping, averaged over a few samples (I think).
Different sounds have different perceived loudness, depending on where the energy is in the frequency spectrum, because our ears are more sensitive to some frequencies than others (babies crying at about 1kHz = very sensitive,  old TVs whistling at 15kHz = less sensitive).
Generally I would give myself some headroom to avoid clipping when combining material, so make sure none of the speech is peaking above 5 or 6dB, and any commercial music files I usually immediately drop by 15dB or so, as most commercial music is mastered to peak very close near 0dB.
I usually assume somewhere between 3-6 dB drop if I've got two sources that are going to be combined, but it totally depends on the source material.
There is a way of measuring loudness (in LUFS) in Premiere, but just as you wouldn't drive a car just by watching the speedometer, you shouldn't balance audio just by watching the meters... The end product goes into someone's ears, so you need to judge it by listening.
Finally, if you are delivering your video for broadcast, not the web, most companies have very specific rules about audio levels, clipping, and loudness - check them before delivering.


text:
Please someone explain this expression
I am a newbie in animation and I am learning by watching different projects.
And I found this expression, but I try to find information and I am not lucky.
comp("Render Comp FHD").layer("Controls").effect("Bg Color")("ADBE Color Control-0001")

this expression is used to set the background color
Please I would like you to explain or give me links to deepen the subject

Can you share a link to where the expression came from?  You might need to provide more info about what the expression links to

That comp links to a layer in a comp called "Render Comp FHD" that has an effect called "Bg Color", which is most likely an expression colour control effect (found in effects>expression controls, they do nothing, but can be used in expressions).
You can create an expression like this by pick-whipping to the effect in question. If it's in another comp you can open the effect controls window (shiftctl/⌘t) for the layer you want to be the controller, and click the padlock on the window tab. That will keep it open when you switch to the other comp, and you can drag the pick-whip to it.
Expressions reference here: https://ae-expressions.docsforadobe.dev/


text:
How to change the time format in the Source pane in Premiere?
What's the way to set the time format in the Source pane to be displayed as 00:00:00?

Click on the video in "Source" panel (You'll see a blue rectangle)

Then click Clip -> Modify -> Timecode...

Select "Original Timecode" and "Ok"

That's it.


text:
How do you solve a difficult camera track?
I've got a tricky camera track to do. Steadicam footage on a stage with a load of musicians and some smoke. After Effects built in tracker is not happy. I've tried masking the musicians out and just leaving the rest of the room visible, but it didn't help.
My question is - what to try next?  Should I wrestle with Blender's camera tracker?
Is there another technique?  Is the only option to fork out a load of cash for Mocha Pro or PFTrack? (Assume money is tight).
It's to try and get a virtual camera position for the Plexus plugin - think dots flying around the room...

I use the Mocha Pro OFX version with Resolve, but I used to use the free Mocha that came with AE.  I honestly don’t remember too many must-have, couldn’t-live-without differences besides the mesh tracking, which is why I upgraded.  The extra export options are nice, but not a dealbreaker for simple stuff.  Sometimes I find it helps to try tracking the shot with a different app if only to help me better distill the process and come up with a better approach, more than a different feature set, so you might want to experiment in Blender, Fusion, or Resolve, if only for perspective.  Also, free.

For dots flying in space, you probably have some room for error.  Particles can look bad if there’s too much slip, but you can usually get away with more than geometry comp’d onto a real surface.  I’d avoid shelling out extra cash until I’d exhausted other approaches.

have you tried tracking with Cinema 4D Lite through After effects?

how do you mean?

In very rough cases, you may want to resort to brute force or tedious manual labor.

Brute force:

Open your footage in Blender and auto-select tracking-markers in the vfx-tab. Set the threshold so that you select at least 100 markers. Track them all to the end. At the last frame, auto-select >100 markers again and track backwards.
Then look at the graph below. Select all the markers which deviate from the x-axis and delete them. Continue cleaning up the bad markers like this. Solve your camera and test it, in most cases, you will get a good 3D track from it.

Tedious Manual Labor:

Inspect the content of the frame very carefully. If you spot any static points that don't move, track them manually. Make sure to have at least 5 tracking points at a time. This may or may not work depending on the content of the frame.


text:
is it possible to discard duplicate frames in a video?
I have a 2 minute game capture that ranges from 60fps to 2fps but the capture is in 30fps. is there any way to discard the duplicate frames so that the video looks smooth? I was thinking of extracting every frame and discarding duplicate frames but that sounds like effort.

mpdecimate - Drop frames that do not differ greatly from the previous frame in order to reduce frame rate. Therefore, the command would be
ffmpeg -i canada_6.mp4 -vf mpdecimate out.ts


text:
After effects workflow for several similar clips
I have to create animations that will be displayed on a screen when a player scores.
Each player will have his own animation (with a photo and his name).
But all the animations will essentially be the same : a title, then the photo, then the name.
Do you have any idea what is the best workflow for doing this kind of "reusable" clips ? Maybe with placeholders ?
Thank you very much !

You can link objects in After Effects to .csv files (as well as many other formats).
For example, if you make a spreadsheet like the one below, and save it as a .csv file:

You can drag the .csv file into your project, then drag it into each comp, and then choose which line of text to use in each object using an expression like this:
thisComp.layer("After Effects csv test - Sheet1.csv")("Data")("Outline")("Name")("Name 0")

So in the example sheet shown, the text displays as "Apple", because it counts from zero after the label row.

This is old but well worth your time - Chain Rendering by Felt Tips:
https://vimeo.com/9914517
And also Work with Data-driven animation shows how you can use a .csv file to link to text strings and image files in your comps.

Hi Tom,
Great, that's some really useful resources !
I'll check this out. Thank you !

This question and excellent @tomh 's answer shows the importance of being organized from your folder files structure first. If you name your photos with the right player name you can get the text for your text layer from the layers names photos. You can also duplicate a first one made comp and hold alt to drag-and-replace the photos without losing the animation keyframes to speed up even more the process.


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Can I achieve effective keying if I use green lights to illuminate a white wall?
I do frequent video shoots of a speaker standing in front of a white wall at the end of a hallway in a corporate office with limited clean background availability and tight spaces. I don't usually have the ability to carry a lot of extra gear with me, so setting up complex backgrounds and lighting is not easy. The existing lighting is pretty standard corporate ceiling fare, some fluorescent (possibly updated to LED) and some other locations with newer LED recessed lights. We've been mostly successful in keying with the white, but it's difficult due to the white wall and its orange-peel texture.
I was thinking it would be nice to be able to set up a green LED or two to wash the wall in green, and then buy some portable and lower cost white LED panels to place in front of the speaker, who could step away from the wall a bit to avoid green spill.
Does this sound like a good idea?

My favorite quick, cheap, DIY greenscreen over the years is a gallon of chromakey paint and a sheet of drywall from Lowe’s or Home Depot.  One sheet is enough for a seated, talking head, like you see in most corporate interviews, and the rigidity of the drywall keeps it flatter and more even than any fabric solution.  If you can get away with storing a sheet of drywall somewhere on site, this is a good option.

I think if you light the wall green, you will get lots of bounced light back onto your subject which will play havoc with your key. Amazon does very cheap greenscreens now, which work pretty well so long as you have a way to evenly light them and your subject is isolated far enough away from the screen and lit separately.

I interned at a company many years ago which used a retro-reflective background coupled with a green LED ring light, which surrounded the lens.  The wall looked silver/white when the device wasn’t in use, so it blended into their office better than a chroma green wall would.
When the device was in use,  it’s trick was that it DID cast green spill onto the subject, but because it was a ring light aligned with the lens position, the spill contribution to the talent was relatively even and flat, but the retro-reflective material shot a highly chromatic green straight back to the lens.  White balancing at the center of the frame would be enough to counter most of the spill, and the contrast provided by the reflective material was enough to pull a decent key.
This was long enough ago that I’m fairly certain they weren’t shooting a format any better than 4:2:2 8bit, and it might have even been 4:2:0 or 4:1:1.
I don’t know how much effort went into correcting green falloff from the center of the frame outwards, but the company did also introduce me to the software ScopeBox, so they probably did tune it somewhat.
I don’t know the exact brand they used, but a ddg search for “chroma key retroreflective ringlight” was enough to return relevant results.


text:
Make the playhead in DaVinci Resolve thinner
thank you for helping me! I'm currently learning the basics of DaVinci Resolve, coming from a way simpler program. But from that program, I'm used to a much thinner playhead. Is there a way to make the playhead thinner in DaVinci Resolve? I've of course searched on this site, on youtube and on the internet in general of course. Also, I've searched around in the program. Thank you for your help!

The relatively thick playhead

I would suggest that you will just need to get used to it. It's not a configurable item, as far as I'm aware. Why would you want it thinner? The line is the important bit anyway, and it's not like the head covers up anything critical - you get the exact time read-out anyway.

Okay, thank you very much. I had the feeling it was thinner with others, but then I'll just get used to it.

The devs at blackmagic design are usually very receptive to feature requests on their user forums, especially if the community reaches consensus.  Try asking at https://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewforum.php?f=21


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OBS issues when capturing two screens
I'm using OBS v25.0.8 for Mac and I'm trying to capture a two screen video, one from my laptop camera (Facetime camera 1280x720) and one presentation (Window share PowerPoint).
I set up my video config as follows:

Canvas 3840x1080
Output 1280x720 (OBS set this automatically)

As you can see from the screenshot above, the PowerPoint presentation is not taking the full width, leaving an empty space between the two screens.
I tried changing the output ratio, but nothing seems to happen. My laptop is a Macbook Pro with the following display 15.4-inch (2880 × 1800)
What is the correct calculation to get the two screens to fit proportionally?

You could eliminate the gap by reducing the width of the Base Resolution from 3840 to what fits: 1280 + the width of the powerpoint presentation. You may need to drag the righthand frame over, but it should fit.
But you've got another issue: your Base and Output are very different aspect ratios, so your output will be distorted as it smushes 50% horizontally (to use a technical term :-).
If you're going to output (capture) 16:9, I believe your canvas needs to be at that ratio too. If you keep the base height 1080, the base width should be 1280 / 720 * 1080 = 1920.
To handle that, you can start by cropping your Facetime camera on the sides, although it won't be enough. You'll need a different aspect ratio in your PowerPoint itself, which will likely require changing the layout of all your slides. Alternately, you could shrink down the presentation in OBS, leaving a gap above and below it and have a nice background color behind the whole frame (or some cool looping animation).


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Insta360 Studio incorrectly displays .insv 360 video file as a black video, static, or distorted monocular video
I have a Insta360 video recorded on an Insta360 One X, and I'm trying to get it to display correctly. The video was displaying and exporting without difficulty until I updated Insta360 studio to 2021 (v4.0.0), and displayed correctly on my phone through the bluetooth connection to the camera.
Now insta360 gives me a flickery illegible mostly black screen as a preview -- basically acting like the video is unreadable. I back-updated Insta360 Studio to v3.6.8 and then it displays as a distorted and badly stitched video, seemingly only through one of the two camera lenses. There's a second mystery video file, seemingly recorded simultaneously, that displays in Insta360 studio as a monocular fish-eye with no manipulation options in Insta360 Studio.
I talked to Insta360 tech support, who advised me to turn CUDA off in the settings. That setting doesn't exist on the mac version of 4.0.0, but does on the windows version of 3.6.8. On the windows version of 3.6.8 it didn't do anything.

The problem was I had renamed the files at the same time as updating Insta360 studio. The camera produces a pair of files, one for each lens, and has a naming convention that lets Insta360 studio pair and stitch them. The naming convention is underscore delimited, and requires the same pattern of underscores as the camera-generated file name. Also, the files have to have the same name except for having "00" and "10" in the right place in the pattern. Below is my tabulation of insta360 studio behavior with different file names.  Correct display requires four underscores in the pattern of "p_q_r_00_s.insv" and "p_q_r_10_s.insv", where at least p,q,r,s can be empty or text containing spaces. So some text followed by three underscores, then "00_.insv" / "10_.insv" works.

Would it be possible for you to reformat the image here using the (relatively) new table markdown support? Images present many problems from both an accessibility and searchability point of view. Thanks!


text:
How do I make ffmpeg create video that retains transparent background from *.png images with transparent background?
I am a researcher, trying to string together a bunch of png files of a protein to a short video. I have all the png images with transparent backgrounds, but I can't seem to get this in the video.
I use this (on macOS terminal) to convert:
ffmpeg -framerate 20 -pattern_type glob -i '*.png' -c:v libx264 -preset slow  -profile:v high -level:v 4.0 -pix_fmt yuv420p -vf pad="width=ceil(iw/2)*2:height=ceil(ih/2)*2" -crf 22 -codec:a aac -pix_fmt yuva420p SST4.mp4

I added the -pix_fmt yuva420p that I found as an accepted answer here, but it doesn't work for me. I also tried other options (rgb24, bgra, etc.), but none I have tried works. I get a nice video, just with black background instead of transparent.

How do you intend to play the video?

This is just for a PowerPoint presentation (where it will partly overlap something else; that's why I want the transparent background).

How about apng (Animated PNG). Size will be large but it is simply PNG with animation .

Thanks for the suggestion, @AbdullahIbnFulan, but if I try that, I see "ghosting". That is, each part of the previous image that is now where there is nothing (clear background) sticks around for the next. So I can see parts of each of the 240 images once it's done (done with online tool, https://ezgif.com/apng-maker).

@AbdullahIbnFulan scratch that, apparently there was a checkbox to avoid that behavior. Still interested in alternatives for as you say, size is large. But for now it'll work, thanks!


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.EXE VIDEO CONVERT TO MP4
I have a video that extension is .exe. I try to open this file in Windows but I can't. I try to convert this file to mp4 but again return empty file. How can I open .exe video?

Some things to try:
First just change the filename from "example.exe" to "example.mp4" and then try to open it in a standard video player.  If the file is actually a video format with just a different file name extention then it might play fine.
Secondly, download and install Format Factory - http://www.pcfreetime.com - and try to convert the file into an MP4 file or something.  Format Factory works with a massive range of file formats and has some really good failover routines.  If it can't open the file then it's 99.99% certain that it's not a video file.
If neither work and you are certain that this is a video file then it probably means whoever created it embedded the file so that running the .exe actually extracted and placed the real video somewhere.  At this point do some standard troubleshooting:

Can you contact the owner / creator and find out how to run it properly?
Can you right click, properties and run set to run as administrator, or run in compatibility mode for a different version of windows?
if it runs ok, what happens?  Check your desktop / documents / video folders afterwards to make sure the video hasn't been extracted elsewhere?

otherwise we need more information to be of any help to you.  Where did the file come from, how did it get into a .exe container, what are you expecting of it etc?

OMG.  .EXE is an executable file.  If a file is named AwesomeClickBaitMovieTitle.exe, there’s an excellent chance it’s a virus.

I know.  I tried to answer the question assuming the OP knew what was going on.


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No Audio In VSDC editor
I finished recording a multi audio track recording on obs, and it has no sound (in the editor, as a video its fine.) I don't understand why.

Before Play the recorded track, you may click on "Renders" on down left to let you hear the Audio. Many video software need to click on "Render" or "Enter" before click on "Play" button to hear audio. I hope this may work for you,  thank you.
See: https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/380841-VSDC-Free-Video-Capture-No-sound-while-recording
If not, that might be your software encountered problem... you may search for solution or troubleshoot or issue-fixed, for example: Youtube-VSDC Video Editor: Trouble Shooting Audio Conversion Problems

See: MUTE OR REPLACE AUDIO IN VSDC FREE VIDEO EDITOR


text:
Improve quality of recorded screen
I tried a lot of different screen recording software but all of them can't record a video with the same quality I see on screen: looks like there is a unsharp mask, or something similar.
Now I'm using OBS Studio, with these setups:

High recording quality (I've tried max quality, no change);
coding Harware (NVNC), (I've tried Software x264, no change);
exit resolution same of input
30 fps
rendering direct 3D 11
color format NV12
Color space 709

A screenshot of the original desktop:

The recorded one:

Is it possible to solve this problem and obtain a recorded screen with the same original quality?

How can you be sure you record what you see on screen? Well, to say it with a cyber security term, by pulling a man in the middle attack. What do I mean by that? Well, obviously, if we can record on the link between your desktop and your monitor, we would surely be capturing what is visible on the monitor. So we somehow need to find a way to get ourselves between that computer output and the input of your monitor.
Now there are multiple ways to do this.
Using a video field recorder
The first and the best option would be to use some kind of recording device. Many of the professional videographers on this forum will own one of these and maybe better know it as a camera monitor. These kind of devices have an input and often an output and they are commonly used to record the live output from a video camera.

In the picture above we can see the Atomos Ninja V recorder. It has 2 hdmi ports, one input and one output. We could put a cable from the desktop on the input and than a cable to a monitor as output. We could than work as normal, but can use the recorder to record anything happening on the screen. This recorder would be doing all the hardwork so the recording won't eat up system resources and these recorders are made to record high quality video. Ideal!
Recording software
A second option would indeed be to use some kind of virtual recorder, like OBS. These are less favourable to recording with external hardware cause they often impact performance and they aren't actually recording the system output. This means that some colour shenanigans from a OS can change the recorded screen from the actual output. Secondly, if the computer crashes the recorded files often get corrupt and can't be used.
I personally use OBS and ShareX and never ran into problems with these tools. I have to admit thought that I'm usually wondering whether or not my night-mode is captured as well.
Things to be aware of
Now many things can affect the recorded video. That makes it quite difficult to give you specific instructions for fixing your problem. But I think it can be either bad settings in your streaming software, asking too much from your desktop or maybe it's your screen. Maybe your screen is using some kind of video profile and giving and alternating the image.

I was very tired writing this, but hopefully it is helpful. I think you can definitely figure out what is going on by just checking out all the settings. Good luck!

It's a recorded screen with OBS and I see the difference with other elements, but your picture looks good with no difference.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/18qSgfK4LpmKcWg7fV5DM_6dhBEvrO2m0
It's a software x264.

Video renderer in video player also will impact how your video shows.
Also you can set your color format to I444 and I think you should get the same picture in video as on your screen.


text:
When does Roto Paint 2 decide to do "refine edge propagating"?
If I am rotoscoping a long clip using RotoPaint 2 in After Effects, and I do the following:
Make a good rotopaint boundary in the middle of the clip, and adjust the Refine Edge tool around it to look right.
I then go to the beginning of the clip, and fix anywhere the rotopaint has messed up.  This requires the computer to process the frames back to the beginning.
Then I just to the end frame, allowing the computer to process the frames in between.
Then I move a few frames back towards the middle of the clip.
Why is the refine edge propagating backwards in time when I've already processed forward over that frame?


text:
Controlling a modern record deck via serial (RS-422)
I have an Atomos Shogun Studio 2 that can only be remotely controlled by RS-422. Atomos says that it uses Sony 9-Pin Protocol and that several JL Cooper control surfaces will work with it. The JL Cooper devices are very expensive and huge to boot, so I hoped to be able to use a USB-to-serial converter to save money and space. My thought was to cobble something together with Companion and a Stream Deck to trigger records.
My issue is that despite using the correct connection settings as specified in the Sony 9-Pin protocol spec detailed here, I only ever get NAK (11 12) responses back from the device. At least getting a valid error code back from the device tells me that the connection works and it hears the commands being issued, even if the syntax is somehow wrong.
I'm using Termite in hex mode to communicate with the deck at 38400 baud, 8-O-1. I'm trying to trigger a record by sending the REC command in hex (20 02, with a checksum of 22).
I've been barking up Atomos' tree for some hints to no avail so far. The various pieces of documentation on the protocols provide precious little in the way of actual, practical examples of what the syntax looks like. Does anyone with experience from the old days when VTRs were commonplace know the secrets for talking to these devices via serial?

Welcome! Are you sending CMD-1 and a data count before the record command and checksum? What happens if you send a STATUS SENSE (61 20) or STANDBY ON (20 05) before REC? In general, the BVW-75 protocol is pretty forgiving but you need to think in terms of what a physical VTR does in your use case: a VTR first spins up the heads (STANDBY ON) before starting to record (REC).


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360video - POV Learning Scenarios
I'm working for an educational facility for social workers and have a project to shoot 2  scenarios, of physical escalation with therapists and patients with cognitive disabilities, in POV.
The requirement of those scenarios are that the viewer should be able to select which subject he wants to follow.
→ So I thought 360 video would be easy. Problem: the subjects are getting into each other's hands. Meaning - there can't be a camera between them.
→ Now I'm more thinking of POV and shoot the scene twice. Once from the patient's perspective and once from the therapist.
Probably with the camera attached to a helmet (something like this).
Does anybody have experience with a shoot similar to this and can give me some advice?
The helmet is pricey, and I couldn't find a rental place for that - any other good solutions?
Thanks!


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ffmpeg split and concat flac audio file generates error "Application provided invalid, non monotonically increasing dts to muxer in stream 0"
I'm using ffmpeg to cut slices from a flac audio file then concatenate them together.  I'm able to do this and the output file plays in VLC media player and appears to have the correct duration; however, I get several errors of the form:

"Application provided invalid, non monotonically increasing dts to muxer in stream 0"

I have two questions:

Do these errors matter?
Which of the three concat commands that I use is preferable?

I create the slices with these commands:

ffmpeg -ss 00:00:00.200 -to 00:00:03.100 -i "input.flac" -c:a copy "slice_1.flac"
ffmpeg -ss 00:00:04.400 -to 00:00:07.200 -i "input.flac" -c:a copy "slice_2.flac"

These are the three different ways I've tried to concat the files:

ffmpeg  -i "concat:slice_1.flac|slice_2.flac" -codec copy -c:a flac -ignore_unknown merged_1.flac
ffmpeg  -i "concat:slice_1.flac|slice_2.flac" -c:a copy merged_2.flac
ffmpeg  -i "concat:slice_1.flac|slice_2.flac" -safe 0 -c copy merged_3.flac

For some reason it looks like when using copy for FLAC ffmpeg just copies the DTS timestamps as-is, refusing to regenerate them even if the flags are set to do so. I'm not sure if this is by design or a bug, but I ran into the same issue with concatenating FLAC files. I ended up using sox for now, but that's hardly ideal since it ends up re-encoding the FLAC - not a problem in the sense of transcoding losses, but takes a lot of unnecessary time. I'll probably be posting about this to the FFMPEG devs to see if this is by design or if it can be worked around.

Yes, those warnings are safe to ignore. They're caused by the input streams not agreeing on the timestamps - which they don't because you're concatenating, and thus each file starts out with zero and increases from there.
As far as I've determined, this warning always happens when concatenating. The output file should have corrected timestamps, and that can easily be checked by re-encoding it or playing it with mplayer. It works for my case, mp3 files, but you may want to double-check that .flac files also get there timestamps recalculated correctly. They should, as that's what this warning is all about.
Of the three commands you give, I'd use the middle one. It's simpler, and doesn't waste CPU cycles re-encoding.
I'd not use the "-ignore_unknown" flag, as if there's an input with an unknown format (not flac) then something has gone seriously wrong and you probably want to abort rather than produce unexpected output. I.E. your output file would be missing bits that you expected to be there.
The first command also seems to want to re-encode things, which is a waste of CPU cycles, but won't decrease audio quality as you're using a lossless codec.
I was unable to find documentation on the "-safe 0" flag, so can't comment on the third.
Personally, I would use the '-f concat -i filename.list' syntax for concatenation. The main advantage being that I don't have to worry about hitting command length limits with hundreds (or thousands) of files to concat, and the disadvantage being that I have to remember to delete the temporary "files to be concatenated" list after ffmpeg completes successfully.


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Da Vinci Resolve Free
I hope this post finds you all well.
I have a short video clip (.mp4) and I wish to trim the last 5-6 seconds of it.
I tried the Ripple Cut approach and it works on trimming from the start of a clip to a place in the middle but not from near the end to the very end.
Would the Razor function work better?
Can you pls. share the exact steps?
I place the Playhead exactly where I wish to start trimming and then press the Razor Blade (icon) to make that Razor Blade turn red? Then….?
Thank you kindly.

Ripple Cut works by shuffling everything to the right of your cut leftward until it butts against your existing timeline.
If all you need to do is truncate the end of your video, just hover over the end of the clip in the timeline. The cursor will turn into a trim tool - either double-sided or single, as you slide the cursor slightly left. The double-sided cursor will, in effect, 'slide' your edit point without changing the timing of the overall timeline. The single razor will leave a gap if you shorten your clip. If you are only truncating a single clip, it doesn't matter in practise which you use, both will do the same thing in this instance.
All you need to do is grab this & drag left.

Image enlarged to make the tool easier to see.


text:
Perfectly looped in after effects, however playback pauses/blinks
I've managed to loop a video, and it looks great in after effects, I used this tutorial video

I've then exported as an mp4. Which again, when imported back into after effects loops perfectly.
However when mp4 played back using vlc/windows media/potplayer - it either pauses, or blinks when restarting the loop. It may pause 3 times, then blink, then pause another 4 times, then blink.
Any tips ?  Does reducing file size help or anything ? A different format, I just used the default media encoder settings for mp4.

What platform are you on? As in, what hardware will you play it back on?

@tomh Does it matter ? A vareity of different devices ... pc,laptop,ipad,phone

Seems to me that you’re asking which players will offer seamless playback of looped media. This will differ by application, platform and specs of the hardware, which is why I asked.

Take a look at this Q/A: https://video.stackexchange.com/q/15376/3908 and also search "seamless" in this stack.


text:
Software to swap audio tracks automatically
Is somewhere out there any software which can swap similar audio tracks ?
For eg. I record video and audio on camera, but I'm also recording the audio with external recorder on the top of the camera. Than, I just want to swap the audio in video with audio from external recorder.
I think it should be fairly easy for the software to detect exact audio track in video and swap it with audio track from external recorder. Definetly easier than doing it manualy.
Thank you!

PluralEyes https://www.maxon.net/en/red-giant-complete/pluraleyes

Adobe Premiere can help you to line up multiple audio and video recordings. Look at how to make multi-camera sequences and select Audio to synchronise the clips based on their waveforms:
https://helpx.adobe.com/premiere-pro/using/create-multi-camera-source-sequence.html

DaVinci can also do this, even in the freeware version.


text:
What does the 'evolution' property under Turbulent Displace in After Effects do?
It seems to add a ripple effect the more I increase the degree, but would like to read about it somewhere more. Couldn't find anything about it with a google/youtube search that specifically explains it. What is it supposed to control precisely?

It's just a quick way of adding movement to the distortion, by evolving the fractals. If you try adjusting the Evolution of a Fractal Noise effect you can witness this in action.
Evolution properties are handy as they allow you to seamlessly loop motion, by toggling 'Cycle Evolution'. This would require more steps to achieve, if you were animating the Offset value, for instance.


text:
How do I calculate the adjustment to a target dbFS? What's the formula?
For example, my peak volume is -4dB, but I want to increase it to -1dB (as per youtube recommendation). In the mixer master volume, which increase should I set? +3dB does not produce a -1dB peak.
Thank you in advance.

What application are you using? Premiere has loudness tools that can help with this.

It depends on your application, your project setup, and how it is metering signals.
If you are playing a mono source through a mono project, and metering using VU meters, playing a continuous sine wave tone at -4dB would meter at -4dBFS. If you increase the gain by 3dB, it should meter at -1dBFS.
Different metering systems use different ways to average the signal over time (eg PPM meters).
Different metering systems also use different loudness curves to try to approximate human loudness perception.
Real-world audio signals have more energy across different parts of the frequency spectrum, so may not meter as precisely as sine tones through the metering system of your application.
Premiere has a loudness radar tool that can help with this.

Seconding using the loudness radar and focusing on hitting your target loudness instead of worrying about peak levels.

Absolutely. You would drive using only the speedometer! But clipping is important to avoid.


text:
Applying Audio Effect to Entire Project
I'm working on a project made of hundreds of short video clips taken over the past year.  Some indoor clips, some outdoor, some in a quiet environment, some in loud, etc.  Naturally, they all have different "loudness" to them.  Some have quiet conversations, some have loud clapping or whatever.
What I'd like is to amplify all clips uniformly (like apply a gain of 5db or so) but without making the already-loud moments overly loud.  I've read about the Limiter Logic effect, and I see there's also Compressor, Adaptive Limiter, etc.
Is Final Cut's "analyze audio" feature good enough for this?  Or does that not deal with the already loud areas?  I can create a compound clip for the entire project, and apply Limiter to that, but is there a better way?

what I've done is just copy a clip in the timeline with some "analyze audio" features, and the Limiter audio effect enabled, then manually use "Paste Attributes" to paste the effects to other clips.  it still seems like there ought to be a single master audio track somewhere i could apply effects to.

Yes, I use it primarily and did not have problems.
Start with the Compressor to bring all sounds together. If necessary have a limiter at the end.


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How to ffmpeg encode a video with audio properly synced in Adobe Premiere and Resolve?
I'm trying to use ffmpeg to encode a series of rendered images with a soundtrack. When we import that video into Premiere the audio seems to be 1/2 frame early. When we import that same video in Resolve the sync seems fine.
To see this, run this script and import "output.mov" into Premiere and Resolve:
#!/bin/sh

# generate 3 seconds worth of test charts at 24fps

ffmpeg -y \
       -f lavfi -i testsrc=duration=3:size=1280x720:rate=24 \
       -f image2 "%03d.png"

# generate a 1kHz tone with duration 1/24s

duration=$(awk "BEGIN {print 1/24}")
ffmpeg -y \
       -f lavfi -i sine=frequency=1000:duration=$duration \
       -t 3.0 -acodec aac 1000hz.m4a

# combine the images and the audio, and offset the audio exactly 2 seconds

ffmpeg -y \
       -f image2 -framerate 24.0 -i "%03d.png" \
       -itsoffset 2.0 -i 1000hz.m4a \
       -vcodec libx264 -pix_fmt yuv420p -crf 20 output.mov

The result is supposed to be a 3 second video clip with the audio pop exactly on the 49th frame. And when our assistant editor loads the clip into Davinci Resolve the pop occurs exactly on frame 49 as we expect. In Premiere the pop is a half frame early.
So in ffmpeg I can add a 1/2 frame offset to the audio. That video will import in Premiere with the audio on frame 49, and in Resolve I'm told the audio is a half frame late. Is there a way to encode this video so that the audio is properly synced for Premiere AND Resolve?

Resolve has settings to compensate for playback audio latency. If there’s a difference between the sync offset you’re seeing while editing and the rendered output, you need to adjust the delay amount.

Fair enough, and the assistant editor can probably nudge the audio in Premiere also.  I’m going to keep this question open, though, because I’m curious if I can generate a single file that loads properly without those adjustments.


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Extract and replace frames from davinci resolve using python scripting
I want to know if there is a way to extract single frames from DaVinci resolve and modify them using a python script or if you can add a hook in fusion so that each frame is run through a python script. I looked through the "API documentation" but can't see any specific way to do this.
This would allow for integration with lots of other tools like OpenCV, TensorFlow and let you do lots of stuff like face detection aruco detection using scripting.

Not sure about how much access the Fusion/Resolve Python API gives you to internal image data; I.e., not sure if you can “pull a frame” as it sits somewhere in the image pipeline, and manipulate it directly, but you should be able to get clip data, such as in and out timecode, and alter the files on disk (or copies). Haven’t messed around with it too much, but I was able to get fusion to make 3D titles from an RSS feed through a Python module.  Hardest part was getting Resolve to use the right Python. Not quite the same, so still an open question.


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How to split a huge video into smaller files automatically in windows?
is there an app that I can use windows that can take a video and divide the file to N number of files? Like for a 1 hour video, I'd like to create 6 videos or 12 then it will automatically determine where to split it.
I discovered this amazing site that does it: https://split-video.com/, but it's just taking too much time and I can probably take advantage of my computer that has good memory and gpu.

Have you tried ffmpeg? It has several options how to split video on equal parts.

Can you explain how?  An example of how to install on windows, and a line of ffmpeg code would be useful

Just download and unpack the ffmpeg package, go to bin directory and run the command:
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -ss 00:00:00 -to 00:10:00 -c copy output1.mp4
(-i  input file
-ss start time in seconds or in hh:mm:ss
-to end time in seconds or in hh:mm:ss
-c codec to use)
kudos: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/508008

nah, I haven't tried to use it in windows. I might just be too lazy to install it on windows. tried it before in linux and it's flawless. installation might be not as smooth in windows but I'll give it a shot


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How to archive a Premiere Pro project that uses After Effects compositions
My video intro and outro are created in after effects. I want to use them in my Premiere Pro videos but I also want to archive these Premiere Pro projects after I'm done. I don't know yet how to do that, but I basically want to gather (and probably zip) every single file used in that PP project so that I can not break it later by removing, renaming, or deleting files that this project depends on.
As far as I know, there are 2 ways in which I can get an AE composition into PP: Either by rendering that clip and using it like a normal video, or by using the "Dynamic Link" functionality.
The former option would be the easiest way to get my intro and outro into PP, and then later gather and archive the files. The problem is the huge file size of the generated clips. I get several GB for that 11-second intro clip. Remember that I wanna archive each video separately, meaning that each project will have its own copy of that intro and outro clip.
Dynamic links don't generate large files but I don't know if my "gather and archive" process will even work with dynamic links. I have a feeling that it will not work.
What do you recommend to fix my problem? Should I just render a smaller file from AE? But then I am afraid to lose too much quality. What file type do you recommend?

Working with video inevitably involves large file sizes.  Buy two large external spinning disks for backup, and a large fast SSD for active projects.
I work on fast SSDs when I'm actively working on a project, making sure all my media, After Effects projects and premiere files are contained within a single folder (and then organised into subfolders).
When it comes to backing up, I don't bother with any of the built in Premiere archiving processes.  They're slow and unreliable in my experience.
I copy the entire project folder to a slower cheaper spinning hard disk using Chronosync.  This is useful because it can do incremental backups, so if you make small changes on your source disk, Chronosync only needs to scan for the changes, and then backs those up on to the backup disk.
So long as you religiously keep all your work in your project folder, this is a very quick and easy way to back up.
When it's all finished, I check the size of my multiple backups agains the SSD project, then delete off the SSD.
The ease of backing up this way is much simpler than trying to keep master copies of an intro and outro on another disk and referencing them across into different projects.

I decided to not use Dynamic Links (they seem clunky and hard to archive) and export to ProRes instead. ProRes is much smaller than lossless avi but still has virtually no decrease in quality. I actually handle the rest of my process the same way you described. I edit on the SSD and archive the finished project on an HDD.

I think that's a good plan.  I sometimes export a master prores, then separate versions of graphics only with ProRes with Alpha, and the under tracks with no gfx as a solid prores file. (and music, sfx and speech audio mixes).