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Stream from a windows desktop to multiple TVs/apartments on a separate channel
How can I stream from my windows 7 desktop to TVs in multiple apartments in my building on a dedicated cable channel. Is it possible? If so, how can I go about it?
The stream must play if someone switches to that channel.
I am trying to achieve something simple. I own a hotel and I want to broadcast hotel conferences/local tech programs/local sports events live to all rooms.

Perhaps something that else that might be more helpful is if you mention what you are trying to accomplish through this channel.  There may be alternate options that could more cheaply accomplish your goals.

While what you are asking about is technically possible, it wouldn't be easy or cheap.  It would in fact be very expensive.  To use a channel, you would need to form your own cable network within your house and play different sources for each channel into the system.  These are the kinds of systems that hotels buy to do their own cable network in the building and they can easily cost tens of thousands of dollars.  You would also probably need some pretty expensive licensing from the cable company to rebroadcast their channels so you would need to basically pay for everyone's cable bill.
For the interactive portion (having a stream start when they go to the channel) you actually need a set-top box for each TV as well.  Broadcast networks like cable can only play a signal on a channel to everyone.  They don't normally support starting a video when someone tunes the channel unless the set-top box can communicate back and control the source.  Alternately, the more modern way of approaching it is to have an on-demand type setup where the content isn't streamed in the traditional broadcast manner, but rather is stored on a media server and sent as a digital signal on demand and encoded for a particular set-top box.  This is generally implemented more like Netflix now with a digital stream being sent over a data network allocated to part of the cable network, though some older systems do it as a hidden channel that only that set-top box knows to tune to.
If it is something you still wish to pursue, I suggest looking into manufacturers of different "hotel cable systems" or "private cable systems."  Some quick searching found these guys as one possible option, though I know nothing about them or how good of an option they may be.  They are just the first option I found to give you an idea of what you are looking for.
Update: If you are in a comcast area, it looks like they may also have an option that they can provide to help work it into an actual service agreement which might be cheaper upfront.  See here.

I guess I will need to intercept the signal when it enters the building. Then have the hardware to add my own signal to it. What would I need to do to intercept the cable tv signal and then add my own signal? How can I convert a video stream from my desktop into a cable tv signal and how can I add this signal and re-broadcast it?

You don't intercept it and add your signal to it.  You actually rebroadcast it all on your own network.  You break out the actual channels as individual signals and then put those signals on your own channels.  You would have to be running your own private cable network.  The signal from your computer would be run in just like any of the other channels, though some specialized hardware may be able to take care of remapping the channels for you internally.  You then need the bi-directional hardware to control the computer's playback.

Alternately to using the computer for playback, you could probably use a pre-built on-demand video system that you could upload the files to and have it handle it.  That would be easier to integrate most likely and may even be cheaper.

Can suggest some hardware that I can look into? Can I also broadcast using an IP camera mounted on a desktop the same way?

@JohnQualis - it's not going to be a plug and play device, it's going to be a system that will need to be customized to your particular needs and the format and requirements that your local cable operator has.  Calling up your cable provider might be a good starting point as they would know what service providers in the area handle things like this.  Tell them you are looking at putting a private cable network in to your building and they should be able to help.

I think you are confusing broadcast vs. streaming. Traditional broadcast is not in the same frequency band as Wi-Fi or 4G, it's also in a special format and not broken into packets as in video streaming on the internet.
One might consider the FCC licensing for broadcasting on standard television broadcast bands as well. These are not free or up for grabs.
I think the only thing you can do is stream via internet and let your apartment friends know the URL you are using. If their TV has an internet connection they should be able to pick up your show otherwise they will need Wi-Fi for the TV and a internet interface on their TV, like getting a NIC card for your PC.
UPDATE: this model is simple. Content on internet, say your own vimeo of youtube channel, distribution via streaming through a browser to a 'smart TV' that has internet access and a browser or like tool or app. Youtube has an app for smart TVs that would allow your audience to stream your channel to them. Here are several streaming services:
http://www.techradar.com/us/news/television/16-best-tv-streaming-services-1044010
If you wanted to a live stream, then you will need a streaming video site account here is an example of such a service.
http://streamhoster.com/

I think you missed the point of his question.  He is asking about private cable systems like they have in hotels.  He wants to be able to setup his own internal cable service for an apartment building.  It is entirely possible to do this, but it is also not cheap in the slightest and requires special licensing with the cable provider since the network has to be entirely internal to the building so as to avoid broadcasting regulations and avoid interfering with the cable provider's network.

I agree that I did not cover cable systems even though technically these are a type of broadcast. However, AJ Henderson the question does not once mention cable systems, that's your interpretation.

True, it just mentioned wanting to share something with all the apartments in his building, which could have been a broadcast thing, but that wouldn't support the bidirectional communication needs for starting when someone tuned the channel.  I was mostly just referring to the bit about Wi-Fi and 4g though because that seemed to have no relation to what was being asked whether broadcast or cable.

I have to say that your coverage of cable is well done and creates awareness of alternate albeit a more traditional approach. I think the answer for John Qualis is going to come down to what type of TVs his apartment dwellers have, older cable based TVs vs. modern Smart TVs.

likewise your coverage of IP solutions is solid, I just wanted to clarify that my comment wasn't about the later half of your post at all, just the first paragraph which seemed out of place to me based on his question.  I think the rest of your answer gives a great option.

Thank you AJ Henderson, between the both of us, we certainly have provided some options to explore.


text:
`Format profile` property in MediaInfo
I got two media files: the first is an application window capture, the second is desktop cature. The only difference between them is that one has format profile section with value OpenDML in MediaInfo, and the other hasn't. All other information are the same (besides only file specific: size, duration and bit rate).
What does the format profile field mean? The files are produced by one media program with the same output settings. How it may affect media file?

UPDATE
I'm just interesting how the encoding software chooses what to put into this field. Is that field just a text info provided by encoder on its own (like description, notes, etc) or it is some kind of property for decoding software to take appropriate actions?

OpenDML is just a slight difference in the internal arrangement of an AVI file allowing it to go beyond the 2GB limit and supports a few other new features.  It shouldn't have any particular impact on the data within the file, though I'm unsure why one file was stored that way and the other was not.  Perhaps the software you were using only includes the extra format data if going beyond 2GB.

By the way, the files are less than gigabyte.

@rook - hmm, no idea why the difference then.

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


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How to scale a layer in pixelated fashion in After Effects?
How to scale a layer in pixelated fashion? I.e. each pixel of the image will grow to the block of pixels in the final scene without smoothing or blending (see picture below):

WORKAROUND
To achieve desired effect you could use the Draft option quality of the layer:
Layer > Quality > Draft

Ok, I read your mind. What you are talking about called Quality and Sampling. You can find it in the timeline on your layer when "Switches" are activated:

Adjust it to pixelated view, and you will be able to reach your goal without any effects.

I believe comments don't accept images, but editing the answer can stay unnoticed by the topicstarter...

Then sorry. I am new here, and trying to do my best in finding solutions to other people problems. Will try to recognize that stuff in the future better.

But first answer is not wrong! The Mosaic effect can handle this task, for example, for vector graphic. Or when picture starting to pixalete no on the needed scale... It is tow different approaches to achieve the desired result for OP...

It will scale like that, because every picture made of pixels (except vector graphics, but just don't use that)
You can force it with effect Stylize > Mosaic
Good luck!

I tried Mosaic effect but it didn't help much (changed Blocks keyframed option)

Why It didn't help? What was the difference between obtained results and the expected result? Sorry, I can not read minds.

When scaling it makes the image blurred on low Block values and just like usual scaled at high Block values. So maybe I need somehow relate these values with image width-height and scaling ratio?

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


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Do newly designed amateur video cameras still shoot interlaced footage by default?
I have a relatively cheap video camera (one of the Sony HandyCam models). Even when the model is recent, I think it is essentially a variation of a hardware that has been around for some time. It shoots 59.94 interlaced fields per second by default (though it has also progressive 29.97 and 59.94 modes).
I don't know if the interlaced mode is there because of legacy reasons, or if it is really used and appreciated by amateurs. I see a lot of people taking progressive videos, specially with machines that resemble a traditional reflex camera instead of a video camera and apparently do not include an interlaced mode.
I like interlacing, though that is not the question because I can see a lot of discussing around this preference all over the internet. My question is, are the other manufacturers of newly designed camcorders still including interlacing modes by default in non-professional cameras like my HandyCam, or is it a format that is about to disappear from amateur machines? Is there any standard regulating this?

Since all consumer HD displays handle interlaced video by buffering and deinterlacing it before display, I think the days of interlacing are numbered. Rather than being a deliberate decision, it has the appearance of a disconnect between the broadcast standards committees and the rest of industry


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What kind of desktop computer is required to edit video in Blender?
I've learnt and done some video editing in Blender and I would like to buy a computer that gives me more power. What should I look for? As much RAM as possible? Will a GPU card make a difference?
Remark: It's only video editing in Blender, and lots of encoding with ffmpeg. No 3D or gaming. I'm particularly interested in knowing wether the GPU would make a substantial difference in that context or if it's better to simply aim for as much RAM as possible.

Considering the additional details in the comments below (you are just video editing, no 3d stuff), i have still to ask for your input and output formats (codec, bitrate, framerate, resolution). With the current info you gave, you do not need a strong GPU, in blender it is just used for 3d stuff. For ffmpeg you could get one that supports NVENC and NVDEC. Current recommendation: Fastest harddrive you can get (M2 ssd), Fastest CPU you can get (Quad minimum, Clock speed over number of cores). 16GB RAM should do it, the RAM speed dont matter a lot.

@Harry I encode my 1920x1080p60 projects first in Blender as H.264 "lossless" (I guess it means the highest quality available, the files are ridiculously big) and LPCM audio in AVI container, then I transcode with ffmpeg to the final formats, usually at least two, one for DVD pal and another as 1080p60 H.264+AAC in MP4 container for archival purposes. I will probably use H.265 and VP9 in the near future too. That's all. I want real time speed when moving the cursor over the footage in Blender, and also transcoding speed. Does the GPU matters?

@Harry I modified my comment to add that information. Please see it again, please. Input codec is usually h.264

thanks for the details, you might want to edit yout question and add these details. one more query: i need to know your input framerates

@Harry The input frame rates are 59.94p and sometimes 30p, 29.9p, 25p and 23.98p. I also do deinterlacing 1080i 60 -> 1080p 60 from camcorder footage (h.264+ac3 on AVCHD container) with ffmpeg before importing it into Blender.

@Harry I also do a lot of filtering with ffmpeg on crappy smartphone footage (e.g. handshake stabilization) that comes usually as h.264+ac3 1270x720p30

Wow, you do a lot of stuff and i detect lots of different questions, mostly about what GPU can help you where. I can't answer this question about blender, consider my first comment as the direct answer. Anyway for all your other format conversion and filtering stuff you'll have to look into the options for each and every standard conversion operation you do and check what GPU support it can serve. For good results you dont just add different standards into one timeline and let the NLE decide automatically what to do. Current perspective: Nvidia with pascal (GTX1060)  helps for start

Are you using it just for Video Editing or are you doing 3D graphics work as well ??
You will need to look at the minimum and recommended specs for the software you are using and make a decision really. It is hard to give a clear cut answer to these questions, as it would also depend on your budget. If you have £10000 spend then go for the biggest baddest you can get but if you only have £500 then you might be limiting yourself.
Minimum (basic usage) hardware
32-bit dual core 2Ghz CPU with SSE2 support.
2 GB RAM.
24 bits 1280×768 display.
Mouse or trackpad.
OpenGL 2.1 compatible graphics with 512 MB RAM.
This is quite a low requirement but the more complex work you do it will take longer to render, so getting more Ram, CPU and GPU will make things run quicker.
A Quad core CPU
8+ GB ram
A decent GPU (2gb+)
The above specs are pretty much standard for most basic gaming PC's but this is where I would start, you will need to decide on how much work you are going to do and what kind of work as 3D modeling and rendering can take a while to render depending on the complexities you are doing.

Just video editing. In particular, will a GPU make a big difference in video editing and transcoding? No 3D. No gaming. Just video editing in Blender and lots of ffmpeg usage.

Why not use a NLE software like Davinci Resolve v14 which is a much better video editing platform with some great performance and exporting presets and it is free as well. the 3 biggest things you will need to have is CPU, Ram and GPU for most editing software

Because I've invested many hour already in Blender up to the point where I feel comfortable using it. So the GPU makes a difference in video editing, then? (No 3D). Are you using Linux?

Blender = Ram and GPU then will give you the best results, CPU would be the next bit as FFMPEG uses the CPU

Thanks! Are you using Linux? I'm a bit outdated, but some years ago there was no support for GPUs. Maybe that has changed?

Nope I use Mac, you will have to probably ask more on the Linux or Blender forums for more specific GPU's which are supported

Thank you very much. Btw, that Davinci Resolve seems interesting, and I will have a look at it. Good luck.


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Alternatives to recordmydesktop?
I am using Recordmydesktop to record skype conversations. After an important recording, I went to the linux terminal where the recording was supposed to be taking place and all I could see was:
Segmentation fault (core dumped)
Recordmydesktop does to me this kind of thing sometimes, usually it happens with the most important recordings. Please provide a working alternative desktop recording software for linux.

RecordMyDesktop has been running good on my 14.04 xubuntu laptop. I had problems with Istanbul

I have 14.04 too.

You did file a bug report, right?

Not yet. If you give me a link to the relevant information, I will.

I've used both Simple Screen Recorder and Open Broadcaster Software. SSP is really simple and easy to use, and I believe it's in the Ubuntu app store. OBS requires a command line installation and the installation of ffmpeg as well, which often has to be compiled. OBS is a little more complex to use and might be overkill for your needs, but it is very powerful.

Thanks. SSP seems OK. I have not yet tested it in long recordings though.


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What export settings should I use in Premiere Pro for iBooks Author videos?
I've tried using Adobe Premiere to save a video for iBooks Author. The problem is that when I export my project as a mpeg2 file the quality of the video degrades a lot.
I am using images to re-create a Ken Burns/panning and scaling effect. I want the quality of the exported video of the images I am using to remain as high as possible. I am aware that iBooks Author optimizes and resizes the imported videos automatically. But right now the quality of the video isn't up to the standard I would like it to be, even before the iBooks optimisation.
What settings should I use in Premiere Pro to export a video that is going to be used in iBooks Author?
Frame rate 23.972
field order- progressive
Aspect- square pixel(1)
TV standard - NTSC
Level- 4.0
Bitrate encoding- VBR 2 pass
Target bitrate- 5 Mbps
Maximum Bitrate- 8Mbps
Keyframe distance- 72

From the Apple support page on iBooks Author: "For video, you should use files with an .mp4 file extension."
So mpeg2 is not the way to go. Also the quality depends strongly on your source footage. Could you add to your question what sort of footage you're working with (size, format).

Yes im using an image that has a huge pixel count 7000x5000 or so... The image degrades greatly when turned into a mp4. i guess that's because the actual video is only 1920x1050 but if there's anyway to keep the quality of the original image I'd want to do that as at the moment i'm not sure if they're worth using.

Could you post the exact settings (bitrate, framesize, fps, etc...) that you use when you export your footage? Just update your question to include that information.


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Add subtitles to an audio track
I need to synchronize an audio track and a video track (that is, cut the video so that it matches perfectly a voice-over), except that the audio track is in chinese and I don't speak chinese, so I don't understand what is being said and I can't synchronize it with the image!
What I would need is a way to "tag" the audio track or to add subtitles to the audio track, so that I know that at time 1'02, the word "hello" is pronounced, at time 1'13 the word "mister" is pronounced, and so on. Then I would import this file in Adobe premiere to be able to edit my video.
So basically I have:

one audio file, a voice-over in chinese
one text file, the text spoken by the voice-over but in english

And I need to create "something" that will match the two files and will help me synchronize my video and audio track afterwards in Adobe Premiere (a chinese speaker will make the match, but he won't be able to edit in Premiere). How would you do that?

I'm not perfectly clear on your process, but it seems you could approach this in the same way you would captioning (subtitling). The thing that ties the two together is time code: in your text file, each phrase is preceded by an "appear" time code, set apart (in brackets, etc) to indicate that it's not part of the spoken text.
[01:02:03:04] These words are being spoken now.
   [01:02:09:10] And this is the next spoken phrase
There are established formats for this, some very elaborate, using XML for example (see Universal Subtitle Format), and very simple ones as laid out above. Since it's for your eyes and not a machine's, simpler is better.
There are utilities (sorry, no links) that can capture the current running time in a readable form and insert it into the text, making the process reasonably efficient for the Chinese translator to accomplish.


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Upon export in Premiere Pro, colors lose saturation when previewing in QuickTime
I working on a project that I originally began in Premiere Pro CS6 on Windows, converted to CC, and am not editing in CC on Mac. I was making some minor tweaks to the video and getting ready to export, when I noticed some major differences in the color between the source monitor and the export preview (the actual exported file resembles or matches what you see in the export preview).

The export seems to lose a lot of color, and even shade a bit purple.
I'm on a 2013 retina MacBook Pro with a NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M. I'm also working with a 30" Dell external monitor via Thunderbolt. [Edit: Actually, I wonder if it's the external monitor that's throwing off my coloring. Here's a screenshot from the MBP screen:

And a screenshot of the rendered video in QuickTime (bottom) compared to the export preview (top). notice the QuickTime video is slightly washed out.

]
Some of the Googling I've done seems to suggest this is a problem with a gamma shift in Premiere (though I don't know how to fix that on export) or even a problem with the nVidia card (though I don't know of a way to look at that on a Mac).
Are there any suggestions for how I can get the export to match what I see in the source monitor?

UPDATE: After playing around with this some more, it seems like the problem might actually have to do with QuickTime, though I'm not sure where it fits into the various pieces in the puzzle. Here's a screenshot of the same video with QuickTime on top and VLC on the bottom:

Thankfully, the video that I uploaded to Wistia preserves the color: http://fogcreek.wistia.com/medias/p4eqf8u3vr.
At this point, it seems to just be a QuickTime problem, so maybe just using VLC as my default video player is the way to go. Anyone with a Mac know any more about what might be going on? I'd still like to understand more.

@AJHenderson the source at that part of the video is .mp4, which had been rendered from Premiere at some point (I can't remember exactly how I rendered it at the time, but was having issues with nesting the sequence).

@AJHenderson I'm not sure about the conformed files. I copied over an entire "Adobe Premiere Pro Preview Files" folder, but not sure if that's it.

"Use Previews" didn't seem to do it. Same output as before.

let us continue this discussion in chat

I had a similar problem, but I was getting washed out colors from H264 renders in Premiere CC 2015 on Windows. I believe it wasn't a playback issue because the rendered footage looked different when brought back into Premiere. I copied the files to a Mac and was able to render fine. My PC had an nVidia car

This is a well-known bug when exporting to H.264. Unfortunately, I'm not clever enough to understand why this happens, but it's a side effect of using the codec. I'll keep looking for an explanation I understand, however I wanted to get this answer out there.
As a workaround for now, I suggest making a quick little eyeball adjustment to the comp's colour correction to compensate. DO NOT DO THIS - SEE BELOW

Update 1:
I did some more digging, and found this on Pro Video Coalition:

QuickTime movies re-exported from applications such has QuickTime Player Pro using the H.264 codec (a common format for web content) appear brighter than the original in some contexts - such as inside QuickTime Player on the Mac, or on a web page viewed by Safari - but not in other contexts such as QuickTime Player on Windows, or the stripped-down QT Player inside After Effects.
Many attribute this to a bug introduced by use of a hidden, optional "gamma" tag (which is different than a full-blown color profile tag) inside QuickTime movies that is supposed to aid in cross-platform compatibility. Unfortunately, this tag is not exposed for the user to edit, and may be interpreted differently by different programs. It has been the cause of much grief among After Effects users employing color management, and has spread into the realm of web video.
- Brightness Issues with H.264 QuickTime Movies, Pro Video Coalition

(Bolding is my doing)
The article also lists a couple of suggestions:

Installing a semi-custom H.264 codec, that allows control of the gamma tag
Do not compensate by darking the image. For players that ignore the gamma tag, suddenly your video is far too dark.

Update 2:
Fuel VFX, an Australian company (whoo!), provided a tool called  QT Gamma Stripper. When they were bought out by Animal Logic, that tool all but disappeared, but it's still able to be found on the web. Here's one site that reputedly is hosting a copy of this free tool.

I was seeing the same thing. Exported video when played in QT was washed out compared to what my preview was in Premiere. When I looked at the same rendered file in VLC it matched. so evidently the problem was in QT. I opened pref and found a dialog box that said.
"
Enable Final Cut Studio color compatibility. When enabled video is not displayed using ColorSync." So that is apparently the culprit. When I enable my color now matches PPro and VLC much closer.
I use Premiere Pro CC now so not sure if that QT preference is an artifact from when I used to use FinalCut Pro and if all MAC QT users have it but I did and when I enabled fixed it. downside is my audience probably won't know to enable this so they will still see washed out. Although most view through Youtube/Vimeo which match PPro closer.

this doesn't help the colours when uploaded to YouTube, which looks bad like in Quicktime

It looks like it is probably something graphic driver related.  The Mac Book Pro Retina screen shots look almost identical to what I see on my color calibrated environment when I look at the video you have posted on your site.
Looks like the playback screen is probably recognized as a video playback by whatever color corrections are going on on the Dell monitor but the export preview isn't (or maybe the other way around.)

I had a similar problem, I am working in Premiere Pro CC on a Mac Pro with a Dell monitor (UP3216Q), what I saw in Premiere and VLC looked identical but in the QuickTime Player (both 7 and X) it was washed out.
Here is what fixed it for me. Go to System Preferences > Displays > Color > Uncheck "Show profiles for this display only" > select "Apple RGB"
It looks like the default display profile for my monitor (DELL UP3216Q) was the problem.

The actual problem is Premiere Pro's colour management. Here's why:
1 - All my colour work is done on Davinci Resolve which uses all the raw files from the beginning and the final product looks great.
2 - The files exported out of Davinci in 422HQ look great as well.
3 - I bring the same files into Premiere Pro and now they look over
saturated, contrasted and not the product that I just exported!!
4 - Take same coloured file from davinci and view it through quicktime, VLC and Premiere Pro and have them all open on the same monitor. You will see that Premiere Pro will look much different!
I'm not sure why Premiere does a gamma shift or doesn't view rec709 properly but all I can say is NEVER look at the colour in Premiere as accurate.
I've had the same problems as everyone here and I've also had major issues with it looking much different on YouTube and Vimeo as well when exporting out of Premiere as h264. I'm pretty sure this is because Premiere doesn't export out with a Rec709 color. Either way here's how you can fix it.
SOLUTION:
1 - Colour on a program that is actually built as a color correction software such as Davinci Resolve. DO NOT COLOUR IN PREMIERE
2- Export your colored files out of Davinci  Resolve as a 422HQ and rec709 color and load these colored files back into premiere.
3 - Now your files are in Premiere and they will look oversaturated and shit BUT DONT WORRY! Add your titles and any warp stabalization or effects you had on and ignore the color for now.
4 - Export your finished product (ignoring color) out of Premiere as Quicktime 422HQ, Render Maximum Bit Depth, 48bit, Use Maximum Render Quality and DO NOT use Previews.
5 - When this full res file is complete you can open it and see that your colours are back to normal and your video looks great again. At this point you'll have all your titles and effects baked in to a high res file and it's ready for web (or other) compression.
6 - Take this full res 422HQ file and bring it into Apple Compressor ($70 on app store). Compressor will be your actual encoding tool forever now. It's 100x better that premiere exports
7 - Choose your video settings. You will see a Rec709 color space option!! By default 422HQ is rec709 but the file will be way to big to upload to social media so that is why we're in Compressor to compress into h264 not in Premiere.
8 - Choose your video settings, export out a file with a rec709 color space, enjoy the color you want on all platforms!
Additional Notes:

Each monitor will display color differently so ideally when you're coloring in Davinci you can work off a calibrated monitor.
If your exporting a 1080 file look into x264 and then use that plugin for better results that h264 in Compressor. For 4K export material use h264
DO NOT SET YOUR MONITOR TO RGB! Video is Rec.709 so if your on a mac keep it to its default colour.
If you really care about your video color you have to get your monitor calibrated to rec.709 and that means calling a good video facility and paying a bit to calibrate your monitor. You can also use a spyder to get close if you want a cheaper option.

Good Luck!!


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Split-screen closed-circuit sports recording
We want to make recordings of high school hockey games for coach and player reviewing.  However, getting a good shot of the entire rink with one camera is impossible.  Using a student to record the game live has proven to be a problem, because the student usually will watch the game and forget he's recording it, so a lot of the action is missed.  So, I was thinking about putting two static cameras at the centerline, one shooting one side of the rink and one shooting the other, then combining into a split-screen video, and then recording that video, so that it can easily be played back at a later time.
So, I have a couple of issues with this:

How to combine the two video streams into a split-screen video.
How to then digitally record these videos for later viewing (digital is preferred, due to the ease of copying and playback).
I would actually prefer HD video... Is that even possible?
Prefer hardware rather than software based, due to the environment.

Any ideas would be appreciated!  I have been googling this and am having a very difficult time finding pro-level equipment made for this... There's a variety of i* apps, and in-car mobile video products, but none of them seem like the right fit.

Have you considered doing this entirely with a lens, rather than in software? A wide angle lens can do it, or a split lens, aiming at both sides of the rink.

Also, have you considered simply using two separate feeds or find a student that is more interested in film than hockey.  It would probably be easiest to use two feeds and find a piece of software to play them back together so that the coach and players can swap between them.  Having each half screen is going to be kind of hard to follow action I would think and makes the actual setup of recording a lot harder.

As far as lenses go, I didn't think I could find a lens that would be wide-angle enough to do the job, and still keep enough definition to make it worth it for the coach...  I will admit that I could be wrong about that.

The student availability issue is a problem because of the size of the school.  So, just finding one that is interested more in film than sports is kind of a non-starter.

I am really trying to do this hardware-based so there is very little man-hours involved in the production of the finished product.  Using software to "choose" which feed to watch on the finished product is too technical and complicated for these users.  I don't really see why having split screen video to cover the entire rink would be difficult to follow: in fact, it would preserve all of the ice that would otherwise be hidden by a single camera angle.  They really want this simple and turn-key, and I realize that means more tech, complication, and automation behind the scenes.

@subnet-nd - if you have each image only taking half the screen, then a wide angle lens could do an equally good job I would think.  The aspect ratio of a rink is roughly similar to a TV if you can get the camera positioned correctly.  (Like say in rafters above the rink.)  There should be software (likely in the security field) that can handle playing videos in a coordinated and user friendly manner where they could actually watch the videos simultaneously and blow them up to have more detail by going full screen.

Your best bet to easily do this is probably to set up two cameras with half the field of view being used.  Then simply setup a simple project that can combine the two and encode it for electronic distribution.  If you want to do an all digital route, you are still going to need to run an encoding after the fact to get the size down, so doing the combination of two feeds as a fixed project in post is probably the most straight forward.  Should be able to just copy the files and hit go.

Many of us including myself tend to throw technology at problems that otherwise would yield better and optimized results by old fashion human intervention.
The problem as I see it:
You want to present to the coaches and team information that will allow them to make decisions on how to improve their performance on the ice during a competition. Simply, you need an accurate and clear recording of a game with the best possible details of the actions of all the players engaged with the puck.
Solution:
While it would be nice to have two cameras to cover the entire field there is still the problem that the optimal portion of the screen will be the half way point between the goalie and the center per both cameras. Any action at either goal or center will be on the edge of each camera's frame. This is not optimal. The best solution would be for one camera to "follow" the action with enough detail to capture the players handling the puck.
Consider how professionally produced hockey games accomplish this by using the following: multiple cameras at strategic locations fed into a live mixer and switcher under the supervision of a video director, and yes with the occasional cut away shots to the commentators. Not to mention the real time graphic compositing with clock, scores, and handy info found marching across the ticker.
Let's streamline this to be affordable and targeting the coaching staff's criteria.
One camera with an experienced "sports" camera operator. The camera should have the ability to zoom and easily be focused manually on the fly, mounted on a heavy duty tripod with a very smooth fluid head and stationed on the center line of the field at 10 to 30 feet above the ice on the most stable platform. The elevation of the camera is critical to capture the geometry of motion under play.
The camera operator must be extremely experienced to achieve the optimal recording. Hiring a student with little or no live sports coverage experience and expecting the student to yield professional results is at best a fairy tale. One of the most demanding and challenging camera work is sports photography. So don't even think about skimping on experience here as you have already found out it will bite you in the butt.
You likely do not have a budget for hiring a professional camera operator.
No worries, since this is a high school you have an enormous resource of moms and dads, uncles and aunts, or other relatives that may have this level of experience and are more than happy to volunteer their skills and talents to assist in improving the performance of this hockey team. Imagine if you had a son or grandson involved in hockey and you are both proud of this and love the sport, and were once a professional sports camera operator.
You only need this experienced person for at least one season as they train two student interns who are at most in their junior year or one year from graduation. You should have at least two interns so you have back up.
These interns should first demonstrate a keen passion for sports video capture and they should receive academic credit for their efforts and perhaps some tuition weaver or discount as an additional incentive. These interns should be additionally trained on the care and feeding of the camera, tripod, and any associated accessories.
In the following year the former interns will be your mentors for the next batch of interns.
Now you have a sustainable means of professional quality capture and recording.
I base this answer on personal experience some 40 years ago.
While I was in my senior year at SIU Carbondale as a cinema major, I was selected from numerous applicants to a special internship for credit to the SIU film unit. One of their main duties was to record on 16mm color film all the home games of the SIU Saluki football team. I recall many Friday nights and Saturday afternoons working as camera assistant to a professional camera operator covering these games. This guy had it down cold with numerous seasons doing this. He would demonstrate technique and then I would have a chance to see if I had got it with his evaluation right on the spot. Instant feedback, instant progress.
One camera, zoom lens, heavy duty tripod with a very smooth fluid head, mounted above the press box outside at about 60 to 80 feet centered above the 50 yard line. These films were absolutely needed for the coaching staff. This coaching staff expected professional results and they got it delivered. Hence, some of the funding for SIU film unit thus came from the SIU football program.


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What is the highest rated HDMI category available?
It seems there are a number of HDMI category ratings.
In regards to quality, least amount of signal loss, and shielding, what currently are the highest rated HDMI categories available to either the general public or to those who have extra $$ to shell out?

The latest and greatest HDMI specification is 1.4a (and version 2 is expected to be released this year). The fastest/highest bandwidth category of HDMI cable is "HDMI with Ethernet." The rating of a cable's shielding (Class 2, Class 3) has more to do with fire resistance and US wiring code and is not really relevant to the matter of signal loss. MyCableMart.com has a great article with more information and cable recommendations: http://mycablemart.com/help/hdmi_which_one.php.
Whether a given cable available for purchase is higher quality with more more shielding is a matter of finding a good vendor and vetting their claims (caveat emptor). Longer cables with thicker wires inside, e.g., 22 AWG versus 24 AWG, will, all other things being equal have lower signal loss.
However, my experience with long HDMI cables has been very hit and miss. Just this week during an install for a multicamera livestream, a brand new, 50ft HDMI cable with built-in "signal booster" would work when connected to a monitor but not when connected to the video switcher (a Blackmagic ATEM Television Studio). A Blackmagic technical support technician told me that TVs/monitors are engineered to be very forgiving of signals that have fallen off spec. The ATEM switcher is more strict (and rightly so) and would not display the signal. Furthermore, I was told by Blackmagic that after 10 feet, HDMI cables start to fall off spec. In the end, we purchased an HDMI to SDI converter and successfully got the signal from the computer to the switcher.
After this and other HDMI misadventures, my gut feeling is to avoid long HDMI runs in favor of SDI connections or CAT5 baluns/extenders. YMMV.

I've read a lot about that with the Blackmagic hardware, and in fact decided to go with the same setup of HDMI to SDI converters and the ATEM. This cable is actually to run from the ATEM to the computer.
+1 for very comprehensive answer with a reference!

Most guys I know in the conference/concert setting opt for SDI to HDMI converters. SDI cable is cheap, reliable, and durable. HDMI is less than.

At the present the highest category of HDMI cable shielding is Category 2


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Reverse Darkening Face Out
Sometimes in documentaries, they have the face darkened out. Is their an effective way to undo this anoynmous effect? Obviously, the curves levels doesn't work as it just shows a bunch of square like patches of dark pixels and no detail as seen. Is their an algorithm that can guess as to how the darkening effect was done?
Below are examples from a documentary film ( It was the only one I could immediately think of as I couldn't find one on gangs / prisoners / murders out of the blue )

A black pixel will remain a black pixel. The information about the face is simply not there. You can change curves/levels/anything, if the information is not recored you can not retrieve it.

You could just try saying, "computer, enhance!" ;)

Sorry.  I know that's not constructive.  But seriously,  as others have said, you can't retrieve what's not there.  However, in the case that you had access to the RAW camera data (if it exists), information in the shadows would be retrievable.

Why information do you mean the aspect ratio the lens or in opengl terms the front amd the back ortho or perspective Or the color data? If color data how does that store pixel color not in each frame of the avi wmv mpg or whatever format video version?

If it is done properly, it should be impossible.  If there is some amount of information there, then it might be possible to get a result by cranking up gamma or luminance, but done correctly, the information is set to black pixels for the entire area and there is no difference between pixels over that area to work from.
It is sometimes possible to reverse images that have been pixelated, blurred or distorted (or at least determine if it is the same person) but there is no way to make up information that isn't there.

Thanks and Thanks to both of you. This makes sense. I thought maybe the information what is visible ( the other part of the face ) could be used to "generate" an approximation using the darkened pixels of data, given that they aren't completely stored with complete / no saturation I.E. absolutely black.

@ChrisOkyen - Just to be clear, if they are not uniform black, then there can possibly be ways to recover some of it, but if they are doing it right, they should be going to pure black.


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How to render an After Effects composition without DRM protection
How can you render a .wmv video file in After Effects without DRM protection, there doesn't seem to be an option when rendering.
UPDATE
This composition im rendering is basically a small animation i made from scratch, so i know im not rendering it with any pre-rendered files

Is it your own composition, or does it come from a DRM protected file?

What format are you using that has DRM protection on it?  This is not a typical behavior of After Effects.  Do you typically produce DRM protected media from the system?

I've never seen this kind of behavior in After Effects.  I'm going to assume that you are using a system that is typically used for producing DRM protected media and that the default options for your Windows Media format are setup to use a DRM system.  This would be part of the configuration of the encoder itself and should be available from the encoding and format options (not the exact name, I don't have AE on my current computer to check, but it's the setting right below quality level in the render queue.)
Without knowing the exact encoder being used, I can't really give any more direct feedback than that.  If you can post the exact encoder being used and the version of AE, I can give some more specific instructions later when I am at my home desktop.

If you are using a Mac, you need to buy Flip for Mac Studio in order to be able to export wmv files.  It costs $50. The more expensive version lets you export using two-pass encoding.
http://www.telestream.net/flip4mac/
I don't you have an issue with DRM in After Effects when using this.


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What can cause poor quality video in Canon point&shoot camera?
I recorded some videos from my superzoom compact camera Canon Powershot SX150 IS. When I run these videos on camera itself, they run fine. But when I move them on PC and run it, I can see it being pixelate and gray framing many times.
I have tried it with Auto mode as well as M mode (where I can do all settings myself).
Am I missing some setting?
Or if I can repair these videos...

On camera viewing is limited by the low resolution of the lcd-display of the camera. Maybe there is the same issues but you just don't notice them on the small display?
As for what might be causing this, without seeing a sample video, I'd suggest a slow memory card. Would you get these quality issues if you shot a video with one step lower quality? I would buy/borrow a faster or at least better quality memory card and see if the problem is solved.

I also suspect something may be wrong with the PC itself (namely the USB ports). articlestack, I suggest plugging the camera into an entirely different computer, transferring the files onto the PC, and seeing if you get the same problems. Sometimes, bad USB ports/busses can cause corruption during transfer.

Well I face that issue with all PCs. But memory card may be an issue. I dint try again however.

Are you dragging the videos and watching them in an editing program such as Final Cut or Premiere Pro? If so, it is probably because you need to log and capture and run them through 'Compressor' to convert the files to a suitable format (say ProRes(LT)..)... I am guessing you are just viewing them in a default viewer, which in that case, as mentioned above it may be due to expectation from watching them on a smaller, lower resolution lcd screen on the camera..Though, the camera you mentioned should output fairly decent video... Hope this helps.

Camera video is usually either MJPEG or h.264.  Transcoding that to a different lossy format isn't going to help unless the player is choking on something in the camera file.  I'd expect that either you couldn't play it at all, or it would look fine, not that you could play but with quality problems.


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Does HD necessarily mean clear, high quality images?
I recently purchase an AXIS network camera that will be used at a scrap metal yard to photograph truck license plates. While the camera is probably sufficient for my purposes I was a bit confused because it was advertised as an HDTV 720p camera but the image quality (still or video) is nowhere near as good as, say, any of the leading smartphone cameras. Apparently, this is because each image is only around 1 MP. If the image is aliased and blurry, in what sense is it "high definition"? It has "more lines" than my old TV, yet it looks worse than any other digital camera I've owned in the last 10 years. Isn't this term a bit misleading in this context?

try to imagine what a photo or frame at the end is. it is allways a snapshot of a timeline where the digital mechanism is starting and ending the transcoding of light/waves/reality in pixels or something similar you defined in a maximum and minimum range (defined by hardware and physics). but you have to see there is a difference between a data stream and a data frame.

1280*720 = 921 600 pixels...  yes of course it's only 1MP.  It sounds like that's not the problem, though.  It sounds like they shouldn't even have bothered with that many pixels, if the optics or DPS behind the sensor or whatever else make that bad a picture.

HD simply refers to a given number of pixels in the signal, not some measure of quality.  Even 1080p TV is lower resolution than the photos on most camera phones.  Even the 4k video used in the latest Hollywood blockbuster movies is lower quality than the still photos of most camera phones.  Video takes up far FAR more data than stills.  If you think about it, 1 second of video contains between 24 and 60 individual photos depending on the format of video being used.  Now there are ways to shrink the video since a lot of the pictures are very similar, but the quality that can be recorded is still much smaller than what we can process for a still.
The think is that an 8mp camera phone still doesn't shoot any better than 1080p video at most, so while it may take 8mp stills, it only takes sub 2mega pixel video.  720p isn't all that much better than an old 480 display.  The main advantage is the progressive scan, but there still isn't that much more information (about double).
The other thing to note with security cameras is that they tend to be made to be durable more than high quality.  The optics are probably not that great and they favor infinity focus over sharpness.  They want everything in the scene to be reasonably in-focus instead of having any particular area really sharp.  So between the optics, the design goals and the limited resolution, it isn't all that surprising that it doesn't render things that clearly since it isn't the goal of a typical security camera.
The term is not at all misleading though and based on your description, it sounds like it behaves like I would expect for the device.  It is High Definition since 720p is a high definition standard even if the optics don't give you as sharp of an image as you'd prefer.

The camera's sensor possibly has 1,280 × 720 = 921,600 pixels arranged in a Bayer Pattern. Half of the pixels are green, a quarter are red, and the remaining are blue. It takes more than one such pixel to calculate an actual full-color pixel, through an interpolation process called demosaicing. This process leads to blurry images when viewed at full resolution. As for the aliasing: This is likely caused by in-camera digital sharpening.
Other factors that negatively influence the quality of the picture:

low quality optics, possibly also badly adjusted
dirt
JPEG compression

Have you noticed, when watching tv, it is hard to read a license plate off a car if that said car is showing wholly with some surroundings on the screen? When the storyline of the tv-program needs to show you the license plate, they move in close and really show you the plate. Can't do better even when they do have very expensive high quality large lens videocameras!! And they produce 1080-lines to show true HD on your telly. Yet no reading the license plate. How could a small and cheap 720-line tiny lens surveillancecamera do any better? No, it does much worse.
As already stated in other answers, most mobile phone cameras beat most video cameras in still photos. Only if someone used the high quality videocamera to switch mode and take a still photo, then it quite likely would beat the mobile phone camera in image quality. But this small surveillancecamera is just no match. Calling it HD is perhaps misleading, but it never meant to say anything about the quality of single still frame, it is a video camera, after all. Video and photograph are not measured by the same standards.
HD video shown in HD television is max 1920×1080 pixel and minimum requirement is 1280×720 pixel. Fill that slot and the video can be called "High Definition".
Now, that's the television that makes the limits. Having a truly high definition surveillance video is possible after all. You just can't show the resulting video in normal HD television, you need special equipment for that, and then you got the license plates. Link to example photos of megapixel CCTV.

It's worth pointing out that even a 4k quality video camera is only going to produce an 8.3 Megapixel image.  You'd have to go to the exceedingly high end video cameras to beat a current generation iPhone's camera in terms of raw pixel count.

@AJHenderson - yeh, that's why I mentioned image quality, not pixel count. Lens and sensor quality of such a video camera should put an iPhone in shame.


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presenter (speaker) change detection from a video clip?
I was wondering if there is an easy way to detect presenter (speaker) changes from a video clip. I have some presentation / panel / seminar type videos, and want to add markers whenever the speaker changes in the stream. It can be when someone from the audience asks a question, or when another panel starts talking.

you might want to reword your question. Maybe use the term presenter or something

I guess that makes it less confusing? Made the change, thanks.

do you mean automated detection? That's going to be tricky...

You can use the speech recognition function within Adobe Premiere to (kind of) do this.  It will analyze a long piece of video, and attempt to create a text script of the speech within the video.  If you tick "identify speakers" before it begins, it will write "[speaker 1], [speaker 2]" etc each time it identifies a change in speaker.
However, the success rate is not massively high.  Adobe claim about 75%, with high-quality audio, which seems about right, but is too low to make it a generally useful feature for most people.
There's a step by step guide on how to use it here:
http://layersmagazine.com/powering-search-with-audio-metadata-using-premiere-pro.html


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How to convert video for viewing on Sony Ericsson C702?
I'd like to convert some of my videos for viewing them on Sony Ericsson C702 cell phone. But I couldn't find the right set of parameters (a/v codecs, container, etc.). I'd prefer a solution using ffmpeg or another tool available on Linux. It seems that different phone models even from the same manufacturers have different video decoding abilities, so the more specific answer the better.
Update: As suggested, I'm posting ffmpeg's output of one of the videos recorded by the phone itself:
ffmpeg version 0.7.13, Copyright (c) 2000-2011 the FFmpeg developers
  built on Jun 13 2012 14:01:54 with gcc 4.4.5
  configuration: --enable-libdc1394 --prefix=/usr --extra-cflags='-Wall -g'
    --cc='ccache cc' --enable-shared --enable-libmp3lame --enable-gpl
    --enable-libvorbis --enable-pthreads --enable-libfaac --enable-libxvid
    --enable-postproc --enable-x11grab --enable-libgsm --enable-libtheora
    --enable-libopencore-amrnb --enable-libopencore-amrwb --enable-libx264
    --enable-libspeex --enable-nonfree --disable-stripping
    --enable-avfilter --enable-libdirac --disable-decoder=libdirac
    --enable-libfreetype --enable-libschroedinger
    --disable-encoder=libschroedinger --enable-version3
    --enable-libopenjpeg --enable-libvpx --enable-librtmp
    --extra-libs=-lgcrypt --disable-altivec --disable-armv5te
    --disable-armv6 --disable-vis
  libavutil    50. 43. 0 / 50. 43. 0
  libavcodec   52.123. 0 / 52.123. 0
  libavformat  52.111. 0 / 52.111. 0
  libavdevice  52.  5. 0 / 52.  5. 0
  libavfilter   1. 80. 0 /  1. 80. 0
  libswscale    0. 14. 1 /  0. 14. 1
  libpostproc  51.  2. 0 / 51.  2. 0
Input #0, mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2, from '/media/sde1/DCIM/100MSDCF/MOV00456.MP4':
  Metadata:
    major_brand     : 3gp5
    minor_version   : 512
    compatible_brands: vfj13gp43gp5mp42emp
    creation_time   : 2012-05-19 12:27:58
    copyright       :
    copyright-eng   :
  Duration: 00:01:21.79, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 382 kb/s
    Stream #0.0(jpn): Video: mpeg4, yuv420p, 320x240 [PAR 1:1 DAR 4:3], 348 kb/s, 29.60 fps, 30 tbr, 1k tbn, 30 tbc
    Metadata:
      creation_time   : 2012-05-19 12:27:59
    Stream #0.1(jpn): Audio: aac, 16000 Hz, mono, s16, 31 kb/s
    Metadata:
      creation_time   : 2012-05-19 12:27:59

Do you have a video that does work with this phone? Providing details on the video using ffmpeg will provide useful info. Include the complete output of ffmpeg -i input.

@LordNeckbeard Good idea, I added a listing to the post.

Devices are often picky, so it's always trial and error. Try: ffmpeg -i input -vf scale=320:-1 -c:v mpeg4 -b:v 400k -c:a aac -strict experimental -b:a 32k -ar 16000 -ac 1 output.mp4 You didn't include the complete console output as requested so I can not give you a better AAC encoder suggestion, and the native FFmpeg AAC encoder is poor at low bitrates.

@LordNeckbeard Thanks, it works. I didn't realize you might need the part with compile options and library versions. I updated it, if you a better suggestion based on that, I'd be happy to know. Also please make it a full answer so that I can vote for it. The wikipedia page says C702 supports MP3, AAC/AAC+/eAAC+ and WMA music files and 3GP/MPEG-4 video files), if it's any help.

Devices are often picky, and specifications are usually too uninformative so it's always trial and error. For example, your link indicates that the phone supports MP4 playback, but that is simply a container than can utilize several video and audio formats.
MPEG-4 part 2 video and AAC-LC audio
(partially based on the working video details you provided)
ffmpeg -i input -vf scale=320:-1 -c:v mpeg4 -b:v 400k -c:a aac -strict experimental -b:a 32k -ar 16000 -ac 1 output.mp4

Some recommendations:

Try increasing the audio bitrate since -c:a aac is not very good
for low bitrates, and because your build does not support better AAC
encoders.

Consider removing -ar 16000 and -ac 1. It's best to try to preserve the original file audio rate and number of audio channels if supported by the phone.

Try replacing -b:v 400k with -q:v using a value of or between 2 - 5 (lower is higher quality) to set a constant quantization parameter instead of an arbitrary bitrate.

Results may vary.
H.264 video and AAC-LC audio
ffmpeg -i input -vf scale=320:-1 -c:v libx264 -profile:v baseline -crf 28 -c:a aac -strict experimental -b:a 128k output.mp4

I'm unsure if this will work on your phone, but it's worth trying. See the FFmpeg and x264 Encoding Guide for more info on encoding with x264.

I tested H.264 and the phone is unable to decode it. But it may come in handy for a newer phone.  The mpeg4 variant works fine.


text:
Ffmpeg 1080p x265 video keeps freezing when played on Raspberry Pi 4
I have some 1080p videos that I'd like to convert to x265 to reduce their size.
The problem is that when I convert them using ffmpeg, I have problems playing the resulting video on Kodi running on Raspberry Pi 4. Either video or audio freezes at certain specific times. I haven't encountered such issues with other x265 1080p videos. (And RPi4 has native HEVC hardware decoding, which allows it to play even high-res x265 video without issues.)
I use

-c:v libx265 -crf 29 -preset slow for video

and for audio

-c:a libopus -b:a 160k -af channelmap=channel_layout=5.1
-c:a libopus -b:a 112k

for different audio channels. For this reason also I need to encode such 2 audio tracks separately and then mux them together.
I tried (separately):

Reduce the maximum rate by -maxrate 3M -bufsize 6M to make sure there aren't VBR parts with too much data to process,
-tune fastdecode,
Adding -filter:a aresample=async=1000.

But neither worked. (I haven't tried combining these options together.)
What could be a cause of these issues and what else can I try?

Update: I changed my workflow to encode all channels at once using -filter:a:0 'channelmap=channel_layout=5.1'. This fixed the problem. Which means, it was apparently caused by remuxing the channels. But still I have no idea why.

Maybe it's related to mkv muxing broken.

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


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Video editing objects from black and white to colour
For school we came up with a cool concept, the video starts in black and white and when a person in the video touches an object it turns to colour.
Could you guys help us out here? Do you have any tutorials for us? Which programs do we have to use (the price of the software is not a problem).
Thanks!
PS.
I now understand that rotoscoping can be used for this. But how bout a gradual change from black and white to colour if a building has been touched for example? For it to change in one frame will look kinda terrible...

You could keyframe the roto, so that it spreads over the building through the course of several frames.

@JasonConrad, how could I do do this if the camera is moving? I believe I can use a program such as Boujou for this, I just dont know exactly what to do.

Boujou is for motion tracking and match moving, which would work if your characters are interacting with CG elements (buildings built in maya, max, c4d, etc), but if you're talking about a VFX shot where you want color to spread over real world buildings, you probably need to take a more frame-by-frame, hand-painted approach.  That's what rotoscoping is all about.  Programs like mocha, bundled with AE, take a lot of the agony out of this process.  It doesn't matter if the camera is moving.

This will probably require a technique called rotoscoping, which involves painting a mask on each frame.  You would need to have two layers of video, one which is desaturated (to make the image black and white) and one which is full color.  You would then need to make a mask (a layer which effectively makes a hole in the black and white layer so that the color layer can be seen).  Since the mask may change based on camera movement and actors moving around the scene, you have to update the mask periodically (possibly every frame).
You can simplify the process quite a bit if the objects are stationary in the scene and the camera is stationary on a tripod.  You could also try using object tracking to maintain the placement of the mask roughly, but to get a satisfactory result, you will probably still need some rotoscoping.
After Effects can accomplish what you are looking for.  Any tutorials on rotoscoping and masking in AE would work to demonstrate the finer points of what tools to use to accomplish it.


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I want to digitise footage from a lot of DV tapes - should I use my camera or buy a tape deck?
I have about 200 hours of footage I need to digitise. I have very little experience in the production side of video. What kind of kit do I need to digitise it, how does it work? and will it wear out my camera (sony A1) if I use that for digitising? I've got Adobe Premiere which I'm planning to use for capture.
I'm planning to use the footage for editing from to make a film.

For the record DV is already digital. You're just capturing it.

There is no reason that your camera should have problems playing back 200 hours of tape and as the signal is digital and was presumably recorded on your camera, there shouldn't be much in the way of quality loss.  The video is either read correctly or not.  If you do get read issues (showing up as either dropped frames or blocky artifacts) then it might be worth getting your hands on a higher quality playback deck that might read the tape better.
I've never done a 200 hour project, but I've done multiple 10 to 50 hour projects on my Canon GL2 and never had a problem.  You can rent a tape deck if you are worried about wear and tear reducing the life of your A1, but I personally wouldn't worry too much about it.  They are often rated for 2000 hours or more (though I don't know what the A1's deck is rated for specifically.)
One major advantage of getting a tape deck though, would be that if you have multiple computers, you could run captures on more than one system at a time, thus speeding your batch logging considerably.

Another option is to rent an appropriate deck from an equipment supplier. I don't know your local market so I can't recommend one, but I'm certain there are some in London. With a pro or semi-pro deck you should get advantages of speed and quality for much less cost than buying, and with no wear on your camera. You also retain the use of the camera if you need extra shots etc.
As for the 'how', that depends a bit on what software and hardware you plan to use. Maybe you could supply more details.


text:
How do I log footage correctly?
I have a shoebox full of minidv tapes and I need to start capturing and logging them. Of course I want to get it right from the start. How should I log the footage? I'm talking more about technique and strategy as opposed to technical equipment. (I"m planning on using my Sony HDR A1e to capture the footage onto my PC with Adobe Premiere). But I want to capture the story and events at the same time into a paper log.

There isn't an easy answer here. It depends on a lot of factors. If you have constant timecode on each tape then you can batch log. Batch logging allows you to go through abs document clips prior to capture and the run captures simply by running tapes.
If you don't have consistent time code then that option goes out the window as batch capture gets confused on broken timecode.
At that point you will want to just capture the tapes manually and possibly use scene detection if your log tool provides it.
Even when manually logging, you can record details in the file meta data. Make sure to record the tape number or name and which piece of time code it is from.

Bear in mind, I'm a beginner. And I'm pretty sure that the timecode will be messed up somewhere, because we were amateurs when we filmed. So manual logging process tips would be appreciate.d

Just to clarify. I will sit and watch the footage and write down what happens at what time. What infomration do I need to capture?

I don't understand what 'batch logging' is

It is a feature in most professional editing packages. It let's you setup start and stop times for clips you want to capture and then goes through them in a semi automated manner. It prompts you for the tape and then takes care of seeking, recording and stopping the clips on the tape for you. Then it prompts for the next tape.

I think the best tool for manual logging is Adobe Prelude. I'm not to deep into Prelude. But I guess as it is also integrated with Premiere you might capture your footage directly to Prelude and add keywords and marks there. Prelude is build to work completely with the keyboard, so you can go through the footage very fast. I guess this might be the best way to log your footage and add tags and information to it. You than can also easily import the footage to Premiere.


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Process for crafting disparate travel footage
I shot 40 hours of mini dv tape of cycling to India. I worked with a professional film company, who gave me some tuition beforehand. However, in the end the film company decided to produce the film about my mate who I was also travelling with and make a love story about it. However, I've got a bunch of footage out of which I think there is enough quality material to make a 1 hr film.
How can I craft this travel footage into a worthwhile product?
I'm currently logging a tape per day, with timecodes and paper notes, and keeping a record of clips I consider to be worthy of going into the film. What other methods can I add into my process to sort out my footage and what methods can I use to craft a story?

Can you narrow this question down at all?  It currently is basically asking "How do I edit video?" which is way, way, WAY too broad.  You are asking at least 3 different questions ("How do I know what is interesting?", "How do I take notes on my footage?" and "How do I form it in to a story?") and each of those is itself pretty broad.

ok I'll look into it

It might be worth maybe narrowing down the questions to make them a bit more specific so someone might be able to give you a process, link to resource etc, editing is a craft and something you learn as you do, storytelling is also a craft and something you learn with some experience and understanding of how stories work.

If this was me, I would log all the tapes with notes and do a rough outline  (on paper) as to what I would like to have.
I would then go and do a rough cut (very rough tbh), putting all the content I want in a order that makes a bit of sense. you can then see how long it is, if its to long you know you can cut it down, if its to short then you might have to rethink your idea or find more footage to use.
I would choose some music (if you are going to have some) for background, montages etc then do another cut to the music getting closer to your final time limit-ish
Sit back give it a week or so go back watch it through and see if you like the way it is being told but have a open mind while doing this.
Do another refined edit of things you didnt like when you watched it back, move things around, change up the flow etc etc.
Watch again and keep doing the last step till your happy with output and story, making sure it wont bore someone watching or confuse them.
get a focus group (Friends, family) to watch it and let them be critical about it to see if they like, understand etc get there feedback and do a final cut.
Final stages are getting the sound levels and colours looking good then let people watch it
OR
get a editor who knows how to tell a good story and ask them if they will help you edit the footage down or get their help in the last stages to refine it all.
There is a good course called Inside the Edit https://insidetheedit.com/ it is a little pricey but it will give you what you want I think, If I have the money I would do it but I just go with my feelings and the above

Thats excellent advice. Thanks +1 :)

Friends and Family review isn't really particularly helpful as they are going to find things interesting because you are involved, not because it is inherently interesting.  The focus group should really be more strangers if you are going to do that.  Possibly find a local independent film group or something similar if you can.

@AJHenderson I see where your coming from and do agree, but the OP is new to this by the looks of it (I may be wrong) and starting with friends and family could be a bit easier then trying to find some strangers to have a look. First things first is to get to this stage anyway, this could take days, weeks, months, years depending on how fast and how much time is spent on the project I know I have some personal projects I keep putting on the back burner

@AdamMannPro - yeah, I agree and it certainly won't hurt to check with family and friends, just thought it worth mentioning that there would be some noteable bias in that case.  Still good for seeing some things that are easy to miss with your own work early on though.


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From logged footage to clips
I've got 40 hours of logged footage. I created a new project for each tape, captured the tape, logged it with pen and paper, wrote in some metadata for the file. Now I need to go back through and create clips from the good bits in the footage. How should I do this? Should I make  another new project, import all the avi files into it and mark clips from those (I don't know how to do this), creating new clips in the project library which I can then drag into the timeline and arrange? I've experimented a bit with this process but I'm not too sure.

any reason you created a new project for each tape, Normally when you log and capture a tape you will do this within a single project and have each tape as a video file.

yeah, there is no reason. I should import all the files into one project then?

yea, one project with folders and within the folders the timelines, video files, sound files etc, I would make a folder for each with appropriate names of course

More recently I had moved to individual clip logging at the logging level and doing batch captures that would capture the individual clips.  With direct to disk systems, it also uses distinct files, so it's been a while since I did this.
That said, what I did for going through long sets of bulk captured footage back in the day was to place the clips on V2 or V3 in my timeline approximately around where I expected to use them.  If I thought they were interesting but didn't know where they would be, I'd put them in another sequence as a set of B-roll shots to pull from.
I then arranged them in to a rough cut, pulling in clips from my B-roll shots where needed.  This works best if you have a pretty decent familiarity with all your footage and a decent idea of your end result, but can also work (I'll be it kind of painfully) if you have less of an idea.  It just takes more culling passes to get it worked down and more video tracks to place clips on.
I also always shifted everything down as I built the rough cut and removed clips I wasn't going to use once I determined they weren't needed.


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How to route from mixer to PC when using outboard equipment
Please let me explain how I've recorded in the past since I think this will make my question clearer.
Microphone -> direct into TL Audio pre-amp -> direct into soundcard.

This is the only way I know how to route.
Due to the location of my equipment (mixer - it's a home studio), the mixer could offer the ease of accessibility so I want to understand more.
Now, I know I could apply the following setup:
Microphone -> track 1 of mixer -> direct into TL Audio pre-amp -> direct into soundcard

But this doesn't seems like a good way, as it means that Track 2 of the mixer cannot use the TL Audio pre-amp.
I was also given a patch bay if that matters (or not).
How do I set up my mixer so I can use the outboard device? In total, I have 3 outboard devices and sadly only 2 send/return on my mixer. I do have 6 AUX though! The problem is AUX is just a send.
This is where my head hurts.
Let's assume my TL Audio pre-amp is connected via AUX 1.
This would mean my AUX1 of the mixer goes into my SoundCard Port 8 and my DirectOut on the mixer (of Track 1) goes into SoundCard Port 1. It then means Direct Out of Track 2 of my mixer goes to SoundCard Port 2 etc.
Is this correct?

What do you mean when you say: "one by the track output and another via the AUX"? WHat is the track output?

@EugeneS -I've updated my question, I hope this is now clearer.

Since your question is not very clear, I will answer generally and then improve my answer if more information is supplied. First of all, it is important to mention that there are 2 types of audio effects:

Parallel effects -  used with the original signal, without changing it. For example if you use delay or reverb; your signal gets routed to the effect and then returned back to your mixing console. At this stage - you decide what will be the correct mix between the original signal and the effect.
Serial effects - affecting the whole signal, for example compression. Auxiliary channels in consoles are usually used to work with parallel effects. You send the original channel through aux to your effects processor and then route the processed signal(actual effect)  back to your return input.

I say that to imply that usually you will not use your auxiliary sends and returns to use them with external pre-amp. The signal has to be pre-amped before going into the mixer channel, long before it reaches aux send point.
Regarding your question about direct outs and aux returns - yes, both of them will output the same signal as long as the aux volume is at maximum since both of them are post-fader.
If you want to use your external pre-amp with your mixer, you can use the line-in input which, in most mixers, is skipping the built-in pre.
EDIT1:
In some mixers the aux send\return are utilized by only one insert point, however internally tip is used as send and ring as return. This is from your mixer spec:

I think your post suggests the AUX is a send and return, is that correct? Mine are only sends. I don't know how to return the signal.

Take a look at EDIT1

@daverook there is an answer here that deals with send/return I/O

@Josh,  thank you for the link. I assume this means I must use a Y cable since my outboard had a send return.

@DaveRook, that is correct.


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Near natural lighting with softbox wattage between 2400 to 2700?
I record video with a large window as a softbox during the day, but I want to record during the night keeping those nice ambient shadows and even lighting.
I'm planing to buy a 3 piece softbox kit. I currently have DSLR with 50 mm f 1.8 and 80 mm f1.4 lenses which give a nice light aperture. The more natural the light is the better.
Here's a sample of my setup with natural light (large window, no additional lights):

I found these two kits that caught my attention, my budget is around 200 bucks.
ePhoto 2400:
http://goo.gl/0GfWdf
ePhoto 2700:
http://goo.gl/6Wov5S
What is the best wattage between these two for a near natural lighting? If not what is the right ammount of wattage to archive it?

Wattage has nothing to do with achieving natural lighting.  The amount of diffusion and placement does.  More light is ALWAYS better because it results in more signal to the camera and more options as far as ISO, aperture and shutter speed.
Nothing you setup with artificial lights (particularly on your budget) will come close to the level of the sun on even a cloudy day.  This doesn't matter though as long as you provide enough light for the camera to pick it up and spread it out through diffusers and light placement and reflectors such that you get a natural look.
I'd suggest reading some on 3 point lighting if you want more information on light placement and get the biggest diffusers you can, though on your budget, you will be hard pressed to get even a decent 3 point light kit, let alone any kind of diffusers.  (A decent large diffuser alone will run over $100.)  Your best bet is to put all the money in to the best light kit you can get and get diffusers later.  Proper three point lighting will still be fairly natural looking.

What do you think about this softbox, it seems large enough:
http://goo.gl/lSVm9t

@GabrielMeono - They might get the job done, but they are CFLs which are going to do anything but natural light.  They aren't dimmable(so you will have to use distance to adjust brightness) and the light generated will likely have some odd properties due to being florescent lighting.


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Fast subtitle workflow in Sony Vegas?
In Vegas is quite time consuming having to insert text using only visual cues, for example:

Inserting new text media requires to choose presets instead of having a default style on the go.
No keyboard shortcut for "Insert Text Media..."
Copying and pasting existing Text in the timeline requires clicking on the "Generated Media..." icon to start editing the new instance.

Is there a way to simplify or speed-up this process?
Keyboard shortcuts, third party plugins? Please give your thoughts.
Thank you.

In Vegas you can make a default text or preset by using the save preset feature. For instance you may add a text at the end of all your movies that looks like this:
Joe Blow Productions
Copyright Joe Blow 2014
After you make this text, give the text title a unique name "Joe Blow", then click the save preset button just to the right of the title window--looks like a floppy disk. The next time you go to the text generator it will be in the menu. Note, when you save any effect or text preset in Vegas you have to leave the current menu and then return to it so it refreshes the content of that menu.
Here is a short Vegas Tutorial to show you how to make your own presets:

Let's say you want to change the font of this preset, engage it, and then make your changes and save this new version with a unique name, like "Joe Blow 2".
You can do this with effects too. It's an easy way to build a custom library of effects and texts that you can use a baseline and then tweak/save as you need them.

Sure presets are very useful, but the default preset (Sample Text) can't be changed and it's also time consuming to pick presets in the drop down menu.

Probably you missed the point two of the question "1. Inserting new text media requires to choose presets instead of having a default style on the go."

Creating my own library of presets has improved my workflow, guess that's too much trouble for you.

I'm sorry but that's a point that was already mentioned, thanks anyway.

Vegas' text capabilities are rather limited. It allows you to insert captions only one by one.
There is an extension for Vegas Pro, which is called Vegasaur. It contains Text Generation Wizard that can import text from subtitle files (srt, sub etc.) or just from the Clipboard
http://vegasaur.com/Vegasaur

Vegas is quite fast at cropping and moving text media in the timeline, str closed captioning software is rather primitive as far as I know. What do you suggest to use along with Vegasaur for subtitles?

Use "animate text"
Here's my workflow.

Play video and tap "M" letter on you keyboard to insert markers in
places where you need your subtitles
Insert generated media, change it's duration to longer
Use the "animate" button
Change the keyframe transition to "hold" so that texts are not moving
Choose "sync cursor to media timeline"
Move your timeline cursor to different markers and just enter a different text in the media generator. You can use Ctrl+Arrow Right to jump to next marker

See this video that helped me to figure this out


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Read audio Markers/Regions in Premiere?
Premiere CC 2014 is unable to read marker data in a wave file.
I'm migrating from Vegas Pro, and this program is able to read markers from the start.
Vegas Pro:

Premiere Pro:

Is there a way to make Premiere read marker/region data?

Looks like Audition can read BWF markers but Premiere doesn't. So, two options are
1) to save separately the regions between markers.
or
2) export a WAV from Audition, with cue points that which Premiere seems to see.

Thank you, I was able to open an audio with metadata in Audition and save it with "include markers and other metadata" and Premiere was able to read all the markers.


text:
Sony Vegas: Make timeline "line" follow event trimming?
It would be a huge time saver to make the time "line" actively chase the end point dragging of events, so you can tell precisely where the event is compared to other tracks above and below.
Is this possible?

Thank you

I'm not sure what your use case is. I am normally dragging events' end points IN the timeline, so of course the timeline and other tracks and events are visible. You also get magnetic snapping to other events if you want. Am I getting your question wrong?

Ideally the timeline "line" should move along with the endpoint of the event, so you can precisely know where it's positioning. Take for example subtitles, if the timeline line would follow the event you could drag the text-event without guessing exactly where it's compared to the speech patterns in the audio track. Right now I have to drag and guess, then click the endpoint of the media-event to see the "line" in that position.

I don't think it's possible in Vegas to move the "timeline" line (cursor) along with your edit.
You can, however, set the cursor directly to where you want your event to end by just clicking to that position. Then drag your event to the cursor and let it snap magnetically to it.
This way you dont have to manually set and delete any markers.

I don't know Vegas specifically, but does it have any kind of mark feature?  The traditional solution to this is to apply 3 point edit techniques and scrub to set your points.
If you aren't familiar with 3 point editing, it consists of determining 3 out of 4 points, the beginning of your edit on the source, the end of your edit on the source, the beginning of your clip that you are bringing in and the end of the clip you are bringing in.  If you know 3 of these, you can determine the forth and complete your edit.
For example, with a subtitle, I would scrub the source video to find the start and end point of the subtitle.  I would place a marker at each of those frames and would then add the subtitle between the two markers.  This general technique should work with just about any reasonable editor and it sounds like it will address your workflow problem.

Sounds elegant and can be done, but in practice putting a marker before dragging becomes another step and cleaning markers after each event drag is a drag. Let's see if anyone knows a different workaround. Thank you.


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Ideal video format for Windows Movie Maker
Windows Movie Maker is very slow in converting from MP4 to whatever it's using as its preferred/interim format. What is their preferred format, so I can convert to it using faster and/or GPU accelerated programs?
I've somewhat ruled out WMV, however, I converted the video to it, and WMM is processing it a good amount faster.
What is the ideal format to use for movie maker for importing video?
55 hours of video to encode/process with microsoft "technology" is not fun!

Please retag this, I can't create the tag "windows-movie-maker", which would be most appropriate.

To the close vote: this is not opinion based. Most probably Windows Movie Maker has a preferred format which doesn't need any transcoding by WMM.

Which version of movie maker?  It appears it may make a difference.

@AJHenderson 2012

Poking around in the cache files, it appears that its ideal format is actually MP4. This matches my observations on CPU usage when using a non-mp4 format.

Prior to windows 7, WMM didn't even have MPEG-4 support without third party codecs.  It is rather unlikely that MP4 is the prefered codec.  More likely, you are seeing reduced CPU usage on MP4 because they may be using GPU decoding capabilities for MP4 since MP4 is a more broadly used standard than WMV.  The MS materials for WMM list WMV first and this makes sense as WMV is Microsoft's video format.

But that's not the case. The cache files in appdata are all mp4.

Windows Movie Maker, being a Microsoft product, works with WMV files using the Windows Media Video codecs.  You can use the free Windows Media Encoder to encode the files.  I believe there is also a free version of Microsoft Expression Encoder that you could use as well.  Expression is a bit newer, but slightly less capable since they moved a lot of functionality to the commercial Expression Encoder Pro (the Pro version is unfortunately not free).


text:
How to get a TV channel to stream as IP camera
My apartment building is broadcasting security cameras via a TV channel. I want to watch this broadcast on an IP camera viewer software (and there combine it with IP cameras that I am using). Is that possible?
I have been looking into TV cards/sticks for PCs but I would not know how to convert the incoming video signal into something an IP viewer software can accept.
I know I could buy a PC, hook in a TV card, output via HDMI to a TV signal encoder box and use that signal on the network but this solution seems overkill to me. I am looking for something compact & simple.
Ae this is a multi-layered question and every option in one layer changes the solutions / problems for the next later, I don't know where to start. So here is the list of questions I have:

how to best get the TV signal into a computer?

I could go with a TV tuner USB stick, but if the output for those then specific to the app that is shipped with it or rather a universal standard that can be used by other software such as VLC? Since I will need to tune to a specific channel where the cam feed is broadcasted, I am not sure if VLC (or other "generic" software) can tune into that.

what computer to use to get the signal to the network?

Do I need a full PC with relevant computing power? Could it be an Arduino? Can Arduinos connect to TV sticks at all?
What processing power do I need? The video stream is likely only 640x480.
Sorry if this is too vague or off-topic.

I think you need to learn to use Google. Start by looking at ffmpeg which, on its own, will do all of this. Of course "IP camera viewer software" is completely vague. VLC almost definitely does all of this in itself.

There are others, but I think ffmpeg is the goto app to try anything. Works with hardware (GPU) encoding too, if it's set up correctly.

I guess I need to rephrase my question.

I think I can see what you are asking, and Ken seems to have missed a big part of the question.
So assuming you are saying that the camera you want to watch is being broadcast as a TV channel that is connected to via an aerial (or equiv).  Then as you have said, you will need something to capture that with. That's going to depend a little on the hardware you are using with the capture device. But I am capturing local TV channels on a xbox usb tuner through a Ubuntu box.  But there are loads of low cost devices out there.
I am then using a bit of software called TVHeadEnd to grab that and spit it out as an IP stream. That can be watched on loads of devices. Of course if you want to watch this outside you home network, you are going to have to open ports on your router, and likely use something like DDNS (no-ip is a good provider for this) to find your router.  Just make sure what ever device you get to capture the broadcast and stream it, is compatible with the software you use to broadcast the stream.  Research before you purchase is recommended.
Lastly I think you will probably get away with running all this on something like a rasberry pi, depending on if you have to transcode the stream (which you would use FFMPEG to do, over an above most internal transcoders, but that's a whole different story).
There may be much simpler solutions out there, with everything just built in, perhaps a HDHomeRun, but I have not used one, worth a looks to see if it fits your need, it may remove the need for a PC all together.
Without more details this is all the info I can offer at the mo. I hope it's enough to get you started.

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


text:
Stabilizing split videos in Adobe Premiere
I have a continuous shot video that is split into 2 parts (my camera splits them at 4GB) and want to apply the warp stabilizer to the whole video. Since the warp stabilizer is using analyzing them independently, the zoom factor is never the same.
I tried to manually determine the zoom factor of the stabilizer but there is no way of setting the actual zoom. I only can set the maximum zoom and an additional % of zoom. On top of that, the center of reference for the zoom is different in each clip even if I manage to hit the same zoom factor.
What's the best way to stabilize the whole shot? Is there a way to link them before applying the stabilizer? Or do I need to join them, export the sequence, re-import the result and then stabilize it?

Why do you need to split them in two? If there is other stuff in between, is it really important they have the exact same zoom factor (since there will be no visible jump between frames)? Also note that you can manually set a zoom factor using the warp stabilizer options.

It's split because the camera splits the files at 4GB. I don't want them to be split.

What kind of camera do you have? If you import the footage using Premiere's media browser, continuous sequences split by the camera  should show up as a single file. See this thread for some info. Of course there's a number of reasons for this not to work, ranging from deleting the metadata files created by the camera to the camera model being not supported by Premiere ...

It's a Canon 5D IV. I import the data with Lightroom.

You import the video files using Lightroom? What for, do you need the video files in Lightroom?

I do photo shoots where I take a couple of hundred photos and 3-4 short videos (Live music). I never even considered importing the videos with Premiere since I did not expect the result to be different. I will need to try that next time and see if that fixes the videos automatically.

It shouldn't make a difference, Lightroom just moves the files, it doesn't do any encoding conversion or something like that ... If this is a regular problem for you, you could look into getting a SDXC card, those will be formatted to exFat instead of FAT32 by your camera, so the videos won't be split at the 4GB mark. However, for your current problem, you should be able to apply the filter if you wrap your files in a nested sequence. I'm at work right now, I'll check that later and write a more detailed reply if no one has answered by then.


text:
How do I set up a field recorder with camera/wireless monitoring?
This has to do with production sound. If you're a mixer, please help me, because I cannot wrap my head around this. I am a total newbie.
Here's the scenario.
Not working explicitly with this device, but since it makes for a head scratching example, take the Zaxcom Maxx (http://www.trewaudio.com/store/Zaxcom-Maxx-Mixer-Recorder.html)
This nifty little recorder has several outputs.

1x TA5 Mono(?) tape out
1x TA5 "Aux 1/2" out, a sum of Out 1 & 2
1x TA5 Stereo(?) Return
2x XLR Outputs

I am assuming from Zaxcom's manual that they are all balanced connections.
NOW. I want to send my stereo mix from the Zaxcom Maxx to a camera, which has two Mic/Line selectable XLR inputs, AND to a Comtek M-216 transmitter.
I have no idea how to do this. Obviously for camera you would use the two XLR outs with some kind of twin/braided XLR cable, right? Does that cable even exist?
Do you use the tape out for the Comtek? TA5 to stereo mini?
Very confused. Please help.

I agree with AJ's comment below: "Any reason not to timecode sync them and combine in post if running two cables is really a problem."  There is also software available that can sync audio tracks without timecode, so is it the cables that's the problem?  Also, I'm unclear as to why you're specifically interested in responses from mixers.  I'm not really an audio guy, but if your problem is integrating audio with video, then I might be able to help.  Please clarify your question or provide us with additional info so we can help you clarify it.

Easiest bet, use a distribution amplifier.  If you need the same audio to both, a DA will boost the signal so that it can actually go to both.  Not sure what the inputs on the Comtek are though, the DA will generally work best if they can both take XLR in.  Also, are you mixing in stereo?  If not, do you need two XLR to the camera?
As for the cable to the camera, you could heat shrink wrap two XLRs if you can't find a basic 2 channel XLR snake (assuming you are looking to have only one "cable" going to the camera.  Any reason not to timecode sync them and combine in post if running two cables is really a problem.