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RaoulDuke12
Nov 9, 2004

The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but to those who see it coming and jump aside.

thehustler posted:

And remember my question was about a transcode rather than recapturing :)

Sorry, I was using "originating" as a source from your timeline on final output rather that the literal source. My point was that yes, you're right, it doesn't generally make much of a difference at all.

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thehustler
Apr 17, 2004

I am very curious about this little crescendo

RaoulDuke12 posted:

Sorry, I was using "originating" as a source from your timeline on final output rather that the literal source. My point was that yes, you're right, it doesn't generally make much of a difference at all.

Ahh, understood.

But yeah, this was all about getting 4 years worth of conference footage in both SD and HD onto one 2 TB HDD. Recompressing the ProRes as ProRes LT will make it all fit and you really don't need the quality for it.

It's all done now, thanks for your replies!

PRADA SLUT
Mar 14, 2006

Inexperienced,
heartless,
but even so
In Final Cut Pro X, if you have a giant audio track laid down in a channel, and you put video tracks over the top of it for editing, how do you prevent the video tracks from automatically sticking to the position of the audio track? Separate audio track, not the recorded audio on the clip itself.

Basically, in a music video, I have the song on one channel. If I try to scoot clips around in the timeline, they stick to each other instead of getting pushed around. I want (for example) to be able to have two video clips next to each other, and when I add another clip in between them, the clips shove over to make room, instead of it adding the new clip on a different channel since there isn't enough room in between the existing clips.

It does it fine when there's no audio track underneath, but as soon as one is added, it seems to make the rest of the clips stick to it and I have to manually adjust the frame-by-frame timing of every single clip, which is a pain in the rear end.

I basically want each channel to act independently of the channels above or below it. I believe what I'm asking to do is to be able to remove the connections from the tracks?



This is wrong. This should all be on one channel. These clips get shoved above because they're not the right length. I don't give a poo poo about different tracks, I want the clips to move themselves like there is only one track they can fit on. Everything should snap.

PRADA SLUT fucked around with this message at 06:18 on Apr 20, 2014

1st AD
Dec 3, 2004

Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu: sometimes passing just isn't an option.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean because you're using the wrong terms for everything, but I think you actually want to lift the audio track from the primary storyline (command-opt-up arrow)and then overwrite the video clips to the primary storyline (command-opt-down arrow).

What I would do is create a 1 second gap or black background at the start of your timeline and connect the audio track to that, then select all the other clips and append those to the primary storyline. That way you can do insert edits and the clips will automatically move around the magnetic timeline instead of being stacked as connected clips.

This isn't working right now because you have the audio as the only media set in the primary timeline and the video clips are all connected to that.

The most expedient way to edit in FCPX (and every NLE really) is via keyboard shortcuts. W for insert edits, D for overwrite edits, and Q for connecting clips. From the looks of your timeline you've been dragging and dropping and this is why nothing works as expected for you.

1st AD fucked around with this message at 11:47 on Apr 20, 2014

BogDew
Jun 14, 2006

E:\FILES>quickfli clown.fli
FCPX is particularly insidious for it's magnetic timeline - notably that irritating issue of automatically linking the first audio and video tracks put down, even if they're not related, and then wiping it if you delete either; which is what Prada is complaining about.

Each blue line you see pointing down from the video to the audio is a link - if he deleted the audio called "Cartier Duet 4" it would remove the three clips attached to it.

The last time I had to use it for putting down a montage I did what the previous poster did and had slug at the start for the audio to cling to and I was able to edit the rest.

If I recall correctly ~ turns on the ability to not automatically shuffle clips around - you'll just overwrite things if one goes over the other.

And I think CTRL-SHIFT-S unlinks the clip and audio, but not sure if you can just select the whole timeline and do that.

PRADA SLUT
Mar 14, 2006

Inexperienced,
heartless,
but even so
I'm a sound designer, not an editor, so I know what the similar terms are.

1st AD
Dec 3, 2004

Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu: sometimes passing just isn't an option.
The magnetic timeline is a lot more useful than you give it credit for, since it lets you easily move scenes with connected audio and b-roll incredibly easily. It is annoying if you want to set up a montage since you have to take one extra step to make sure your edits don't knock your audio out, but the ability to move clips to different positions on the timeline quickly is invaluable in making/testing lots of different edit decisions.

Also if you're doing news or docu stuff you can use the connected clips to easily move talking head stuff as well as any associated stills, audio, and b-roll around without having to nest everything or manually move multiple tracks of video and audio.

Ctrl-shift-s doesn't unlink the audio in the way you're thinking; it splits apart the audio and video of a video clip, placing the audio in the timeline as a separate connected clip attached to the video. This allows you to move it out of sync or connect it to a different clip or do whatever. This doesn't really help in Prada's situation.

Ctrl-s allows you to make j and l edits without breaking the clip apart.

edit: Prada, your timeline should look more like this:



I didn't do a slug as a first clip but the idea is the same, have your first clip be something that is never gonna change or be moved and attach your edited audio track there. In this case I edited the song in a separate sequence and connected it to the first clip in the timeline.

1st AD fucked around with this message at 17:52 on Apr 20, 2014

Armagnac
Jun 24, 2005
Le feu de la vie.
Kind of shocked to see that people are using FCP X.

God seeing that timeline makes me upset again. What the gently caress are they smoking that they'd want to make an NLE that gets rid of tracks, the main metaphor for editing for over 100 years. Also when I hear about how to do things in FCP X, it always sounds like it's 2 more key presses than it used to be in 7.

It's so disappointing because there are a lot of features (like how trimming is handled, focus on Metadata, 64bit, the speed of certain parts of the app) that are so cool. But putting media on specific tracks is such an important part of what I do, that it will always be a deal breaker. Thankfully, Premiere has been stepping up.

If you're a sound designer, (and like to have specific elements on specific tracks) you *really* should get out of FCPX, it will drive you insane.

1st AD
Dec 3, 2004

Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu: sometimes passing just isn't an option.
When you learn how to deal with the FCPX timeline it is actually a lot faster to edit with than Premiere. A lot of my work is short form videos with agency clients and the audition feature allows me to quickly build out several edit options and flip through them rather than duplicating my sequence 10 times and making changes that way.

In addition, changing the paradigm from tracks to connected clips makes it a lot easier to move entire scenes and sequences around your timeline instead of having to nest everything. Maybe if you're doing narrative work only there's no benefit to this, but for news/documentary this is a huge benefit when you're not sure how you want to build out scenes.

Ev
Aug 3, 2006
Anyone with experience with Avid Media Composer and XDCAM seen this error message before: "failed to get the sample temporal offset from the AMA plug-in"? It happened when consolidating/transcoding a disc with something like 250 clips on it. Granted it's late so I didn't play around with it a ton, but anyone have an idea?

We're on MC 5.5 with an ISIS (I think that's all caps) server for storage.

1st AD
Dec 3, 2004

Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu: sometimes passing just isn't an option.
PC or Mac? I've had tons of issues with Mavericks and XDCAM and ended up having to transcode to DNxHD in Resolve

Ev
Aug 3, 2006

1st AD posted:

PC or Mac? I've had tons of issues with Mavericks and XDCAM and ended up having to transcode to DNxHD in Resolve
PC. Windows 7.

BogDew
Jun 14, 2006

E:\FILES>quickfli clown.fli

Armagnac posted:

Kind of shocked to see that people are using FCP X.
FCPX was pretty much designed with what 1stAD is doing. Short clips, ENGs or films where you quickly skim and sort through footage with tags, pile it into a timeline then trim and rearrange where required, complete with features like audition that allow you to rapidly preview results to clients.

It's the pod-coffee maker for budding editors.

Not to suggest you couldn't edit a whole feature in it, but the fact remains that three years on you still have to rely on third party add-ons to make up for deficits.

It's sort of the pinnacle of Walter Murch's concern that digital editing makes us mentally cut corners and we end up skimming over parts that could make a good edit a great edit - even moreso with the hover-scrub features.

AVID's the only NLE that at least forces you to always keep watching your footage, you can't cut blind with a blade tool. It's a shame the interface is still as unweildly as it was in the 90s. Fine for three point editing, but a pain should you attempt to lay down any complex effects.

Oh and the pancake timeline method in Premiere is a good way to swap and change between major cuts.

1st AD
Dec 3, 2004

Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu: sometimes passing just isn't an option.
I kind of disagree on your point there, having more tools and methods to log your shots can only help you find those moments that make a good edit a great edit. Having a skimming playhead doesn't really take anything away from you, it sure does save you on some keystrokes though. A lazy editor is going to be lazy regardless of the tool they're using. If you look at the iterations of Avid, Premiere, etc. over time, you'll see that they're adding more and more ways to use metadata to help you edit. That's not a bad thing at all.

BogDew
Jun 14, 2006

E:\FILES>quickfli clown.fli
Not decrying metadata as one of the best tools to come about in the realm of editing, only that FCPX by design can encourage corners to be cut under the guise of ease of use.

Those who have come off other suites are aware of what's lacking and will create a workflow to compensate, aided by some of the cool tricks FCPX can do. It's gotten far better than when it first came out.

But if you're brand new it's sort of creating a "training wheels" mindset that shuffles all the way back to shoot as newcomers assume everything can be fixed in post and don't take the time to correct shaky camera or poor colour balance.

But if you take the time to get to know FCP's quirks then yes it is a pretty capable suite, just sorely hampered from how detached it's become from the professional realm.

Ev
Aug 3, 2006
To follow up and answer my own question, apparently that error message I saw comes up when you have corrupted clips on a disc. So it just requires importing in small batches to narrow down which clip is bad. Or at least that's what I've been told by the person who usually does the importing in our office.

bassguitarhero
Feb 29, 2008

Does anyone know about conforming video for iTunes and Netflix? We have a film collection that we're pushing to get on those platforms, and the distribution company we're working with told us to send the files to a canadian company called Juice to conform for the platforms. Juice however keeps emailing us and telling us the audio is in the wrong format and they're going to charge us more to convert the audio. Their complaint is that the audio is in dual mono and iTunes/Netflix only takes audio in stereo.

Working in Final Cut and Quicktime, I exported the audio from the films as stereo and reimported them back into Final Cut and replaced the audio, my format settings say that the audio is stereo, the timeline settings say stereo, the get info for quicktime says it's stereo, but the company complains that it's still dual mono and they're going to charge us more. Of the 7 films we sent, one of them was fine but the other 6 were not. I can't seem to figure it out and they won't explain to me what the actual problem is other than "it's dual mono"

Dillbag
Mar 4, 2007

Click here to join Lem Lee in the Hell Of Being Cut To Pieces
Nap Ghost
As far as my usage of the term goes, dual mono IS stereo - 2 channels of audio panned left & right. Maybe your audio isn't panned properly? When you reimport the QuickTime into FCP, do the levels on the audio meters rise and fall EXACTLY the same, or are there slight variations?

Regardless, they need to explain the problem to you better or find someone on their tech side who can. You are the client and if they can't give you proper delivery specs or explain what the problem is, you should find another vendor.

Ervin K
Nov 4, 2010

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS
I have limited experience in post production and have recently been trying to export a clip from my 3d demo. Problem is no matter what settings I use (and tutorials I follow), the results always turn out to be really lovely, here's an example:

https://vimeo.com/93639347

that one is an FLV, its pretty desaturated, blurry, and the compression artifacts are visible. I've tried h.264 and some others as well and got the same results. I know I shouldn't expect it to look the same as the source material, but this is just way worse. Could there be something in particular that I'm missing? Otherwise what sort of export settings should I be using?

e: Here's the first frame at source quality:

Ervin K fucked around with this message at 19:27 on May 2, 2014

1st AD
Dec 3, 2004

Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu: sometimes passing just isn't an option.
What bitrate are you exporting at?

Ervin K
Nov 4, 2010

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS
I should specify that I'm doing this in premiere pro. In this case I simply set it to the high preset for FLV, which has a min rate of 80 and a max of 120. I also just tired the QuickTime format(with h.264) and unchecked "limit data rate to X kpbs", which produced a pretty good result but was 458mb big. The one I uploaded to Vimeo was at 53mb. I did set it to do 2 passes.

e: also one particular tutorial advised that I set the key frames to 1 per frame, insisting that it wouldn't have much of an effect on the video size. Is this a good idea or just dumb?

Ervin K fucked around with this message at 19:58 on May 2, 2014

1st AD
Dec 3, 2004

Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu: sometimes passing just isn't an option.
How did you get the video into Premiere? What codec and bitrate is it using ?

Ervin K
Nov 4, 2010

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS
It was a Targa image sequence that I post-processed and rendered in Aftereffects as an uncompressed avi. It has a bitrate of 1,493mbps. I just did another quicktime + h.264 render with a 20kbps cap, and the result is 32mb big for 12 second of footage. It looks significantly better but still really lacks saturation and contrast as well as being pretty large.

1st AD
Dec 3, 2004

Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu: sometimes passing just isn't an option.
Why aren't you rendering direct to mp4 or Media Encoder instead of outputting a QuickTime? QT sometimes does a gamma shift which will gently caress with your footage.

PriorMarcus
Oct 17, 2008

ASK ME ABOUT BEING ALLERGIC TO POSITIVITY

I'm editing in Premiere Pro CS6 and half way through a clip the Preview Screen turns red and the clip stops playing.

Now, the clip is in a .mov container and is just an mpeg file, and other clips with the exact same settings are playing fine. What's going on here?

thehustler
Apr 17, 2004

I am very curious about this little crescendo

1st AD posted:

Why aren't you rendering direct to mp4 or Media Encoder instead of outputting a QuickTime? QT sometimes does a gamma shift which will gently caress with your footage.

Interesting. Why does that happen?

1st AD
Dec 3, 2004

Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu: sometimes passing just isn't an option.
The player itself mucks around with the color space and displays 16-240 instead of 0-255. Why it does this I don't know, but the result is a change in contrast and color and a slight change in gamma.

Also, apparently AE adds it's own gamma boost when encoding to QuickTime?

http://vitrolite.wordpress.com/2010/12/31/quicktime_gamma_bug/

RaoulDuke12
Nov 9, 2004

The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but to those who see it coming and jump aside.

bassguitarhero posted:

Does anyone know about conforming video for iTunes and Netflix? We have a film collection that we're pushing to get on those platforms, and the distribution company we're working with told us to send the files to a canadian company called Juice to conform for the platforms. Juice however keeps emailing us and telling us the audio is in the wrong format and they're going to charge us more to convert the audio. Their complaint is that the audio is in dual mono and iTunes/Netflix only takes audio in stereo.

Working in Final Cut and Quicktime, I exported the audio from the films as stereo and reimported them back into Final Cut and replaced the audio, my format settings say that the audio is stereo, the timeline settings say stereo, the get info for quicktime says it's stereo, but the company complains that it's still dual mono and they're going to charge us more. Of the 7 films we sent, one of them was fine but the other 6 were not. I can't seem to figure it out and they won't explain to me what the actual problem is other than "it's dual mono"

Just to clarify, it says "stereo" in both these places?

Sequence Settings:



And if you're using quicktime conversion:



or if you're using just export > quicktime movie



On the last one especially, if it's set to channel grouped instead of stereo downmix, I've had places complain about it being dual mono, even though there's no indication that it is.

Stereo
Feb 27, 2014

Get rekt son
Anyone got any tips or ideas on covering up a small lens smudge? It's fairly unobvious until its over a dark surface and I don't have the time to do it frame by frame in PS. Cheers. Using FPC 7.

BogDew
Jun 14, 2006

E:\FILES>quickfli clown.fli
Sadly rotoscoping it frame by frame is the only real option. If you have PS CS6, at the least it's video editing tools make that kind of thing pretty easy to do, especially when you use layers, clone tools and so forth.

1st AD
Dec 3, 2004

Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu: sometimes passing just isn't an option.
There's some AE filters that will let you sample out dead pixels. That would be the best way of doing it.

the_lion
Jun 8, 2010

On the hunt for prey... :D

Stereo posted:

Anyone got any tips or ideas on covering up a small lens smudge? It's fairly unobvious until its over a dark surface and I don't have the time to do it frame by frame in PS. Cheers. Using FPC 7.

If you have access to AE I guess you could mocha track it or some nearby pixels and hopefully remove it that way?

I know there's a content aware script out there for AE that may help but I'm not in front of my machine right now.

Lens smudges are the worst. I always love when people with no idea say "we'll fix it in post! :D" because computers are magical one click "fix it" beasts. :(

Stereo
Feb 27, 2014

Get rekt son

the_lion posted:

If you have access to AE I guess you could mocha track it or some nearby pixels and hopefully remove it that way?

I know there's a content aware script out there for AE that may help but I'm not in front of my machine right now.

Lens smudges are the worst. I always love when people with no idea say "we'll fix it in post! :D" because computers are magical one click "fix it" beasts. :(

I know right :/ I ended up scrapping the shot anyway. Thanks for the suggestions.

bassguitarhero
Feb 29, 2008

RaoulDuke12 posted:

Just to clarify, it says "stereo" in both these places?

Sequence Settings:



And if you're using quicktime conversion:



or if you're using just export > quicktime movie



On the last one especially, if it's set to channel grouped instead of stereo downmix, I've had places complain about it being dual mono, even though there's no indication that it is.

Thanks for the tips on this - they finally sent over a sheet of instructions on how to convert the audio to their spec, which was essentially, "Set your sequence settings to dual mono then set each track to its own audio output" which wasn't a stereo downmix at all, but just separating it by track. Then again they spent 3 weeks going back and forth with me on one film having "duplicate frames" and me not being able to fix it until they finally sent me a clip of the problem section wherein I realized that the duplicate frames they were complaining about was because the film was *animated* and the animator worked at 12fps and doubled them because that's what you do. The whole thing has made my head hurt.



Anyways, while I'm here, I just finished the trailer for the SF International LGBT film festival, it's up here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOHZbm0Ql-k with music from fellow goon RMNC. Hoping to get George Takei to share it since he's in the trailer and coming to the festival.

Max
Nov 30, 2002

bassguitarhero posted:

Then again they spent 3 weeks going back and forth with me on one film having "duplicate frames" and me not being able to fix it until they finally sent me a clip of the problem section wherein I realized that the duplicate frames they were complaining about was because the film was *animated* and the animator worked at 12fps and doubled them because that's what you do. The whole thing has made my head hurt.

This kind of thing makes me want to scream. I had a good experience with that when I was dealing with a negative cutter once. I had an odd flash frame that I actually wanted on the workprint, and he called just to make sure it was there on purpose.

fluppet
Feb 10, 2009
I'm having a bit of trouble when converting and resizing a couple of files from mp4 to webm. As far as i can tell its the resize step that is introducing a colour shift but cant work out why.

Original file: http://www.sendspace.com/file/p0b68q
Resized webm: http://www.sendspace.com/file/iwlsvp


Does anyone have any ideas as to whats going on?

Dromedary Today
Jun 16, 2007

Tomorrow!
Heya, I am a complete newbie when it comes to video editing. Recently I started learning some new languages and decided to make a video every week where I practice the language in front of my lovely laptop camera, and upload it on youtube so speakers of the language can critique me. The videos look pretty boring though because the only editing I'm doing is cutting out long pauses while I'm trying to remember words (doing this in Windows Movie Maker :blush:).

So I figured I might as well do this right and learn about some basic editing, and my question is, what software should I get? I've tried googling around a bit but most lists of software seem really shilly and trying to push specific brands with referral links. These are the things I'm looking to add to the videos:

Some kind of intro displaying an image and some text, some music, maybe some simple premade animation
Have some text or images on top of the video at different times, some non-intrusive transitions
Convert the YUV .avi I get from my webcam to something smaller in size, in a format that is accepted by youtube.

I'm on a PC laptop that's 6 or so years old, mainly using Windows. If you have any tips on what I should go for let me know :)

wormil
Sep 12, 2002

Hulk will smoke you!

Postponing Camel posted:

I'm on a PC laptop that's 6 or so years old, mainly using Windows. If you have any tips on what I should go for let me know :)

I recently spent several weeks evaluating Sony Movie Studio 13 and 13 Platinum, Cyberlink Power Director 12, Corel Visual Studio X7, Microsoft Movie Maker and Video Pad trial and free versions. Time on each was minimum 3 hours and I completed at least one video. My system is an i3-2100, 8GB ram, onboard video; except for Cyberlink, I had no trouble editing up to 10 minute videos at 720p. I tested a few 1080p clips and didn't have any issues but never made a project from them.

The tldr version is I decided on Corel VS because it is the most intuitive, has the most extras (music, transitions, etc.), has the most modern interface, and was the fastest (for me) at putting together videos. Get SP1, it fixes several dumb and irritating bugs that lead to crashes (mostly related to importing video). [note: VS took me a few extra minutes to get started as the interface is a little different than the others but it's worth it]

Longer summary:
-Cyberlink PD is a resource hog and was the only software in the group that slowed my computer, it was also unstable and frequently crashed. To add insult to injury I kept experiencing a save bug where it would go through the motions of saving but not actually save so when it inevitably crashed more work was lost than expected. But it is powerful and relatively easy to use.
-Sony MS 13 (the base program) is little better than MSMM, don't even bother.
-Sony MS 13 Plat was easy to use and fast at basic editing but slower once you move beyond the basics. Mostly because it is sparse on extras and there are no "auto" modes for visual editing, every tweak is manual although you can make your own presets. This program is rock solid stable, I never experienced a single crash.
-VideoPad (paid) is a good program, stable, easy to use, but way too expensive ($40). You could buy the previous version of Corel or Sony for less and get more.
-VideoPad (free) very stripped down version, maybe a tad better than MSMM.
-Microsoft Movie Maker (MSMM) another stripped down free editor, good for stringing pictures or videos together and little else.

All of these programs have 30 day trials, give them a shot.

Dromedary Today
Jun 16, 2007

Tomorrow!
Thanks wormil, I really appreciate the rundown. I'll try out Corel VS, looks like it's well suited for the simple stuff I want to do. Cheers!

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RaoulDuke12
Nov 9, 2004

The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but to those who see it coming and jump aside.
I've always loved Magic Bullet Grinder because it will add TOD timecode to DSLR footage based off of the metadata on the .THM file without transcoding, so I can line stuff up a lot better.

However, the program is horribly out of date obviously. Is there another program that does this out there? Bulletproof doesn't seem to.

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