Estrella Studios, LLC » Video Editing

Video encoding confusion: Tekzilla clears it up

Bill — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 05:04:43 +0000

I was watching an episode of Tekzilla the other day. The show comes from Revision 3, and is hosted by car-dude Patrick Norton and geek-gal Veronica Belmont. Kevin Rose filled in for Patrick this day, as they answered viewer questions — one being about proper video encoding for online. They use an app called Episode Pro. I assume these directions and screenshots are from that app … but you’re likely to have some of these same fields whether you use Sorenson, Vegas, Quicktime .. you name it.

You can watch the video below… but here’s the just of it:

Bandwidth settings:

Peak Rate: 1500 kbit/s
Average rate: 1200 kbit/s
Frame skip probability: 0
VBV buffer size: 5
VBR strength: 50 (but grayed out)
Profile settings: Vp6-E

Encoding settings:

High Quailty
2-pass Encoding: yes (checked)
2-pass Mode: CBR
Sharpness: 5

Frame Rate:

Frame Rate: 29.97
Type: fast
Fraction: 1/2
Framerate Type: Upper limit
First Interlaced Pair: Frame 2 and 3

Deinterlace:

Field Order: Automatic detection
Creating New Fields by: Edge detecting interpolation
Deinterlace Type: deinterlace interlaced frames (automatic)
Threshold: 6
Deinterlace Chroma: 1
Double Frame Rate: 0

Resize:

Width: 640
Height: 360
Top: 0
Bottom: 0
Left: 0
Right: 0
Display Ration Compensation: Assume 16:9
Aspect Mode: Letterbox (pad)
Interlace Handling: Progressive output
Interpolation mode: Automatic

After Effects Quick Tip: Layer effects

Dan — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 22:30:43 +0000

After effects has layer effects that are very similar to photoshop. There are multiple ways to access them. First you will need multiple layers, of course.

Then in the bottom left corner of the timeline panel click on the “Expand/Collapse Transfer control panel” icon.

This will display the Mode column.

Now you can easily change the blending mode of you After Effects layers just like Photoshop.

After Effects Quick Tip: Fill display with shape

Dan — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 23:05:02 +0000

If you want to create a shape the exact size of your preview just double click the Elipse, rectangle or rounded rectangle tool.

This is a great technique for starting a vignette, or creating a quick background.

After Effects Quick Tip: Preview exposure

Dan — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 22:59:18 +0000

You may find yourself working on a dark or light project with very little contrast. A simple display adjustment can help you navigate through you without having to hunt for those low contrast elements.
You will find the “Adjust Exposure” icon to the bottom right of your display window.

Changing this only affects your display and will not change rendered output.

After Effects Quick Tip: Renaming Layers

Dan — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 21:59:16 +0000

In most other programs when you want to change the name of a layer, you just double click the name and start typing. This is not the case in After Effects. To change the name you need to first highlight the layer by clicking on the name.

Then hit Enter (Windows) or Return (Mac OS).

Now that the text is activated, change the name then hit Enter/Return again or click anywhere on the screen to finalize.

Note: Make sure you do not hit the Enter or Return on the keypad as that will not work.

After Effects Quick Tip: Shy layers

Dan — Fri, 30 May 2008 05:26:09 +0000

Lights, cameras, backgrounds and other layers can sometimes get in the way and slow you down. Using AE’s “shy” feature you can hide these layers to get them out of the way.

First click the shy button directly to the left of the layers name you want to hide.

Then activate all the shy layers by clicking the shy button at the top of the timeline.

Enjoy the extra space!

After Effects QuickTip: Fast, Easy Vignettes

Dan — Fri, 30 May 2008 04:35:51 +0000

Need a vignette and need it fast? Well, first make a new adjustment layer (solid layers work too if you dont need blur or tone effects) in your composition and name it “vignette”. Creating a new layer will place it on top of the layer stack. If you add your footage after the vignette layer just make sure the vignette is above the footage.

On your toolbar select the “Elipse Tool”. Make sure the vignette layer is selected then double-click the Elipse Tool icon.

Select the vignette layer an press the “m” key to open the mask attributes. Make a check in “Inverted”. Increase “Mask Feather” and “Mask Expansion”. I recommend the settings below for a 720×480 composition:

Now add some effects to the vignette. I chose “fast blur” and here are my settings:

Play around with different effects and settings to get interesting results.

After Effects QuickTip: Speed up previews

Dan — Tue, 27 May 2008 12:27:56 +0000

If you have a complex project with tons of layers and multiple or advanced effects, you will notice extreme slowdown when scrubbing through your timeline. An easy way to help speed things up is to lower the resolution on the display window.

All you need to do is click the dropdown menu and select “half”, “third”, or “quarter” located under the preview.

It may not be as pretty but this lowers the resolution giving After Effects less information to process.

Also, if you export your movie with the “export” setting After Effects will render your project at the resolution of your preview.

Another note. You can disable the preview altogether on-the-fly by pressing “Caps Lock”.

After Effects QuickTip: Resize or move multiple layers as a whole

Dan — Thu, 22 May 2008 09:10:54 +0000

Okay, you have a web logo project that you just completed. You show your client and they are happy with it, of course, but they need it in HD and you built it at a much lower resolution for the web.

Your logo has multiple layers and when you select them in order to resize and move they all react to your modifications separately throwing off the entire composition.

We need to adjust these layers as a group. Well, since after effects does not have a group command we are going to use a a very helpful technique to create our own group.

Create a null object layer. Select all the layers you want within your group.
Click and drag the pick whip from one of the selected layers to the null object.

Done! Now if you adjust the scale and position of the null, all your linked layers will be universally modified.

700X Zoom?

Dan — Mon, 12 May 2008 02:22:53 +0000

Often the most prominently displayed specification displayed on your camera is the Zoom multiplier. If you look at the body of most inexpensive cameras you’ll find that the “digital zoom” multiplier is stamped, quite large, across the side of your camera. Its funny to me that this feature is so blatantly displayed when it is actually quite useless. That’s right, useless! As a matter of fact, one of the first things most professionals or informed consumers do is deactivate this misleading feature. As of late, consumers have caught on and manufactures have toned down the “zoom label” on the pricier consumer models and even removed it from more expensive prosumer models.

Now I’ll tell you why it sucks.

A camcorders “optical zoom” is mainly determined by the size and make of the lens. 12x up to 30x are common optical zoom levels found on most camcorders. This should be considered the maximum zoom level because anything beyond the optical zoom is simulated. The camera is basically digitally resizing the video input in real-time. When the image is enlarged the area between the original pixels needs to be filled with new pixels that are simulated by the cameras chip. This common process is called “interpolation”. The same process can be observed by opening a small image in a photo editing program then enlarging it by three or four hundred percent. Keep in mind that an image editor does a much better job of interpolating pixels because it has more processing power and takes more time when a camera has a weak processor and must perform the task real-time. If you were perform this task and the final image looks okay to you, then by all means, enjoy your 700x zoom. If not, most cameras have an option to turn the digital zoom off.