Video editing

I did things

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I finally had a day off where I didn’t endure any kind of pain or accidental self harm! I even managed to get a nice breakfast, a little bit of cleaning done, and even made a video of a recent Left 4 Dead gaming session plus a title card for tomorrow. I also played around some more in Source Filmmaker; mainly playing with assets. I originally wanted to have a short cold open for the video, but the Francis model kept crashing SFM making the project pointless… though I did have fun with particles.

Videos releases will continue to be semi random as I’m still in the process of grabbing footage; I just happened to have enough to release something. :trollface:

Video Hiatus

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After doing a good job of releasing one video per week for almost two months I’ve found myself needing to take a break. I have stuff that I need to put out, but it’ll require further polishing and analysis before getting to a point of release… unless some miracle happens where I find something to upload, such as cat porn. :morty: I’ll be sure to continue making regular posts, would have done one yesterday but was stuck in bed for most of the day. :rick:

Oh, forgot to add there might be a chance of me streaming. :v:

It’s good to have hobbies

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The temperature was much cooler today, resulting me staying in , resulting in me spending several hours editing over three hours of footage into a seven minute clip, took me the whole afternoon but it’s all cut up. All I need to do is refine it and add some finishing touches, then I’ll have another one in the can. I’m starting to get low on video footage again, gonna have to fix that. I already have another video lined up for tomorrow; I’m sure some of you can guess what it’ll be. :melon:

Of course it wasn’t all work on my day off! I played a bit of Okami HD. I’m not sure if it’s the art style, music, or the whole environment in general but playing it is very relaxing. It felt good to play while listening to the wind flow through the tree outside my window. The only thing that might complete my immersion would be putting it on my laptop and playing it in the middle of a forest… though that would just make me look like an ass. :assy: Although other people enjoy their smart phones and other handhelds; why deny me some balanced time with nature and technology? If it were warmer today I probably would have done something of that caliber.

Running the numbers and cooling the engines

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I’ve been doing some test renders to really break in my new setup, and already I see drastic improvements when comparing to my old Xeon setup.

To break things down I rendered a clip that was 3:11 long. On H.265 I managed to get it to render in 6 minutes and 23 seconds. Meanwhile H.264 got me 3 minutes and 17 seconds. On my old setup it would be about a minute or two more before completion.

I haven’t been using H.265 for rendering, but now with more support for it I’ll switch despite the longer render time. My test clip when rendered on H.265 was 200mb while on H.264 it was 325mb total.

Quite impressive, this has proven to be worth every penny. :morty: You can expect more videos assuming real life doesn’t get my knickers in a twist. I’ve been working on a couple others today, and will be releasing one tomorrow that was already in the can. It will be my final video with an intro, after reading around I’ve decided to just drop intros and add more content instead unless I find a good reason to add one to a particular video. I’m not a big enough YouTuber to really get away with having them for every video.

Shotcut now has Keyframes!

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I’ve mentioned a few times in passing that for the most part I do my video editing with Shotcut, an open source alternative to Premiere or Vegas. I still keep Premiere installed on the off chance I need to keyframe something (like the THX logo in last weeks MGR video), but now it seems that miiiiight change considering they have officially added the ability to add keyframes to your projects!

Perhaps the most requested feature is the ability to move or smooth pan-and-zoom images or digital photos. We chose to address that in a more general manner by allowing filter parameters to be key-framed and animated rather than build something specific. Well, after long wait and much work, this has been introduced with a new Keyframes panel. It has an icon on the main toolbar to open the panel. There is much to say about this new feature and be sure to watch the videos as they become available. Keep in mind that this is new, incomplete, and a little unstable. Here are more caveats:

  • No support for undo/redo (pending filter support for this)
  • No keyboard shortcuts yet
  • Not yet available for transitions or generators
  • Only the following filters support keyframes at this time:
    • Gain / Volume
    • Brightness*
    • Circular Frame (HTML proof-of-concept)
    • Color Grading* (no simple)
    • Opacity*
    • Size and Position* (simple only, no curve UI)

It’s new, so I expect it to not in perfect working order, but a great start nevertheless. If they keep it up and get it at a point where it’s on par with other non-linear editors I’ll have a reason to retire premiere completely. :happy:

Another night of video edits comes to a close

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I’ve finally caught up on all of my video editing, although in my foolishness I’ve somehow overwritten one of my videos. So that particular one will never see the light of day… it was one of the MGSV ones. Fortunately MGSV is a large game, I should be able to find everything I lost naturally, still doesn’t stop me from kicking myself in the head over it.

I’m now back at a point where I can start doing other stuff.

An entire day of editing cardboard box porn

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I’ve been going over video footage I’ve accumulated over the last week, and surprisingly I have quite a bit to share. I’ve been dividing it all up into small videos of course, it feels weird to actually have footage in the can so to speak, if only I had more time for this sort of thing.

I did commit a sin tonight though, for almost an entire year I’ve only used Shotcut for my videos as that offers the ability to edit my OBS recordings along with their individual audio tracks, while newer versions of Adobe can handle this I don’t think it’s worth it to me to pay a monthly fee when I can achieve what I want out of an Open Source program. But tonight I had to take one of my clips into Premiere Pro to do some keyframe work, something Shotcut lacks at present. I also had to use it to loop an animated gif into another format as Shotcut kept having a stroke whenever I tried to import it. So I guess ye olde CS6 still serves a purpose… although Shotcut has been kicking all kinds of ass when it comes to video editing options, filters, multi-platform support and a thriving community.

I definitely recommend Shotcut if you’re looking for a video editor on the cheap, or an excellent Open Source competitor that runs on Linux, which Adobe doesn’t. 😛