What are the current ways to prep your sources?

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TwilightChrono
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What are the current ways to prep your sources?

Post by TwilightChrono » Wed Jun 26, 2013 7:50 am

I've been having an issue the past few months. I've looked into it but it seems I can't find anything on my own. So I wanted to bring the question to you guys. My friends here on the org.

The Explanation:

I got so used to making fake avi's and doing scripts that way when it came to preparing my footage. But thanks to my job I haven't been able to keep track. Sounds like a lame excuse I know but bare with me. It seems fake AVI's don't work anymore and are met by harsh resistance by my editor either not recognizing them AT ALL or it being riddles with errors upon being opened to edit with. I'm also curious as how you guys do it with files such as MKV's, MP4's and regular AVI's. How would you go about converting and scripting those to a usable format? What programs would you use?

The only way I know how to deal with MKV's is to fraps them, then throw them in the editor save them as MP4 or another format of my choosing then convert it to a vob and then toss it in DGIndex and make my script that way. And I know it's not the proper way. There has to be something easier.

The question:

So can I get some info on this matter? I really need ot know how to do these things cause my editing is really suffering and the way I'm doing is more than likely wrong and very time consuming. So, can I get some help? How do you guys do it?
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l33tmeatwad
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Re: What are the current ways to prep your sources?

Post by l33tmeatwad » Wed Jun 26, 2013 10:34 am

My way probably isn't convenient to most, but I do what could best be described as "2-pass editing" where I do a rough cut of the video, then filter only the footage I need before pulling that footage into software to do effects and such. That saves me time when it comes to filtering footage and allows me to use the best set of filters I can (even if they are super slow).

Fraps is a NO NO! What you need to do is either convert to lossless AVI or recontainer them to MP4. I have some guides on these two methods which can be found HERE. Converting to lossless AVI is recommended, however is space is a concern then recontainering the footage should work fine. Keep in mine all videos that are 10bit will need to be converted to lossless AVI.
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Re: What are the current ways to prep your sources?

Post by AMVGuide » Wed Jun 26, 2013 9:35 pm

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It only looks complicated because it's an all-inclusive flow-chart. Video Tutorial Here.

It involves making an AviSynth script which calls your footage. (manually, or using AvsPmod)
Then open the script with VirtualDub, and save the footage as a big 'ol lossless .avi

For me, I usually do some light filtering on the whole footage first like ttempsmooth() and gradfunkmirror(). I find that covers a good chunk of problems without worrying about overfiltering. Then if I encounter a scene that needs something special: I'll render the clip from my editor; filter it; then throw it back into my editor. Either that, or I'll do some selective-filtering on those scenes with Range() after I render my AMV.

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Re: What are the current ways to prep your sources?

Post by Qyot27 » Wed Jun 26, 2013 10:08 pm

Clip editing. And recursive scripting*.

I don't intend to be mean here, but there hasn't really been any excuse for the last ~5½ years or so to not know that you open MKVs - and other miscellany that don't have dedicated source filters - with FFmpegSource (1.x for those of us that remember that, FFMS2 now). Before that it required DirectShowSource or DSS2.


*The source footage is opened/preprocessed in one set of scripts, as normal. Using ffmpeg, I generate a low quality MJPEG copy that I can track through in VirtualDub, and I use these to log the frame numbers for the scenes I want to use. The text log of relevant clips gets converted to a shell script that generates AviSynth scripts for each individual clip that Import() the source scripts and use Trim() to clip the right values. Then use a bash for loop to process all those little clip scripts to HuffYUV files with ffmpeg. Aside from using VirtualDub to find the right scenes and the editing process in Premiere, none of it uses a GUI. Heck, for general viewing purposes I've mostly switched entirely to mpv, so even that part is command-line based.
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Re: What are the current ways to prep your sources?

Post by AMVGuide » Thu Jun 27, 2013 12:44 am

Qyot27 wrote: [...]log the frame numbers for the scenes I want to use.
I actually used to do something just like this :o Then HDDs came down in price, and now I just convert the whole series; and import it into Magix where I can run Automatic Scene Detection. That way, I can pick and choose my clips without even having to cut the footage-- let alone mark timestamps or framenumbers anymore :)

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Re: What are the current ways to prep your sources?

Post by Qyot27 » Thu Jun 27, 2013 5:15 pm

AMVGuide wrote:
Qyot27 wrote: [...]log the frame numbers for the scenes I want to use.
I actually used to do something just like this :o Then HDDs came down in price, and now I just convert the whole series; and import it into Magix where I can run Automatic Scene Detection. That way, I can pick and choose my clips without even having to cut the footage-- let alone mark timestamps or framenumbers anymore :)
The important part there being the scene detection capability, of course. I once tried to edit with an entire episode the way that everybody would talk about doing for years, and it was a PITA; I'd always used individual clips up until that point (the fancy script chain and bash usage is something I only worked out in the last year, though; it's so much easier than setting up VDub's job control to do it). It contributed to the snowball of events that sapped my motivation and sparked the almost four-year hiatus I was on since 2009.
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Re: What are the current ways to prep your sources?

Post by AMVGuide » Thu Jun 27, 2013 6:09 pm

Qyot27 wrote:The important part there being the scene detection capability, of course.
Oh, for sure :) Now, the down-side to using Magix's in-software scene detection is I don't have individual clip files on my HDD --so I can't use my clips with anything other than Magix-- which isn't a big deal for me; however, to get around this, occasionally I might use AutoClip(), mode 2, which creates AviSynth Trim() Scripts. And I'm not entirely sure, but I think newer Adobe products have EDL.txt compatibility now, so the VegasEDL.txt file generate with mode 3 might work too.

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Re: What are the current ways to prep your sources?

Post by l33tmeatwad » Fri Jun 28, 2013 1:10 am

Heh, interesting way of creating scripts...I just do my entire rough cut via AviSynth before moving on to editing software, lol...
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Re: What are the current ways to prep your sources?

Post by TwilightChrono » Tue Jul 02, 2013 12:16 am

Some interesting ways to do things here. thanks for the input. I'll try these out.
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Re: What are the current ways to prep your sources?

Post by ReneKelly » Mon Aug 26, 2013 11:28 pm

thanks for the explanations man, but i would wish to know that are there some more ways to get of the solution for it?

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