Quarter Mount

I spend decent time traveling. The laptop is always with you, but creative work is not always possible. But it turns out to be engaged in installation. In editing, it takes the most time to view the material and study the joints of the scenes. This is especially true for "raw", "spontaneous" material. When there are a lot of takes, there is a lot of marriage in takes and you have to stitch the movie in the literally the only way possible.

Here's the misfortune: my laptop ASUS UL30A, does not drag live video in my favorite Sony Vegas'e , when running on battery power. I am silent about FullHD.

A small but useful trick under the cut.

Source packages:
  1. The viewing window on a laptop, even when using a second USB monitor, is significantly less than the hires
  2. A lot of resources are spent on decoding "advanced formats" H.26x
  3. When editing (in this case, Vegas) does not cope with the flow, it solves the problem by skipping frames, which creates problems with thin installation


Conclusion:

It is possible and necessary to use for editing (at least in the first stage) video in low resolution (size), with minimal compression and the same frame rate as the original one.

Usage scenario:
  • We compress the video to a lower resolution (I use 1/4 HD - 640x360, by the way, with this resolution I can also mount it on my powerful home computer: there are no glitches with frame transmission, and the details are visible enough)
  • We put the downloaded video into a separate folder
  • Mounted in it
  • At the end of the installation, we change the project parameters (frame size) The project parameters are initially set in the output resolution - this does not affect performance, but allows you to use Pan / Crop / FX, etc. (thanks to Laplace and merlin_rterm)
  • And calmly copy the source materials to the folder with the “compressed video”. Vegas picks them up normally. Or use Replace in ProjectMedia (maki)

Technical implementation:

For batch compression, I used ffmpeg . Through trial and error, the mpeg4 codec was chosen as the leader in terms of size / quality ratio, and joyfully greeted by vegas of all versions.

A small shamance with a cmd file (I haven’t written bat nicknames for a long time) and the running script creates a short subdirectory in the source directory with a copy of the source files in a quarter size.

rem 2short.cmd
mkdir short
for %%i in (*.mov) do (
ffmpeg -y -i %%~ni.MOV -s 640x360 -vcodec mpeg4 -b 5000000 -ab 128000 short/%%~ni.MOV
)


Used ffmpeg options:
  • -i - source file
  • -y - overwrite the output file (last parameter) without confirmation
  • -s - frame size
  • -vcodec - used codec
  • -b - video bitrate
  • -ab - sound bitrate

Proof:

A spontaneous project - filmed in a day and a half of shooting, in seven locks, without a worked-out storyboard of the final scenes, on the whale optics Cannon 7D (professionals will damn me). Due to the confusion of the material, the project was mounted for more than six months (at times it seemed that the material could not be saved). It is in the quarters.

Mug from igor isaev on Vimeo .

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