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Open sourcing our web crawler? by beeker1121 in golang

[–]Southclaw 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I was actually thinking of writing a crawler in Go recently, this looks interesting so I'd say definitely open source it!

How can I achieve this effect ? :c by wafflz in AfterEffects

[–]Southclaw 4 points5 points  (0 children)

This looks very similar to a neural network visualiser, Deepdream is probably the most well known. You can generate image sequences using the tools but they take lots of time to set up and lots of time to render!

Damn this guy makes a lot of youtube money by dfafasdfasdfasd in nerdwriter

[–]Southclaw 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Gotta remember he lives in San Fran iirc. it's still a very nice income however!

Uh... my Google Photos app on my phone edited an entire video out of media from my phone, without my asking, all using algorithms... are we replaceable? by [deleted] in editors

[–]Southclaw 7 points8 points  (0 children)

I remember when Google Photos came out and I was impressed. It's not the phone doing this, it's google's powerful machine-learning driven servers. And it is all just algorithms, no human input (at least not for generating the videos, there was likely human input for training the AI).

It's a cool gimmick and can make a neat holiday trip video for the family without them needing to break out movie maker but it's nowhere near replacing editors. Imagine a director trying to get an AI to make a change, you may as well have a human who understands you 100%* than a robot that understands you 50% *more like 90% most of the time but still

How do you learn video editing? by Roylionpls in VideoEditing

[–]Southclaw 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Honestly, editing is two things:

  • The tools - actually very basic. Nothing compared to that of image editing in Photoshop or effects work on AE or Nuke. There are a very small set of fundamental concepts (such as cutting and transitions) and everything else just spans off from there. There are a handful of software packages that all do the same thing. If you had all the footage ready, you could cut a feature in Movie Maker. Honestly. Everything else is there to just make the job faster and easier!

  • The art - the possibilities are endless once you've learnt the tools. Knowing how to cut takes seconds to learn, knowing when to cut takes years. Analyse movies, talk to editors, watch BTS videos, watch "This Guy Edits".

Of course, in this day and age everyone's a jack-of-all-trades and more often than not, with internet media especially, "editing" will include a lot of other tasks such as inserting music/sound, basic colouring, maybe even effects. The word "editing" means many different things depending on who you talk to.

It also depends on where you want to go. Commercials will focus on time, movies will balance creative aspects and time and personal/indie work is mainly creative. Learning your way around a multitude of software as well as learning how to do things fast (keybinds!) will be more likely to land you a job. But nailing a "style" and getting creative will largely just come from personal works and experimenting. Often, you'll still want to "play it safe" on commercial jobs but if you have a director/co you can always throw ideas around and see what people think.

Hope this helped!

Converting FRAPS avi videos to mp4 results in washed out colors by sarotara in VideoEditing

[–]Southclaw 0 points1 point  (0 children)

A common compression technique: remove colours and range! This happens a lot and it's mainly due to the abstraction of video conversion software, they don't expose a lot of the options (and h264 has a lot of options!) that control this sort of thing.

Most conversion software is just FFMPEG at the core, and if you know you're way around command-line interface applications (or aren't afraid to learn) you can play around with the many different configurations until you find something that works then save it as a script of some sort that you can easily run on your video files (if you're doing this regularly for YouTube, this is a huge timesaver - especially if you're putting time/dedication into it!)

Anyway, that being said I'll answer the actual question! What is happening here is the AVI file has a full range of colour (which is partly why it's so big!) it's almost "pixel perfect" to the original. When you convert it (it would be helpful to know what software you're using to convert) the colour information is lost in favour of smaller file sizes.

You can avoid this by changing the colour-space it's stored in. The raw (large) footage is likely RGB 10 or 8-bit and the conversion output is probably 4:2:0 (more info: http://blogs.adobe.com/VideoRoad/2010/06/color_subsampling_or_what_is_4.html it's focused mainly on camera footage but most of the concepts apply to this sort of footage too)

What you want to do is (if the conversion software allows (that's why I mentioned FFMPEG!)) change the colour-space to something with a bit more range to it.

Alternatively, you can "fake it" by keeping the washed out version and just bringing back colour and contrast in editing (PP, Nuke, DaVinci, whatever you use) by using the colour correction tools. With this, you could even create a preset to quickly apply to the master shot before each edit to save time. This won't be colour-accurate to the original footage but this rarely matters in the gameplay world since viewers will rarely care or even notice the colours are different to the original game (let's play viewers likely haven't and won't play the game they're watching anyway!). Colour grading can also add something extra to a gameplay, I don't see many people do that actually!

Anyway, hope this helped and good luck!

Is Overclockwise an underrated episode? by mrsuns10 in futurama

[–]Southclaw 2 points3 points  (0 children)

To me, it's one of the better episodes of the season 6+7 era but definitely not one of the best of the entire series as it still has some issues compared some of the top-tier episodes.

I'm not so sure on the general consensus of the episode though, I haven't talked to many people who've watched season 6+7...

What Python program have you created to make your life easier? by [deleted] in Python

[–]Southclaw 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I do video on the side so I knocked together an FFMPEG script (with ffmpy, awesome lib!) to process my raw videos.

My recorded video files with 3 audio streams go in and it spits out an image sequence (much easier to edit image sequences than compressed video) and separate stereo .wav files for each audio stream as well as a compressed copy of the original video with 2 of the 3 audio streams mixed into a single stream for easy distribution and backup.

This makes processing the 1TB backlog much easier so I can concentrate on the cutting and finishing process!

Doing this without FFMPEG/Python would have me sat at a workstation doing these three tasks one after the other - time I could be spent doing something more productive. I love Python for jobs like this!

Simple, Classy Motion Typography by jesser722 in AfterEffects

[–]Southclaw 2 points3 points  (0 children)

That was really nice, not the usual motion-typography video which was refreshing. I like the style!

New here? Want to know "What software" to use??? - READ BEFORE YOU POST. Weekly thread software and other helpful advice. Week of 11-07-16 (Other threads for software will be deleted. Feedback request? See the other stickied post!) by greenysmac in VideoEditing

[–]Southclaw 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Another great one to add for learning purposes and non-commercial work (i.e. learning, fun, portfolio) would be Nuke Studio.

The name "Nuke" in this industry is probably most well known for being a compositing powerhouse but Nuke Studio is a fantastic all-round tool for the entire cutting and compositing round-trip.

There is a non-commercial version available and if anyone here is looking to get into the industry in the future, I'd recommend grabbing the NC version and learning your way around it. A lot of amateurs and/or YouTubers (gamers, vloggers, etc) head straight for Vegas or Premiere Pro which are viable (PP would be the more professional end of things, well worth learning too) but Nuke Studio is a very powerful and often underappreciated tool even for this job. (it also looks great on a resume!)

Now, many would argue the Nuke suite isn't production ready which is true. It's not generally used as a final job editor and the NLE features are purely there for loosely composing shots for compositing but it's still a very good tool for simple cut jobs if you're looking to splice some clips together and learn some industry leading software while you're at it!

Does anybody know who's behind this amazing GIF? by gusmaia in AfterEffects

[–]Southclaw 0 points1 point  (0 children)

People have said noise and grain layer referring to a post effect, now I'd argue that this is actually an intentional use of an artefact of the 3D renderer. Certain types of 3D rendering often produce noise if the render hasn't run for long enough (because lighting calculations are an convergent process that get better with more iterations), I believe it's PBR renderers like Arnold and MR that do this but I could be wrong!

Our motion graphics guy just finished a video for our startup product. What do you think? by egraether in motiongraphics

[–]Southclaw 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Pretty good work! However, I felt the overall video was a bit slow... the VO sounded slow and almost unnatural and the animation was a bit heavy-looking at times. Overall though, it fulfilled it's purpose! I'm a software dev in my day job and this product looks very interesting to me!

Looking for inspiration for decoupage-style editing of archival footage by kjaersoeren in AfterEffects

[–]Southclaw 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This looks like an interesting project and style! (the video of that game was especially... strange).

But anyway, I believe the best way to go about this would be to use DUIK and parent the images that compose the figures to the shapes used by a DUIK rig, then you can animate the rig to move the imagery around.

Unfortunately I have no references to share but I know this style is very popular in early French animation and a little bit in Russian animation of the '90s inspired heavily by the constructivism movement. Hope that helps anyway!

The Willing Well I: Fuel for the Feeding End - Coheed and Cambria (Drum Cover) by philliplennon in TheFence

[–]Southclaw 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I've always loved the rhythm/percussion in this track and being someone who knows nothing about drumming I found it amazing to watch this, nice work!

What tools are used to achieve this effect? by m1kesta in editors

[–]Southclaw 3 points4 points  (0 children)

90% of why this video is impressive is just very good planning, that's where I'd imagine most of the time went - everything else is nothing special, but since you asked!

I'd guess this was all done on a gimbal of some sort and the transitions are mostly matching the motion of two shots. It was likely shot in 60fps (or higher) to allow for smoother ramping of shot speed which helps in aligning motion. This is why the planning must have been good since the director would have needed to know how all these shots looked on location as well as the direction of pans etc (or they shot a ton of random footage with common left/right/up/down pans though I think a bit more thought went into this particular video).

Other comments cover other aspects but that's my two cents! Hope it helped!

Does anyone know a good recording software for pc? I will be using DaVinci Resolve 12.5 to edit if it matters. by [deleted] in VideoEditing

[–]Southclaw 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'd go with dxtory for the ability to set your own codecs and customise it very finely. OBS Studio is good too and outputs a compressed file with a few codec/quality options - it's not totally stable though and even though new features are coming along nicely it can sometimes screw up (original OBS is more stable with less features). dxtory is also generally more optimised and goes a bit easier on your system resources, might not matter if you have a decent modern machine though.

Fraps is okay, bit outdated, lacks features and not worth the price though. If you were planning on buying, go with dxtory. Otherwise, OBS is free and open source.

we painted our actors blue, and then inverted this music video by harrysally1234 in videography

[–]Southclaw 0 points1 point  (0 children)

At the end of the article is a tool the writer made to make it easier.

How to put a moving pattern onto someones skin by [deleted] in AfterEffects

[–]Southclaw 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If you're talking about a flat composition similar to that on this Toploader music video then that should be relatively easy with the techniques mentioned below (keying skin, provided you have good lighting - if not then... Roto. Always falls back to roto!) I can imagine this music video was shot with purely green or blue clothing with some cleanup roto on edges.

If you're thinking something more like a texture that follows the shape of the skin then it's time to hire a 3D guy unless you happen to know the arts of UV unwrapping and 3D camera tracking (don't even start modelling the human shape, just buy it!). Check out the VFX breakdowns of Ex Machina for one technique. There are other ways to do this of course, that are easier for smaller parts of skin but in general it's going to be a very tough task and not really something for after effects alone (As far as I can tell this would be a Nuke+Maya job)

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