Video editing

I've found myself mired in a video project for Christmas.

It seemed like a simple project to begin with, take a blu-ray, rip it, put a different soundtrack on it, burn it to another blu-ray. So, for instance, if you were going to make a blu-ray of The Wizard of Oz with Dark Side of the Moon already part of the soundtrack so you could just put that version in your blu-ray player and play it.

That's not the exact project, but it's close.

So I use this page to start. I rip it with MakeMKV no problem, and convert it to an mpeg-4 video with Handbrake. The only thing is, Handbrake makes *.m4v files, not *.mp4 file. Shouldn't be a problem, right? I try to import it into Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 and it turns out PP doesn't like mpeg 4 files using H.264 encoding. According to their forums, you should turn it into an .avi file, but keep the H.264 encoding. I try this using ffdshow, which is a godawful command line encoder. It encodes, and I can watch the file in both Windows Media Player and VLC, but it won't import into PP. Hrrrm.

I try a bunch of other codecs and wrappers (and I'm not sure what the difference is), each one taking a fair number of hours before you can see if Adobe likes that format, and I finally find that a wmv file with Windows Media 9 will work and doesn't look awful.

I successfully strip the soundtrack and add my new soundtrack. I then let Adobe spend 9 hours re-encoding this file with the new soundtrack.

This morning I see that it has worked. I load up the new file in Windows Media Player and play it. It's the movie with the new soundtrack. I fast forward to the end and WMP crashes saying there's a problem with the file (the file is 9GB). Has the file become corrupted? This happens at various points if I go anywhere over the halfway point. Do I have to re-render this thing? I put it on another computer (so I have this one free), and I set it to playing normally in WMP. It's now way over halfway (about 2 hours into this 2.5 hour movie) and it's playing fine.

Is it just that WMP is chocking on the large file size when I just drag the player around?

So now I have to burn it to a blu-ray. I have BD-Rs and I pull up the software that came with my burner. It's Cyberlink burning stuff, and it immediately tries to get me to buy the upgrade because this is some shitty lite package. More to the point, it won't allow me to create an actual blu-ray, only a data disk. WTF?

I google around and find DVDFab 9, which has a trial which will allow me to burn this blu-ray. It seems simple enough, I just drag the file into the file area on the software and then make a menu and stuff (just like burning a DVD).

I dragged my 9GB file over to it about an hour ago and it has a box which says "Analyze <filename>." According to the instructions I found out there, just copying one blu-ray to another, it took the writer's version about 24 minutes to do the analysis. Could've been a shorter movie, could've been a different encoding scheme that the software deals with more easily.

Is the .wmv format giving this program fits? It's obviously still going, it hasn't stopped churning.

Also, why is video editing full of little companies with fly by night websites that are full of spyware? In trying to find a conversion utility I ended up downloading three different things before I found one that wasn't horribly crippled (but didn't tell you so until after you installed it), or that didn't try to install a bunch of toolbars and "shopping helpers." The one I eventually used turned out to be a UI interface that used a bunch of command line encoders that had been developed as open source stuff.

And why is this so much harder than it should be?

That's actually a lot of the software out there, it seems like everyone just writes UIs on top of ffmpeg.

Combination of piracy concerns, which makes legit video editing harder, and actual pirates, who put up with sketchy shit so they can pirate.

Okay, the entire wmv file played fine in WMP on the other computer, so the fast forwarding through a gigantic file was what was making WMP die on me. The file should be fine.

It's now been over 2 hours of DVDFab analyzing the fucking file. A quick check on my resources shows the reason is probably because it's only using one of my four cores.

Anyone got any suggestions for a free or inexpensive piece of software that will burn a blu-ray? Anyone ever used DVDFab before? Should I just download Nero like I used to for DVD's?

This continues to vex me!

Downloaded Nero 12. They won't let me burn blu-rays until after I buy the software even though it's an unlimited trial for 15 days. Fuck them.

Cyberlink PowerDVDPro came with my blu-ray burner. Won't let me burn a blu-ray unless I buy their full package.

DVDFab seems to want to do the job, but can't seem to handle a *.wmv file. I tried a much shorter (60 sec) wmv file and it churned for 20 minutes, then crashes when I try to cancel the action.

I'm trying to re-encode to a different file type that hopefully DVDFab can handle. It takes hours each time. Grrrr. Tried mpeg-2 blu-ray, which for some reason gave me the movie and soundtrack as different files, along with an xmp file, so I assume somewhere there's software that knows how to put that all together into a blu-ray, but not any software that I have. I'm now trying mpeg-4 blu-ray.

Does anyone burn blu-rays? Does anyone know of a free blu-ray burning package (or one with a trial that will actually burn a single blu-ray?)

Finally got it into mpeg-4 with sound (you have to put it in Dolby 5.1 and tell it to combine the sound and video files, this is not the default, because who would want a movie with sound? Fuck me, Adobe.)

DVDFab can deal with it. It wants to burn it to a blu-ray!

I bought single layer BD-R. They hold 25GB. The mpeg-4 file is 25.1GB. I need a dual layer blu-ray that holds 50GB.

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!

Off to Best Buy tomorrow.

(BTW, I guess this is my video editing blog, because no one else seems to do this).

I'll be posting in here later when I try to get some tutorial videos together...

Overnight my SSD crapped out on me. Good thing I bought another one when they were on sale.

Reinstalling everything... I don't think I lost anything but the project files, and those were backed up on Carbonite, so I'm waiting for restoration.

So am I stoned or is Windows Movie Maker actually...functional? Like, you could make a small movie with it it seems? So far it doesn't feel totally broken but I haven't tried to make anything beyond "can I put video and a music together and do something crazy like, I dunno, split a video clip"

I grabbed it as part of some Windows Extra pack or something. It didn't deal with my problems, because it couldn't deal with an .m4v file, but it looked like a nice little lite package.

I take it back, WMM sucks for fine grained editing. I just discovered Reaper does video editing and while simple, it does allow precise editing for audio/video sync. Sweet!

In my professional life, I am so glad that I never have to deal with an audio track.

I don't know if it helps but the Adobe Creative Cloud subscription has been pretty valuable to me. $50/month for 12 month contract and you get Premiere Pro (and everything else).

It used to be more functional than it is now. I can't remember what feature they removed from it when it became "Windows Live Movie Maker," but it's not as good.

Oh holy fuck. CS5 ships with something called Encore, which will allow you to set up menus and burn blu-rays without bothering to render the video first. I have already paid for blu-ray burning software. I have had it all along. It even dynamically links to photoshop (for menus) and Premiere Pro (for the project). It will recommend an export codec and wrapper that will fit on the blu-ray.

I am the stupidest person on the planet.

Yes, but DOES IT WORK? At this point I am really wondering whether your inevitable but unfortunate resemblance to a pirate is going to stymie your every effort to Just Burn The Damn Blu-Bits.

It says it's Transcoding. It's been doing that for about 3-4 hours. The progress bar is going up slowly, but the Time Remaining field is blank.

It also says this burn will use 17.88GB, and it has detected the blu-ray in the drive. Most signs are good.

With my luck, I'll lose power because of the ice storm just as it's finishing.

It worked!

Blu-ray is burned. I tested it in my PS3. The picture quality is a bit grainy because it went from blu-ray to .mkv to .mv4 to .wmv to .mtv. If I weren't out of time I'd try to go cut some of those steps.

Phew!

So...worth it, and will you do it again? =)

No and no. Well, maybe. Depends on how the gift is received. It started as a "Oh, that will be quick and easy to do and if they don't like it, well, no big deal," and it went to, "I WILL MAKE THIS WORK. It cannot be this difficult to do this!"

So if I had to do it again, it would be easier.

On the other hand, I thought of this really quick and easy project that I'm just going to film and edit this afternoon. Shouldn't take more than a couple of hours...

One of the problems with the short test video I made is that I didn't have enough lighting. Apparently one of the basic rules of film and photography is that if you think you have enough light, it means you need a lot more. If you think it's too bright, you probably need a little bit more light.

So I ordered some cheap ($50!) photography lights off Amazon to help light my home studio in case I want to do more filming.

And success! Man, lighting makes a huge difference. Except now I have glare off some glass surfaces showing my reflection when I'm filming. Hmmm.

The solution is vampirism.

My video project actually went without a hitch today!

The hardest part was setting up the lighting, and I did that poorly. I had no unused electrical sockets within easy reach of my filming, so I got out the LED emergency lights we use when the power goes out. They provide very shitty lighting, plus every light in the room was on, plus the "low light" setting on my camera was on, and it still looks grainy. Ah well, it was a two minute video with action figures.

Depending on your lighting needs, you can probably get lights cheaper if you buy construction lights from a hardware store than buying photography/film lights and then either make your own filters or buy filters and rig them yourself. I've been looking into building my own green screen and picked up some 1000 watt construction lights for lighting the screen for about $30 from Home Depot.