The Song Fight Bulletin Board

I debated on setting up reaper for video. And I still might. But I'm thinking a dedicated editor will be best in the long run. Honestly, if I weren't so new to this stuff I'd just hunker down and spend hours and hours in VSDC and probably end up happy.

I have a version of Vegas 14 Pro Edit (Humble Bundle purchase a few years ago) that I used for some of my Guitar videos on Youtube in the past on my home Laptop... but I ended up using Reaper this time for our live music video for this years SF!L stream... Vegas is probably better as it's a full on Video Editor so it has much more "special fx" or whatever... but Reaper was perfectly fine for my needs this time and you can watch the free tutorial videos online if you get stuck.

I know this weekend's stream is probably overloaded already, but just uploaded a live Vowl Sounds song to the Dropbox!

vowlvom wrote: ↑

Thu Sep 24, 2020 11:22 am

I know this weekend's stream is probably overloaded already, but just uploaded a live Vowl Sounds song to the Dropbox!

Cool. I'll confirm it gets into the mix.

Folks, I'm excited for this weekend.

Yeah! Rest up, it's going to be a marathon!

I'm working up a five-song set but it won't be done till tomorrow night. Earliest (!)
Just hoping to have some stage time

Can confirm: there will a Future Boy live set and live fight entry. I am rendering the videos right now.

Also, for what it's worth, I'm using Reaper for mixing and video "editing" and Handbrake to create the mp4 files from the Reaper uncompressed render.

On the topic of video editors: DaVinci Resolve has a free version that can do almost anything you'd ever need (if you're not a pro).

I never got the "free" vegas. I was wanting to try it before purchasing a newer version. Guess if you put in existing user they didn't wanna give away stuff for free. *shrug*

For me it came down to DaVinci or VSDC or Reaper. A friend had some crashing problems with DaVinci (but to be fair, he is one of those super push it to the limits and see if it'll break guys) so I went with VSDC when I heard Vom had done so. I've heard good things about DaVinci otherwise.

Okay, enough side chat. My three song live set project is on the backburner. Gonna try to get into the live(stream) fight.

sleepysilverdoor mentioned Openshot over on the Discord, which is another free video editing option that looks more user-friendly than VSDC.

I've been really happy with VSDC thus far (especially now that I've sorted the export settings, thanks to fluffy's advice) but it definitely doesn't feel like the most straightforward option.

Really hoping I can get in on the live fight but I had forgotten that I am attending a livestreamed wedding tomorrow! So I'm not sure if I will get time. Will do my best though...

Yes, OpenShot made creating a 4 tiled video extremely easy. It's also open source and pretty well-regarded for what it is. I know diddly squat about video editing and managed to piece together a passable mosaic for my live fight entry. I'm sure that it's possible to do more than just 4 tiles, but I didn't try. I actually only had three videos, so I used some other footage for the 4th one. It ran kind of slow...but I also used 2012 Lenovo Thinkpad with 4g of RAM so of course it did.

You could always make some of your tiles contain four tiles.

I said last post, and we're a little off topic, but....

I'm done with VSDC. Luckily I didn't smash my computer. I resorted to the photos editor for the live fight video. Unfortunately it wouldn't edit the video file from OBS so it's just a one shot, wrong camera on the iphone video. The hardest part in both programs was lining up the audio to the video files. I'm gonna set up reaper and try that. If I can edit video like I edit wav files then I'll at least be able to do my little style of video with a lot less heartache.

Might try openshot now that it's been mentioned more than twice. Kinda tired of trying video editors by now, though.

For format issues like that, try Handbrake. It's a reasonably easy-to-use GUI frontend to FFMpeg, which can convert basically any video format to any other video format.

Detailed ramble:

Spoiler

OBS is intended for doing realtime streaming, and its recording mechanism is really just a convenient byproduct of that. Streaming-optimized video isn't in an editable format; you get only occasional keyframes (typically once every few seconds), and the container format is usually also not one of the typical editing formats either. You can mitigate the latter by at least having OBS save as mp4 instead of flv or mkv, but it'll still be a streaming-optimized mp4 and won't be frame-by-frame editable (at least not efficiently). And for various reasons mp4 is also not a great on-the-fly streaming/recording format, and if OBS crashes while writing it out you lose the whole recording, which is why OBS doesn't default to that.

Higher-end NLEs like Final Cut and Premiere actually take those videos and convert them internally to a frame-by-frame format to make them easier to deal with.

I tried three video editors:

1. iMovie— very awesome but only 1 PiP is possible.
2. Premiere Rush— Seems to want my video source to start at the beginning of project, making me contort to move things around to sync with audio. Also, does not have a “nudge” function!!!!!
3. Premiere Pro. I had a coupon for 40% off Adobe Creative Sweet. Since I already pay for Photoshop, moving to this is a $20/month increase for everything else (including Acrobat which I infuriatingly have use for more than I’d like). So I pulled the trigger.

Once I got somewhat used to how Premiere works, it became incredibly easy to do as much PiP as I want, and lining up audio to video wasn’t as bad as I feared.

So... I guess this is a case of the paid programs showing off in terms of saving effort to get what you want vs twisting into knots to almost get what you want. Two legs of the stool—- Cheap, Easy, Good. I picked Easy and Good.

JB

It looks like Premiere Elements might do the thing and is "only" $100 (cheap by NLE standards, anyway). I can't find a straight answer on Adobe's website about how many concurrent video tracks and edits thereof it supports, though. It has a free trial for anyone so inclined to find out themselves.

That said, I bought a much older version of Premiere Elements years ago and the UI was pretty janky.

fluffy wrote: ↑

Fri Sep 25, 2020 9:26 am

For format issues like that, try Handbrake. It's a reasonably easy-to-use GUI frontend to FFMpeg, which can convert basically any video format to any other video format.

Downloaded Handbrake then realized I could just "remux" the mkv right there in OBS and problem was solved. You can also just set it to export as another file type but it was pretty insistent that I not do that.

I downloaded and used openshot and am uploading the live fight video now. It was fairly straight forward. To line up audio I had the video clips show the waveforms and just used those to line up. It's not perfect but pretty not bad and I'm tired of video for one day.

I didn't play with multiple shots on a single screen, but figure there's got to be a how to video/FAQ somewhere if/when the time comes.

oh yeah I forgot that obs had built-in remux. Incidentally OBS is also an FFmpeg frontend, although it does a bit more (and uses somewhat different parts of FFmpeg than Handbrake).

I use Premiere for editing. I pay for Adobe Creative Suite for work stuff and part of that work is making videos. I'm tempted to have a lash at After Effects tomorrow, as I discovered a thing about Premiere this week with masks that made me cross, but it should be fairly straightforward in After Effects. We'll see. I use Adobe Media Encoder for exporting (part of the suite) and it's so easy and excellent to use.

No, not happening

I used Premiere Elements 2020, the non-subscription version, for the videos I've been doing for Song Fight Live. (I had apparently already bought a version 4-5 years ago so I could upgrade for "only" $80.) I'm starting from basically zero video experience and am slowly figuring it out. From what I could tell looking online it supports unlimited video tracks. I know first hand it supports at least twelve.

I wound up working out in advance the layout I wanted, and then running all my clips through Handbrake first to upsample them to 30fps constant frame rate from variable (so they'd stay in synch properly) and resize them (to make arranging them easier and to reduce the workload for Premiere).

Premiere grips: I wish I could get it to not "scale clip to workspace" by default, I wish I could get it to use the top left of a clip as its positioning reference point by default instead of the clip's center, I wish the positioning editing window would stay open when I selected a different clip to position. You only get presets for both project setup AND export. The "import media" and "media in project" buttons/drop-downs are right next to each other but opening one does not close the other, so, you can easily wind up with both of them open, one on top of the other, which is such a lazy thing not to fix. Etc.