Aresby

So here are the inconclusive results of the United Kingdom jury. For a 3-minute video. 25 frames/sec. 1920 x 1080p. [Attempt at pasting in a Word table here was thwarted when pressing SAVE] Video Resultant File Encoding Bit Rate Size H264 Q15 20,020 2.08Gb H264 Q21 9,487 203Mb H264 Q25 5,848 125Mb MPEG4 8192 6,791 145Mb Even with the lowest H264 Q25 it took significantly longer than real-time to encode (about 1.5 - 2.0 times). The MPEG4 was quicker than real-time (about 2 mins to encode a 3-min video) which really adds up for a 20-min video. Given that the last two in the table are not miles apart in their final renderings, the fact that the H264 took significantly longer might indicate that the super compression algorithm is working overtime trying to cram stuff in (and failing) but taking an age to do it. Quality was perfectly acceptable from all rendered .mp4 movies at full screen on a 24" monitor. Anybody have any comments (especially the VP developers).

Thanks for those links, I shall explore. But I really want that in-built normaliser that c_major has dangled in front of me, my needs are fairly simple. The reason I mentioned compression is that I thought I could amplify 200% (the entire audio) and then use the compressor to get it all back down below 0dB sort of normalised but that's not working for me. Ho hum.

Quite possibly, although my understanding was that H.264 was also supposed to be smaller than legacy MPEG4 files due to the better compression? Yes, YouTube suggests H.264 but I bet they would prefer MPEG4 if the size difference was of the order that I show above! Something weird is going on here, I'm sure. However, as my empirical test indicates above, the MPEG file I generated is significantly smaller than the H.264 file - with comparable quality. So as you suggest, I'll adjust the slider to see if I can get the H.264 file size down to around the MPEG4 file size with the quality remaining consistent. And I'll check out the bitrate of my previously generated H.264 files (at quality factor 15) as suggested above too. I'll may generate my next video using MPEG4 and upload it to YouTube - I bet no-one notices a drop in quality! And I get my life back instead of waiting for videos to render!

How can I tell what the bitrate is for H.264-generated mp4s? All I get is that 'quality' slider in VP (set to the default of 15). Is the bitrate embedded in the file details?

I'm confused. Not with life in general but with the options in VP to generate in either H.264 or MPEG4. Now I fully understand that H.264 is now enshrined in the MP4 standards etc but here's the thing: yesterday I generated a video in both H.264 (quality factor 15, whatever that means) and also in MPEG4 (8192 Mbits which is recommended by YouTube, apparently). When generating the H.264 I could wash the dishes, walk the dog, take out the trash... in short it took forever, as it always does. So a 20 minute video takes about twice that time on a quad-core I5 with 12Gb memory. The CPU runs at 100% for the entire render period. Poor thing. When generating the MPEG4 it romped through it in about 10 minutes - in fact it was so quick I initially thought it had failed. The H.264 size was about 2.5Gb and the MPEG4 about 750Mb. Wow! Quite a difference. In a like-for-like comparison, full-screen, on a 24" monitor I could not tell the difference. So what's up with these two formats? I thought H.264 was supposed to be ultra-compressed and the new boy-on-the-block, but frankly, I'm now thinking about generating all my videos in MPEG4 8192 Mbits as it's quicker, smaller and looks just like the H.264 equivalent. So I remain confused and would welcome Real World enlightenment on these formats. Anyone?

Hurrah! I downloaded VP4.40 yesterday for a very short video but the problem didn't present itself (the video was too short with hardly any transitions, so not a good test). I'll re-test on the one that drove me mad at the weekend with that annoying message!

I'm using 4.33 of VP and have the following 'issue' when previewing my sequence. Having added various transitions to the clips on my video, why (after the initial 100% CPU usage as it presumably creates the preview) does it say "Building preview, please wait" or similar every time that I then watch that video sequence? The CPU is idle (which indicates to me that there is no outstanding work to do) but I hit the space bar and I get that message and the effect (a simple dissolve, a wipe from right) is not shown (I get a frozen image) as that message is displayed. Drives me nuts! Eventually, after several attempts at watching the clip(s) with the transition it sorts itself out (and the final video always seems to be fine) but why this "Building preview" message? Is there anything I can do to assist (I've already reduced the preview resolution to far below what I'd like it to be, to see if it helped - it didn't). Perhaps 4.40 cures this but it's not mentioned on the release notes.

I've briefly looked at that 'insight' and realised there's a lot going on. I shall re-read in depth at my leisure as I have a vested interest in keeping my sources synced. Thanks for the link, appreciated. I'm using OBS Studio for capture in real-time and VP for post production editing but by the time it hits VP it's all a bit late to realise that sound has not synced properly with one or two of my cameras. At best it's sometimes possible to unlink the audio and remove either a few frames of video or ditto for audio and get it back in sync but it's hardly studio standard behaviour. It just makes you realise how much is going on for a simple outside broadcast of a few minutes!

Any idea why this should happen? I notice this happens with my webcams too - sometimes it all goes back into sync too which is weird. Is it VideoPad or some other anomaly (in which case how do they ever make movies where the audio is shot separately - yes, I know they don't use VP to shoot Star Wars).

An automatic audio normalise is definitely what I want and need but the alternative method you describe will be a workaround for now, thanks for the carrot you have tempted me with in a future release! I'm guessing I could also use that to get rid of coughs and the like rather than cutting out a section which then disturbs the video (obviously). Cool. And thanks.

Hi Guys I tried to 'normalise' the volume of my video over the weekend with dismal results - some parts were still too quiet but mostly was of the correct volume so did not want to up that level any more. Is there a simple way to normalise the volume (as per radio transmissions, no sound too quiet, max volume very much controlled) using the compressor and amplify audio effects? (Was there not a preset in a previous version that did this?) One problem I have is that it is apparent that I just don't understand the compression audio effect controls at all (I thought I was getting the hang of it but it all went awry). Any pointers, please?

Thanks for the information. This weekend I made very, very sure I did not zoom in / out whilst removing a section and I had no problems, so your explanation is spot on, of course. I discovered by accident that if I drag the cursor so that part of the track is selected I have the option to delete that section. I haven't tried it yet but would that just remove the unwanted piece without making a cut? (I will try this out, I'm not just being lazy, but I was rushing to get the last video out and I didn't want any distractions!).

I had come to the same conclusion but don't understand why this would be so. Given that I have a 'main' video track that I'm chopping snippets out of, the gaps automatically close up but, as I said, sometimes (not often, but often enough to be irritating) perhaps don't fully close up to allow a video transition to span the two clips. Sometimes I can drag the right-hand clip over the left-hand clip a bit and then drag it back again (all without releasing the mouse) and it will 'snap' together and the transition suddenly span the clips - but sometimes it doesn't. I just tried the story board view for my latest video and whilst it's nice and big for the main track (so may be useful to correct the tiny gap, if that's where the problem lies) it's not for general use as I always have at least two, sometimes 5 video tracks on the go (but max two audio). I beginning to think this is a bug; after all, if I'm just splitting tracks, highlight the cut clip and pressing delete but then the remaining clips do not join up exactly (with no tiny gap) then that is wrong, don't you think?

I often crossfade (or wipe) one clip to the following clip having removed a "Er..." or "Um..." out of my track. However, many is the time that the effect (as indicated on the track as the small grey block at the top of the track) is only applied to the first clip - it does not get applied to the following (no gap) clip. I say 'no gap' because all I've just done is split the tracks and removed a section containing the unwanted "Er". To resolve this I have found that if I move the second clip up (to an overlay track) and then immediately back down again it all seems to 'snap back' and the crossfade correctly spans the two clips without me having to reapply the transition. Just a bit annoying and I'm pretty sure it did not do this in a previous releases but I can't be sure. It's annoying because if I am using that overlay track for other things it can all get a bit hairy! Any ideas of what is happening here?

Excellent! I'm very pleased that feedback from your users is acknowledged and acted on - this will be a huge benefit to me when it's been implemented. In the meantime, I've not had a huge opportunity to test this out further but further to my previous post when I couldn't get the greyed out icon to become active I can confirm I was working with a test piece of video which had no effects applied to any of the (audio) clips, so that was undoubtedly the cause of my failure. Since then I've created just one further video and manually selected each of the dozen clips I needed to apply an audio effect to and it all worked as you previously described, phew! saved me some time. I notice that selecting the "audio" track (ie select one audio clip then CTRL-A) also selects the associated video tracks - I suppose this is the designed behaviour but in some ways I would prefer just the audio track to be selected in this case (and vice versa if I was attempting to apply an effect to some video clips). Functionally this has no value but it just was a bit disconcerting to see every single audio and video clip selected when I tried to apply an audio effect after clicking an audio clip! I'll certainly be experimenting further with this feature and look forward to the next interim release with that enhancement included

Wow! Just tried this on a review video and guess what? It worked! (But you already knew it would, right?). Excellent, just what I needed, it now saves a ton of time, thanks for letting me know the idiot's guide to doing it right, that's what I need generally, I find UPDATE ----------- Just thought I'd experiment a bit more and do you think I can get this to work again? The Apply To All toolbar icon (the one you arrowed) is greyed out - nothing I will do will enable it. I've followed the idiot's guide several times but to no avail. It asked me Apply to all 4 clips which I clicked but that icon is still greyed out. I have no idea how I managed it in the video review I've just completed. Stumped. Again.

Mmm, some strange behaviour when doing this. Selecting the (audio) effect from the toolbar indeed brings up that "Apply to All/One/Cancel" dialog. (Not so if you click the FX button in the bottom left hand corner of the (first) clip selected, but we knew that) However, you do have to select a NEW effect, not click on the Effect Properties button expecting to be able to edit existing effects, as you don't get that dialog box appear. When I did a new Compression effect, I deleted the newly one added to the list of effects currently in place and amended one of the existing ones - but all the other clips had the new effect still in place (ie not deleted). Then I had to go to all 84 clips and remove the new effect (well, if I had saved the project I would have to have done so). Adding a brand new audio effect (not yet applied effect to any of the selected clips) had the unfortunate effect of only applying the changed parameters to the first clip - all remaining selected clips had the standard values still applied. I guess this "feature" is either not working as intended or, if "working as designed" is not really helping me! Dammit, I thought my prayers had been answered!

Excellent answers, thank you very much. I'm just putting together another video right now so I shall try both suggestions out and see how they perform. Now I just need to post (this time in the correct forum) my urgent requirement of applying an audio effect to all clips on the audio track without having to first select 84 tiny little segments (some of which are too small to select without expanding the timeline). Pity you can't select all audio clips by (right) clicking the audio track... Actually, this could also apply to video clips too... I live in hope. Thanks again chaps, appreciated.

Hi guys I'm unable to find a way of crossfading (using any of the transition types) from an overlay video track to the one 'below' - and, more importantly, back again - that is from, say Video Track 0 to Video Track 1 (the overlay track) - it just does a hard cut. I've tried selecting the two clips (on different video tracks) that I want to transition but it does not work as expected.The clips are all aligned at the same cursor point. The best I've managed so far is transitioning from an overlay track down to the track below - but then I'm stuck with a hard cut back to the overlay track clip. I'm using multiple video sources (each on an individual track) so moving the required clip to another track is not the answer - that would totally throw out my (audio) synchronisation. Any ideas? I can clarify further too if required. Fingers crossed someone can help me on this one.