phil_the

Thanks. I ended up using other effects to obscure parts of the video where I didn't have time to keep fine tuning the masks. I had quite a bit of extra footage that I didn't end up using. Yes, I realise that individual plugins aren't supported, that's why I posted here asking if anyone else has had any success or otherwise with this one. It is really frustrating when you see programs like Zoom and Skype, that can detect and replace a background really easily. If they can do it with a live stream, it is surprising that NCH can't come up with a way of doing this in the editor. I have done a bit more experimenting and I have managed to get it to replace the background of the tutorial animation with my own image, but I've still not been able to do anything with my own video clips. I wondered if it might be something to do with the format of the video file. I tried converting my mp4 to avi but that didn't seem to fix it either. I even tried reducing the resolution right down to 320x240, but again no joy yet. I could keep experimenting, but it might be easier to see if I can write my own program to remove a background or write my own plugin. I had a quick glance at the virtualdub plugin api yesterday, but it is such old technology that the project files are no longer compatible with more recent versions of the C++ compiler!

This is for a reasonable length of video with multiple overlapping clips, so I can appear on the screen multiple times, in front, behind and beside myself. I did one a few weeks ago using the mask effect in combination with multiple green screens, but it took me many hours of editing and the result was far from perfect. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLeHVoteW8o I didn't make it easy for myself by having a very busy background and I was filming in strong sunlight over the course of a day so was getting varying lengths of shadows and changes in brightness as clouds went overhead etc. I'd like to do more of these, but even if I can find a better location and better lighting, having the ability to remove a static background from a whole clip would be extremely useful.

Not sure if it will help but might be worth a try. Go into Options> Media. Uncheck 'Automatically normalize audio volume of external audio / video files'. Then reload the project. Phil.

Take a look at some of the messages in the Debut forum. I was able to use it a couple of times and it worked really well, but I found once the trial period ended it didn't work anymore. I think other people have had similar issues. There may be a way around it, but I never followed up as I realised that I can use PowerPoint. You may also be able to use the Game Bar in Windows 10, although that didn't work on my hardware.

Has anyone had any success using the BackChange VirtualDub plugin? I have managed to get it to work using his supplied tutorial files, but am struggling to get it working with my own files. The first issue was that I was initially getting repeated messages popping up saying that it couldn't find the files, but I fixed this by replacing the filenames in the script file with full paths instead of relative paths. The second issue was that it seemed to be doing something but wasn't looking quite right, and I realized that somehow the image was being flipped vertically. I added a Flip Effect before the BackChange effect and this fixed it. As soon as I try to use my own video clip and my own background images, it just seems to crash VP every time 😞 I upgraded to latest version of VP yesterday. I assume the error is being generated by the plugin, but it would be nice if VP could trap the error rather than just dying. He says that the background image files need to be 24bpp uncompressed .tga files, and match the resolution of the clip. I couldn't find a program online to convert png or jpg files to this format (there are some online converters but none of them seem to give the option to chose whether or not you want compression or allow you to specify the pixel format). I had a go yesterday at writing my own program to do the conversion, and I have something which I think is working but it is still crashing VP. It is possible my converter isn't working quite right, so I'll do some more testing on that. Meanwhile I wondered if anyone else had managed to get this working or has discovered another way to remove the background from a video? Phil.

I'm looking for the same thing. Looks like this still hasn't been implemented :-(

I am still fairly new to video editing and have only done a couple of things using the polygon mask, but I have run into this same problem. It is not immediately obvious that if you delete a point on the mask, that point is deleted for all keyframes not just the one you are currently working on. I wasted a lot of time figuring out what was happening until I worked it out. The simple way around this is to never delete a point from a mask. Instead move a point that you don't want so that it is at the same position as another point. It can be a real pain if you have a complex mask shape that you need to animate over a period of time. I am now much more cautious about adding extra points when not necessary. I found it is very easy to accidentally add points without meaning to, when trying to click and drag an existing point for example. I haven't tried this but I have just thought that another way around the problem might be to split your clip at the keyframe position. Then you can safely delete points from the second clip without it affecting the first. This might not help if you have key frames with a different shape at every frame, but might be useful if you have some time between key frames and interpolating.

Thanks, I have done it now. I pretty much did what you said, although I found it OK to stick with the Timeline view and use the >|| button to skip through and identify the clips to delete. As there were so many glitches, the audio would probably have got out of sync by the end I think, so what I did was do the delete without the ripple so it leaves a gap (I think delete in the Storyboard would have done the same). This leaves blank gaps. So then I overlaid the same track but shifted it by four frames which filled in all the gaps 🙂. I removed the audio from the track that I split, and used the audio from the overlaid track. I unlinked this audio and shifted it back to match the main track, although that probably wasn't necessary as a difference of four frames likely wouldn't have been noticeable. Thanks both for you help and advice.

I just re-read your suggestion about using the Storyboard mode. I haven't used this very much. If I delete a split section from there, would the following section shift to fill the gap or stay in the same place in the timeline? I would need to maintain the time placements in order to re-sync the audio and to keep it synced with the other tracks I am going to be combining this one with. I'll try it. or... rather than splitting the clips, it might be easier to add a transparent effect and switch this between 0 and 100% in the animator.

Thanks for the quick reply. Another idea I had after posting, was that I could overlay the same clip and shift it by a few frames. Then, all I would need to do is split and remove the affected sections, and the shifted frames would show through. This would still be quite tedious as there are lots of affected frames, but would be easier than creating lots of snapshots. I hadn't thought of using stabilisation. As you say though it isn't really designed for such big shifts. I wonder whether there might be a clever trick by exporting with different frame rates? According to the File properties, this clip is 23.33 fps. If I were to export it at say 20fps would this simply drop a few frames every now and then? I would obviously be very lucky if it happened to drop the affected frames, but I wondered if I did this multiple times, shifting the clip on the sequence by a few frames each time, I might get enough useable sections that I can splice together. I might have a play with this and see what happens.

I have seen this thread but my problem is not flickering due to changes in exposure / light levels, but a different type of flickering, so I'm not sure if the same suggestions will be appropriate. In my case I have been sent a video with quite bad flickering throughout. I assume this is due to a fault in their camera, so not much point in asking them to redo it. When I use the clip viewer and step through the frames I can see that one or two frames appear to be shifted in the frame and looks like this: Snapshot - 12.png Is there a simple way to fix this type of problem? I suppose I could take a snapshot at each frame prior to the faulty frames and overlay this, but this would be extremely tedious to do the whole clip. Thanks Phil.

Thanks for the reply. Changing filename/extension isn't really a problem as I can use the resolve screen that comes up. I have thought about using Videopad to produce the proxies. It would be easier if the export function had an option to export in the original aspect ratio but a different resolution. To be fair, the other program I am using doesn't have that option either, I have just got into the habit of using that, and it is quicker and easier just to do a quick convert. Even though the proxy files are sometimes bigger on disk, I can confirm that the preview does seem to come up quicker than when using the originals. I just wondered if I ought to consider reducing the frame rate, data rate or other variables too. If you don't think it will make much difference I won't worry about it 🙂 Cheers Phil.

http://nch.invisionzone.com/topic/26563-proxy-editing/ This is a great tip, but I noticed that some of my lower resolution proxy files were actually larger than the original higher resolution versions. This is probably because the program I am using to convert them is converting to a different format (mp4 vs mov) or possibly because it's using a different frame rate. Is it purely or primarily the resolution that is important here, or is the file size and/or frame rate relevant too? Thanks Phil.

Thanks for the response Nat. I'm not going to argue that it's not a bug. It is only expected though if you know what to expect 🙂 I would suggest that it is not really desired behaviour, but I do understand why it works like this. It was definitely unexpected when I first saw it, and the solution isn't obvious until you zoom right in, and watch what is happening by slowly moving the slider or moving frame by frame. I just used the images in the example for convenience. When I first encountered it, it was with video clips where I was using the green screen to remove the background. It all worked fine, until the last thing I did was add an additional clip at the end with a cross-fade, and didn't notice the problem until I'd done the export, so it was rather annoying at the time. I think adding a fade at half the duration of the cross-fade is slightly simpler than your solution. Dividing by two isn't exactly a difficult calculation 🙂 but both methods would work, and your solution would be better if using separate overlapping tracks rather than a simple cross-fade. Anyway, hopefully this thread might help someone else in the future if they encounter the same issue. Cheers Phil

Hello again, Sorry for not getting back on this sooner. I can't find the project I was seeing this in now but it is pretty simple to reproduce the problem. Example In the example above I have two images one after the other on the timeline and another image overlaid over the first one in a separate track. The overlaid image is just a circle that will act as a hole that you can see the other image through. This is done by adding a green screen effect on the overlaid image. I then added a crossfade transition on the main track. I increased the length of the transition to 5 seconds so that you can see the problem better. What happens, is that during the first part of the transition you can see the part of the image through the hole slowly changing to the second image, as expected. At the mid-point though, because the overlay track has finished at this point, you suddenly see all of the first image appear (albeit partially faded). Now that I have looked at this more closely I can see how to fix it. What I need to do is to extend the overlay track to the end of the transition, and add a fade on this for 2.5 seconds (half the crossfade length on the main track). Phil.

I am producing a collaborative music video with various members of the band sending me their individual recordings for me to edit together. One video I have received does not play in the Windows 10 Film player app, saying that HEVC codec is required. However the video does load into videopad 🙂 . I was also able to generate my low-res proxy using Any Video Converter. What is odd though is that when I include this in my project with the other clips, something strange seems to be happening when I add / remove effects and view the clip in the clip & sequence previews. Sometimes the video shows correctly, and then it will switch to being stretched to a different width. It doesn't seem to be consistent when and why it does this. Deleting the cache and rebooting doesn't seem to fix it either. The video is in 9:16 (1920x1088) and my project is 16:9. Seems to be happening with both the original and my low-res proxy, but have mostly been using the latter. I have now re-coded the video, by using the Stretch to Aspect Ratio effect in videopad and exporting just this clip. This seems to have fixed it, but I thought people might be interested in case this is a subtle bug in VP somewhere. I am currently using v8.31. I will upgrade to latest version at some point, but am in the middle of this and another couple of projects at the moment, so don't want to do this just yet. Phil

Thanks for trying to help. Sorry for not getting back to you on this I've been busy with other projects. I remembered that I have another program installed and can do a screen record using that instead. Hopefully your advice might be useful for someone else if they encounter the same problem. Cheers Phil.

Sorry for not getting back on this. I have been busy with other projects, so haven't had chance to look at this again. I will try updating to latest version once I've finished a couple of projects I'm working on at the moment then report back. Thanks for your help. Phil

Thanks, Sorry for not replying before. I was very busy with a project at the time, and last thing I needed was for this! It seems to have been fine since, but I will check out drivers at some point. Thanks Phil

rebooted and back to normal! phew!! A huge relief, but very worrying. Any idea what might have caused this and how I can prevent giving myself a near heart attack again? Phil.

I have been working on a project for several days which needs to be completed today, and has been announced for people to see tomorrow. This morning when I turned my laptop on and started up VideoPad. I get a message pop up saying that effects requiring 3d hardware acceleration have been disabled. Odd, I thought, but no matter as I'm not doing anything in 3D. However, some of the standard transitions that I am making huge use of, such as Scale, have disappeared!!!!

v8.31 I am using the Green screen effect to remove the background from a video clip. This works well, but when I add a crossfade transition to the next clip, the background is briefly visible during the transition. Is this a bug? Any ideas how to correct this?

I went to uninstall again, but this time I chose the repair (reinstall) option to see if that might help. Now when I press the record button, I get a message saying that the feature I'm trying to use requires the professional version. Given that this is the basic core function of the program, I don't see any point in the free version at all. Full uninstall required I think, and search for alternative product. Phil.

Should I be able to record with the free version of Debut? If not I don't really see the point of it. I installed the software a few weeks ago, and managed to do a couple of recordings. All fairly straightforward and obvious. I just went to use it again, and it says the free trial has expired. I went to uninstall it and it gave me the option to downgrade to the free version instead, so I chose that. When I run the software now, I press the record button and nothing happens. The button changes colour briefly to indicate it has been pressed but it doesn't start recording. Phil.

Thanks, In this case the mono audio seems to be coming through both sides, and can be adjusted using the pan controls in the sequence. I do have some old video clips where the sound was only in one channel, so this tip may be useful if I ever need to use those in the future. Thanks Phil