- choosing output format at the start, not just at export
- file formats and conversion. Maybe auto-conversion could happen in the background while I cut with low-res?
- file formats and conversion. Maybe auto-conversion could happen in the background while I cut with low-res?
> choosing output format at the start, not just at export
Got it, added to my todo list.
> file formats and conversion. Maybe auto-conversion could happen in the background while I cut with low-res?
I do support the popular formats for now. What do you mean by "conversion"? In my mind, that clearly happens when you import the file into the project.
At export, I do go through the original videos, to get the highest res for each video frame. If this is what you mean by auto-conversion, that is possible, but not sure how advantageous it would be - it takes a lot of CPU + GPU (even if in the background) and may disrupt your editing. I will dig deeper into this.
I don't want to choose the format at the start, but do want it only on export.
The conversion part is probably not a common use case. I use found-footage a lot and web video comes in formats that make e.g. premiere struggle. Maybe better don't listen to me after all :)
By output format, do you mean, .mp4/.avi and the like? If so, clearly on export is where it makes sense (which is where I have it)
> I use found-footage a lot and web video comes in formats that make e.g. premiere struggle
I see. If you download it as .mp4, it's easy. Other formats (.mkv, for instance) are much harder to interpret. I will try to strike a balance between what people want and how easy I can support them ;)
Yes, but even more: resolution. I don't want to think of whether I need HD or 4k later, I just want to do a cut now.
> I will try to strike a balance between what people want and how easy I can support them ;)
Maybe you can check out what is easy to re-mux with ffmpeg if you use that. Often it's just the audio that needs to be re-encoded.
Got it, so if I understand correctly, that means reasonable defaults.
> Maybe you can check out what is easy to re-mux with ffmpeg if you use that. Often it's just the audio that needs to be re-encoded.
Unfortunately, I can't use ffmpeg in a commercial app. But yeah, I'll figure out something :)
no, that means you only have to choose a ratio and place your videos in there, but you don't have to commit to a certain resolution or framerate or at least you can change all that later without any effect on video position, scale and cuts.
Too bad about ffmpeg, I love it so much :)
Sorry for my poor choice of words. That's what I meant. Only the ratio is fixed (clearly, you can change that too, but very likely you would need to readjust everything).
> Too bad about ffmpeg, I love it so much :)
Trust me, I know :( Everything would have been orders of magnitude easier for me, had I been able to use ffmpeg.
So basically where it counts (x264 and x265), I can't.
LATER EDIT:
I remember looking into this a while ago in quite a bit of detail: https://www.engadget.com/2010-05-04-know-your-rights-h-264-p... (there's plenty of other links to this).
Long story short, MPEG LA owns some patents that relate to h264/h265, and you need to pay them A LOT of $ in order to use these codecs. Using ffmpeg will not devoid you of that.
Also, even somewhere on the ffmpeg page, when I last read it, it will say something more in the lines of "we're not lawyers, so take this with a grain of salt".
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So all in all, after doing quite a bit of research, seeing how vague the licensing from MPEGLA is and all that, I started looking for alternatives. I found one (from Microsoft), and that's what I'm using. At this point, it satisfies most of my needs (even though I had to do lot of optimizations on top of it) -- in case this won't hold true in the future, I may revisit the whole ffmpeg mambo-jambo :D