Hacker News Reader

Comment by ufmace | Hacker News Reader

Nice, thanks! I tried using ffmpeg for a minor video editing task I had a few months ago - just a cut, crop, rescale, and volume adjust. I've tried a few of the mainstream GUI video editing tools, and IMO, they all have incomprehensible UIs, are way too bloated, and usually far too expensive for what I'm trying to do. FFmpeg may not be dead simple, but I find it much easier to skim the command line flag list to figure out how to do what I want. And once I do, I can save down a handful of useful sets of flags and refer to them next time. Cheers to ffmpeg, one of the kings of FOSS! If you ever feel the need to do any kind of video conversion or editing, definitely try to do it in ffmpeg first.

View on HN

I recently found LosslessCut (https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut) that is basically a GUI for ffmpeg, you can make simple edits without re-encoding the stream.

Indeed. I find it baffling how hard it is to just make lightweight edits to videos on Windows. At a bare minimum I would like to clip a video, or crop or change audio tracks. My cheat sheet of ffmpeg commands still remains to be the easiest way for me to do this.

There are a lot of free apps to make lightweight edits to videos on windows. One example is Avidemux. I have high-end video editors but Avidemux comes in handy more often than it should.

http://fixounet.free.fr/avidemux/

Another is ShutterEncoder:

https://www.shutterencoder.com/en/

Davinci Resolve has a free (as in beer) version that is quite capable and easy to use, even as someone who'd only used iMovie before. The only problem is that "how to do X in Davinci Resolve" has been taken over by slop.

Davinci Resolve is actually the first thing that came to mind on the subject of, okay it's free, that's nice, but I can't for the life of me figure out how to do anything in it. I suppose it's not necessarily their fault that the search results for how to do basic things are garbage, but I guess an advantage of CLI apps is how-to results for them don't seem to attract nearly as much SEOified clickbait.

I shoot RAW from an older Canon 5D which Resolve does not read natively. So there's a bit of a conversion step going from CR2. My typical workflow is to use Adobe RAW to process the images, then import the RAW directly to AE to render out with whatever repositioning or cropping. Let's not forget LR Timelapse[0] as part of the workflow too.

[0] https://lrtimelapse.com/

I was reading about how to create timelapses on a canon dslr and someone pointed out that each frame you take adds to your shutter count and consumes the lifetime of your shutter. Do you find that a problem? For example a frame every 2 seconds for 8 hours is 14,400 actuations of the shutter.

I worry about my shutter count like I worry about my HN points...I don't. If the shutter was to fail from "too many" clicks, it can replaced. It's not the end of the world. There are people that will point out that you can die every time you drive your car, but does that prevent you from driving your car? I easily have over 150k (I don't have the right cable/adapters available at the moment to confirm the number USB-C to USB-mini) to get actual number. Even if the shutter were to fail, I'd just have it replaced for less than the price of a new body.

To be fair, pulling out a professional video editor for small changes is like learning emacs to edit some config files. You don't need 99% of the features.

Also as an FYI to everyone, FFmpeg does support nVidia GPU acceleration but it might not be enabled in your build. So check if you use it a lot.

Probably true, but ffmpeg seems to have a ton of features too. It seems to me that CLI apps are inherently better at not distracting you with things you don't need. A CLI flag that you don't use is invisible outside of the man pages, not so for a menu or toolbar of a zillion options with names and icons you don't understand.

Blender has a very well done video editor, it's probably my favorite foss video editor so far. It also uses ffmpeg under the hood

Worth a try!

I found https://github.com/mifi/editly to be an intuitive frontend for this type of task - I used it to create a montage of several clips and was able to easily adjust parameters around timestamps and such to get the montage perfect

Reply on news.ycombinator.com