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Stack Videos Horizontally, Vertically, in a Grid With FFmpeg

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Re: Stack Videos Horizontally, Vertically, in a Grid With FFmpeg

#2
My favorite video editing discovery of the last couple of years is Da Vinci Resolve. It rivals Adobe Premiere in many ways. Plus it's cross-platform, and free: https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/

It also supports the OpenFX plugin format: http://openfx.sourceforge.net/

Re: Stack Videos Horizontally, Vertically, in a Grid With FFmpeg

#3
If you want to do fun things with ffmpeg as a cli, most roads end at filter_complex[0]. You can get some truly impressive results at the cost of maintaining really intricate commands. There's also added value when onboarding a new teammate and seeing their eyes open when they find some of the commands you maintain...

Once you grok filter_complex, it becomes a lot easier to understand how people get very complex results out of ffmpeg.

Of less renown but worthy of a mention is the tee[1] muxer. It lets you take the same resulting input and pass it to different destinations. Incredibly handy, ie, for outputting DASH, HLS, and a regular ol mp4 from the same command WITHOUT having to redo the scaling or anything else that was in the filter_complex.

[0] https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-filters.html#Filtergraph-syntax-1

[1] https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-formats.html#Examples-12 (links to examples which is where you should start, scroll up to see docs)

Re: Stack Videos Horizontally, Vertically, in a Grid With FFmpeg

#4

My favorite video editing discovery of the last couple of years is Da Vinci Resolve. It rivals Adobe Premiere in many ways. Plus it's cross-platform, and free: https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/ It also supports the OpenFX plugin format: http://openfx.sourceforge.net/

Woah, it's cross platform and has Linux support?! Thanks for sharing!

Re: Stack Videos Horizontally, Vertically, in a Grid With FFmpeg

#6

My favorite video editing discovery of the last couple of years is Da Vinci Resolve. It rivals Adobe Premiere in many ways. Plus it's cross-platform, and free: https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/ It also supports the OpenFX plugin format: http://openfx.sourceforge.net/

Major bonus for Resolve: it's explicitly differentiated from Premiere/AE by not being subscriptionware: it has a single one-time cost per version.

You buy it once for $300 and then you have that version forever. Meanwhile, the Adobe Creative Cloud is >$500/year, every year.

Re: Stack Videos Horizontally, Vertically, in a Grid With FFmpeg

#7
post #3

If you want to do fun things with ffmpeg as a cli, most roads end at filter_complex[0]. You can get some truly impressive results at the cost of maintaining really intricate commands. There's also added value when onboarding a new teammate and seeing their eyes open when they find some of the commands you maintain... Once you grok filter_complex, it becomes a lot easier to understand how people get very complex resul…

Where do you work that complex ffmpeg flows are part of the modus operandi?

Re: Stack Videos Horizontally, Vertically, in a Grid With FFmpeg

#8
I want to love ffmpeg but I honestly can't stand that I have to spend ~15 minutes looking for the magical incantation to get the result I want. After I find it, it works quickly and has good results.

However, it really feels like video editing isn't something that should be done on the command line. Does anyone know of decent GUI frontends to ffmpeg?

Re: Stack Videos Horizontally, Vertically, in a Grid With FFmpeg

#9
post #8

I want to love ffmpeg but I honestly can't stand that I have to spend ~15 minutes looking for the magical incantation to get the result I want. After I find it, it works quickly and has good results. However, it really feels like video editing isn't something that should be done on the command line. Does anyone know of decent GUI frontends to ffmpeg?

Avidemux is a good quick and dirty editor with a fair bit of power

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

Re: Stack Videos Horizontally, Vertically, in a Grid With FFmpeg

#10
post #8

I want to love ffmpeg but I honestly can't stand that I have to spend ~15 minutes looking for the magical incantation to get the result I want. After I find it, it works quickly and has good results. However, it really feels like video editing isn't something that should be done on the command line. Does anyone know of decent GUI frontends to ffmpeg?

Main trick is that ffmpeg is not really a command line tool. It's a set of libraries - libav* - built in C which lets you do absolutely everything you want with video/media files (and somewhat less successfully, with streaming data too, while for modern applications such as webrtc, ffmpeg sucks).

Command line tool is just a (rather lame) wrapper for (some) of those features.

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