[Stephen Dixon]

what do you want to do with the AVI?

[Stephen Dixon]

If your footage isn’t interlaced you could omit the -deinterlace option in the above command.

Also, if you want to tweak the settings until you get a movie that is acceptable size/quality, then change the -crf option (stands for constant rate factor which is basically the “quality” setting). 20 is a pretty good place to start, lower is better/bigger file, higher is worse quality/smaller file.

Stephen Dixon
Editor, Animator, Motionographer
Museum Victoria

[Stephen Dixon]

the option is -b 15M. You might consider setting maxrate and minrate and bufsize as well.

[Stephen Dixon]

It certainly does now – both encodes and decodes, I use it all the time.
eg ffmpeg -i input.mov -vcodec prores -profile hq -acodec pcm_16sle output.mov will turn input.mov into a prores 422 (HQ) file (the -acodec option is given just because that’s how fcp likes it).

[Stephen Dixon]

The script I provided would read the aspect of the original and supply it as the variable to be used in the aspect tag, so the output would always match. You will need to change the syntax to suit cmd.exe rather than Bash, as it sounds like you’re in a windows environment.

[Stephen Dixon]

The 1.25 is the conversion from 30 to 24 fps, and the 1.001 comes from the National Television Standards Committee in 1953, when they standardised the NTSC color system, used in some obscure parts of the world.

The reason according to wikipedia:

To reduce the visibility of interference between the chrominance signal and FM sound carrier required a slight reduction of the frame rate from 30 frames per second to 30/1.001 (approximately 29.97) frames per second, and changing the line frequency from 15,750 Hz to 15,750/1.001 Hz (approximately 15,734.26 Hz).

Basically it’s a fix for an analogue broadcast problem that is probably only of importance if you want your video to comply with the analogue NTSC standard.

[Stephen Dixon]

go to https://www.audiocoding.com/faac.html for the source. You may need to get dependencies and they may have dependencies and so on. Make a small sacrifice to your choice of deity and compile.

As far as your black video goes, well I’m stumped. Have you tried running ffmpeg from the command line?

[Stephen Dixon]

It’s definitely doing something tricky with the paths. Maybe try enclosing the path in quotes. I’m sorry that I’m not much chop with windows paths.

[Stephen Dixon]

Have you used the -aspect option? I believe the parameters are just the ratio as x:y, e.g. 16:9 or 4:3.

You could find the aspect of the original source with ffprobe, a bit of regex hacking would return it as a variable:
AR=$(ffprobe source.mov 2>&1|sed “s/.*PAR[[:space:]]*([0-9]*):([0-9]*).*/1:2/”)

then you can use the variable as a parameter in the -aspect option:
ffmpeg -i source.mov [whatever] -aspect $AR [whatever] output.avi

This is assuming you’re in a POSIX environment of course.

Stephen Dixon
Editor, Animator, Motionographer
Museum Victoria

[Stephen Dixon]

The last step puts both video streams into the one AVI file. If you don’t need to hang on to both streams you could do it in one step (either step 1 or step 2, depending on whether you want to keep the left or right side).