Starting Point

[NeptuneDrew]

I've done video editing with Sony Vegas but I am now venturing in to a bit more complicated territory. I need someone to point me in the right direction.

I have hundreds of good quality wmv files that I'd like to convert to flv while doing the following:
1. batch processing
2. add watermark (preferably an image)
3. extract images from the video (say 5 at 20% intervals of video length)

I'm looking for something relatively user friendly and doesn't necessarily need to be free (but I won't argue).

Thanks in advance,
Drew

[budwzr]

Yeah, Vegas does all that.

[NeptuneDrew]

Yeah, Vegas does all that.

Vegas professional I guess? I've only got the consumer grade $60 version.

[budwzr]

Well you can still do #2-3.

[NeptuneDrew]

I downloaded the pro trial version to see if it's worth purchasing.

I don't see an option to render as flv from Vegas directly. I could use vegas to add my watermark and extract the images.

[poisondeathray]

ffmpeg can do all that, is free, but not user friendly (requires scripting, writing code)

something like sorenson squeeze is probably what you're looking for , but I don't think it can do #3 , but there are many free tools that can do #3

[NeptuneDrew]

I'm OK with the extra step of converting to flv with something else (macromedia). I can do that in batches as well.

The one thing I'm looking for is a script to extract thumbnails (5 evenly distributed from each region) from the video for each region. Does anyone know if there is an existing script floating out there somewhere?

[budwzr]

There are a few that can do 4 or 6 frames evenly spaced, but 5 I dunno.(That's a joke)

Are you trying to do those videos where it's a sequence of stills? I'm working on one of those too, except I'm using actual stills from five frame bursts.

[NeptuneDrew]

I want to get the 5 (or whatever number) images for a preview on my site so that when a user hovers over with the mouse it runs a preview. This is a typical feature you see on tube sites.

What are some of the scripts/programs that do this?

[poisondeathray]

check here:
https://www.videohelp.com/tools/sections/desktop-screen-capture

something like scenegrabber or imagegrabber, I think some some of them have CLI interfaces suitable for batching

ffmpeg can do it too, but I'm not sure of the exact syntax for what you want to do

[NeptuneDrew]

I found that video thumbnail maker does pretty much what I'm looking for. I wanted the images to be separate files as opposed to one image with the multiple images on it.