Category: Guides and Tutorials

Frameserving from Premiere Pro CC 2019 to FFmpeg

This article discusses how to set up frameserving from Adobe Premiere CC 2019 or later for great results with free software.

A while ago while working on batches of video edits, I came to the realisation that frameserving is simply the best, most flexible way to encode in some cases. Time marches on, and so did my software - eventually I came to a new machine, new Premiere Pro and - disaster - no apparent support for frameserving. Just when I needed it...

Cleverer people than me have solved the CC2019 problem - for those of you editing in Premiere it's once again fairly easy to frameserve encode. However, it did take a bit of sleuthing to figure out a few things; this tutorial should help you to avoid the same problems I encountered.

November 2019: Vouk's excellent Voukoder plugin for After Effects and Premiere can now accomplish some of what this article covers, and it has an active developer and user community. Vouk includes the FFmpeg/libav filters to enable things like bwdif deinterlacing. There are still some bugs but it's worth a test - it should integrate nicely into an AME or batch workflow. More complicated workflows may still benefit from frameserving, so it's still worthwhile to do.

July 2020: wangqr, the developer of the dfscPremiere.prm patch, informed me by email that he's not maintaining it any more as it's been merged into the main Debugmode Frameserver repository. Download v3.0 for use with CC2019 and above. Thank you for your hard work, Q!

Spoiler: it's a little bit of work, not very difficult, and the results are great

Canon XF305 MXF problems in Premiere? Transcode your clips to ProRes with FFMPEG!

Recently encountered a weird problem with 1080i MXFs straight out of a Canon XF305. The files would play in VLC, but Premiere Pro CC 2017 on a brand new MacBook Pro or iMac failed soon after starting to decode the video, with a horrible red frame and MXF frame decode errors in the Log. It's pretty nasty, but I'm sure we can wield FFmpeg to fix this for us. Continue reading "Canon XF305 MXF problems in Premiere? Transcode your clips to ProRes with FFMPEG!"

Updating jwhois on CentOS to solve v6nic errors

I use fail2ban on my servers, and I noticed whois queries to v6nic.net were running into problems. If you're having the same problems, here's how to fix them.

I use fail2ban on some of my servers, along with the "jwhois" application (to automatically return whois info in the automated fail2ban emails I receive).

I noticed that 43.229.53.15 was coming back in my emails as follows:

 [Querying whois.v6nic.net]
 [Unable to connect to remote host]
 missing whois program

This is because v6nic.net is defunct and has been taken over by a cybersquatter (discussion about this on the Red Hat Bugzilla). The whois server whois.apnic.net works adequately in its place.

The version of jwhois available from the epel repo for el6 (CentOS 6) is out of date:

jwhois.x86_64 4.0-19.el6 @base

rpmfind lists 4.0-43 for Fedora Core 24 as the latest version, but this isn't compatible (loads of dependency issues if you try and manually install).

So, let's fix it manually.

jwhois derives its list of whois servers from /etc/jwhois.conf (by default). Let's do a search/replace all with nano.

Assuming nano is installed (sudo yum install nano -y) do the following:
Press Ctrl \
Type in whois.v6nic.net and press Enter
Type in whois.apnic.net and press Enter
Press A to replace all found instances
Type Ctrl X to exit, then Y to save the changed file.
Done!

Related reading, if you've got nothing else to do...

Replacing a FiiO E7 battery - simple! (Photos)

I've had a FiiO E7 headphone amp for a few years and it's recently gained a new lease of life -- as an audio interface! However, the OEM battery got a bit long in the tooth, so I set about replacing it. It's much easier than you might think. Click through for photos and step-by-step instructions, plus a list of components to buy. (Warning: magnifying glass and hot glue gun are advantageous!)

I've had a FiiO E7 headphone amp for a few years and it's recently gained a new lease of life -- as an audio interface for my LG G3! Sadly, the has G3 shockingly bad audio quality from its onboard 3.5 mm output - riddled with noise, fuzz/hiss and audible aliasing and distortion. This is likely due to poor design from LG in an effort to power save, combined with a latent bug in Android relating to how it scales audio samples, the latter sounding like it's aliasing audio in a certain range of gain due to it internally resampling or something stupid like that. My old Galaxy S3 LTE running Cyanogenmod 10 (4.2.2) sounded amazing, I wish it hadn't died!

ANYWAY! Recent builds of Android (I'm running 5.1) include a provision for audio-via-USB, enabled by default on most devices, so hooking up a micro-to-mini USB cable between the phone and the E7 gives you blissfully great audio quality.

So, I dug mine out of a cupboard - with a flat battery, of course - and charged it up. Soon after, the battery got fat and decided to push the front of the screen out... Ok, time to replace the battery! Continue reading "Replacing a FiiO E7 battery - simple! (Photos)"

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