How can I split video into two separate frames?
April 1, 2013 10:38 AM   Subscribe

My company has a video conference bridge that can record conferences. For any given conference, there are multiple streams of 720p video, sometimes including presentations like PowerPoint. I have been given the task of cleaning up these presentations for posting on the company website. I have never edited video before. I am trying to choose a video editing suite that will allow me to take the .mov files that the bridge generates and choose a single stream to display.

I don't need to see nine offices of people staring at the PowerPoint, I just want the PowerPoint and the audio track. If you play the .mov file as it is, you see a really wide (basically two wide screen images side by side) screen with the people (however many offices connected to the call) on one side and the content (PP presentation) on the other. How do I just get the PP?
posted by domo to Technology (12 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
You can use the Microsoft Movie Maker, take the audio track and then use a copy of the actual PowerPoint to create the video stream.

Just have the call leader forward you the Presentation Deck.

Are you pulling this from a third party conference bridge, or from your Polycom Bridge?
posted by Ruthless Bunny at 10:42 AM on April 1, 2013


Response by poster: It is a RADVISION Elite bridge. I cannot get the PowerPoint. It is actually a combo of PowerPoint and a video capture of this guy's computer screen. He goes to several websites to talk about design, then he signs into their corporate site and does a few tasks. I cannot replicate this.
posted by domo at 10:48 AM on April 1, 2013


If you want to make a batch process for this, FFMPEG may be your best option.

Do you have a sample file that you could post?
posted by schmod at 11:01 AM on April 1, 2013


Yeah, wow. Okay.

I'm not really up with Avaya/Cisco stuff. Here's the Website. It seems that you have either a Scopia 5000 or 6000. Here's the User Guide.

I suspect that you may be a bit hosed, in that only the presenter's view should have been saved to the .mov file, not the entire main conference, but the user's guide doesn't really mention that.

There's a number, 201-689-6300 that you can call, they may be able to get you to tech support or someone who can help you.
posted by Ruthless Bunny at 11:06 AM on April 1, 2013


If I understand correctly, for each conference, you have 1 MOV file that is ultra-wide and the right half of the video is what you want. If so, FFmpeg with cropped input should work. You won't be able to "select" any streams; once the MOV file is made, that's just a baked sequence of moving pictures. You'll have to crop (in FFmpeg) and then do an encode to whatever output format you want.

If you have specs (or small sample) of the input MOV and the output you want, we can come up with a FFmpeg command.
posted by Gyan at 11:11 AM on April 1, 2013


Actually, a bit of Googling suggests that there may indeed be two separate streams inside the .MOV container, along with some QuickTime trickery to make them display side-by-side (the QuickTime file format lets you do some rather odd things).

In either event, a small bit of the input file would be greatly helpful.
posted by schmod at 11:20 AM on April 1, 2013


Response by poster: Dropbox of sample video here.
posted by domo at 12:26 PM on April 1, 2013


If I understand this correctly, your overall goal is to simply crop one side if the video to display on your website, correct?

You could do this in HTML, bypassing the need for any editing. (Though you'll want to make sure the video is in a web-friendly format to begin with)
Here's how to do that.
posted by ShutterBun at 12:49 PM on April 1, 2013


OK, here's the infodump from ffmpeg regarding the sample file:

-----------------
Input #0, mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2, from 'D:/Temp/1-63768-1362689998188_AVC.mov':

Duration: 00:00:24.68, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 1459 kb/s

Stream #0:0(eng): Audio: pcm_mulaw (ulaw / 0x77616C75), 8000 Hz, mono, s16,
64 kb/s

Stream #0:1(eng): Video: none (rv64 / 0x34367672), 624x352, 302 kb/s, 28.02 fps,
29.97 tbr, 90k tbn, 90k tbc

Stream #0:2(eng): Video: none (rv64 / 0x34367672), 1280x768, 10 kb/s, 0.96 fps,
1 tbr, 90k tbn, 90k tbc

Stream #0:3(eng): Video: qtrle (rle / 0x20656C72), rgb555le, 4x3, 0 kb/s,
SAR 119:64 DAR 119:48, 0.04 fps, 0.04 tbr, 600 tbn, 600 tbc
-----------------

It seems that there's only one substantive video payload, unless ffmpeg is reading the bitrates wrong. But I can't get the video stream to play over here.
posted by Gyan at 1:24 PM on April 1, 2013


Response by poster: You will likely have to open it in Quicktime after installing this proprietary H264 plugin: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7288975/streaming.exe
It's like they don't want you to be able to use the recordings. I've heard from the manufacturer that they are going to issue an update that uses HTML5 instead. I can't wait.
posted by domo at 1:29 PM on April 1, 2013


Assuming that you have that goofy codec installed, here's the ffmpeg command that you'd need:
ffmpeg -i originalMovie.mov -map 0:0 -map 0:2 -c:v copy -c:a copy splitMovie.mov

This is what it spit out for me.

@Gyan: The codec's doing a super-efficient job of compressing the Powerpoint slides, so the second stream is actually a substantive payload, even though it doesn't look like it from the small size. Still images evidently compress fantastically well with this codec.
posted by schmod at 1:38 PM on April 1, 2013


Best answer: Hold up, I can do one better. This command line should spit out a file that doesn't require that weird codec.

ffmpeg -vcodec h264 -i originalMovie.mov -map 0:0 -map 0:2 -c:v libx264 -c:a copy splitMovie.mov
posted by schmod at 1:48 PM on April 1, 2013 [1 favorite]


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