Stomp Manual. shinywhitebox ltd

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1 Stomp Manual shinywhitebox ltd

2 Table of Contents Stomp's Manual... 3 What does Stomp do?...3 Cropping...3 Easy to use...3 Batch mode...3 Filtering...4 Overview of the UI... 5 User Interface...5 From here you can:...5 First Steps...5 Goal:...5 Navigating & Saving... 8 The Video View...8 Scrubbing...8 In/Out Points...8 Keyboard Shortcuts Preset Management Adding a preset...11 Removing Presets...12 The Gear Menu...12 Turbo H Resetting Factory Presets...13 Options Panel Recompress video: Leave video untouched: Remove it: Audio Settings...15 Change aspect ratio...15 The Gear Menu Why is this important?...18 Filtering The Filter Stack & Properties...22 Preferences Storage Locations...25 Temporary files...25 Other options...26 Performance...26 Support...26 Other options...27 Automation via AppleScript

3 Stomp's Manual What does Stomp do? Well, in short it's a compressor for audio and video. It takes QuickTime compatible files as input and creates QuickTime compatible files as output. Re- compression is the process of taking all the frames of one video and recreating them in another format. The typical usage is to compress a "raw" format like ProRes or Apple Intermediate into something more suitable for the web such as H264. Another example would be if you would also need to recompress video if you wanted to get an ishowu clip (say, from YouTube) and have it playable on an iphone. Movies have both audio and video, and Stomp lets you process each of these individually or not at all. For example you can choose to leave video alone while recompressing the video frames to a different format. To give you an idea, the following conversions are just some of those that are possible: Apple Animation H.264 MPEG4 H p DV footage WMV (if you have purchased the WMV Flip4Mac component) 1080p HD 720p (any format) Any movie iphone format Any movie Leaving the video alone but recompressing audio to AAC. Any movie Turbo H.264 (if you have the device from Elgato) Stripping audio from a movie The above are just examples to give you an idea of the possibilities. What else does it do? Here's a summary of the major features. Cropping Ever wanted to crop a video like you can a picture? Well now you can - and easily! Easy to use A major goal of Stomp was to make it easy to use. If you've ever used some other tools out there you'll know that they often ask you to enter things like offsets for cropping manually. We wanted to make video compression and cropping / fixing something that anyone could do. It should be a matter of dropping videos in, changing a couple of easy options and clicking Go. Batch mode 3

4 Stomp can process more than one file at once. This is covered in more detail when we explain the user interface, but it's mentioned here because it's one of the more powerful features of Stomp. Just select a bunch of videos, hit "process" and go make dinner. Filtering Stomp is able to use any number of Core Image filters during image processing. This means that you can apply gamma fixes and other color corrections very easily. 4

5 Overview of the UI User Interface Stomp is driven almost entirely from the single main window, shown below: From here you can: Choose which presets you want to use. A preset collects a bunch of settings together under a nice, easy to understand name. See a list of videos that you may want to process (this is the list down the bottom). "Scrub" around the video using the view on the top / right. First Steps Lets take a run through and crop a video. This will provide you some hands on experience of how the interface works. Goal: Our goal is to get the above video of the bike, and take out the "525 Chain conversion" part. We are going to clip that out so that it's not visible, and create a new video in the process. In addition, the source video is in the "Apple Intermediate 5

6 Codec" format. You can see it's 197.4Mb and we'd like to reduce that to something more sensible. What we'll do is specify a crop area, have Stomp output the video using a medium quality H.264 and also compress the PCM audio to AAC. Lets begin! 1. Get the video into Stomp. In this example it's already done. It's easy though: All you need to do is drag the video that you want to compress into the main UI area. Or if you like click the + button on the left hand side to bring up an Open dialog so that you can add media that way. 2. Choose H.264 as the preset. 3. At this point you should also unlock the presets, so they can be edited. Press the Unlock icon to the right hand side of the settings panel. It's a simple toggle switch that prevents unintentional changes to existing presets. 6

7 4. With the preset now unlocked you can click on the crop option to enable it. You'll notice a "marching ants" overlay on the video. Resize this so that it's like the picture 5. In order to compress the audio into AAC we need to do... nothing! Stomps H.264 preset are setup by default to compress to AAC. If you're curious, click the "Settings..." button to the right of "Recompress Audio" and it'll show you what its setup to do. 6. That's it! Click the Process button to kick off the compression. 7

8 Navigating & Saving The Video View The most obvious part of the UI is the video view. It's got the movie scrubber and also lets you perform trimming of videos, as well as creating clips of existing videos. Scrubbing Click and drag the cursor around to move through the video footage. You can also click the HH:MM:SS area on the scrubber to change it's mode from time to frames. In/Out Points Note: YOU MUST LEFT- CLICK ON THE VIDEO, OR HAVE THE VIDEO LIST ACTIVE FOR KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS TO WORK AS EXPECTED. IF IN/OUT POINTS AREN'T BEING SET FOR YOU, CLICK THE MOVIE YOU'RE EDITING. THE VIDEO LIST (BOTTOM OF WINDOW) SHOULD BECOME ACTIVE AND KEY SHORTCUTS SHOULD THEN WORK. You can press the I and O keys to set in and out points respectively. You may also drag these using the handles provided, much like the QuickTime player. I/O selections are useful. You can: 1. Process the selected I/O clip without having to create a separate sub clip to do so. 2. Create new clips (reference, or self contained). The main reason that in/out points exist is to allow super fast processing of sub clips. Just set the I/O point and press the Process button. Stomp will process only the portion of the movie defined by the in/out points. You can also create two different types of movies from an in/out selection as shown here: 8

9 Right click on the scrubber bar to bring up the menu, you should see Trim to Selection: This will reduce the selected movie to its in/out selection. You can undo this by pressing Cmd- Z. 4. Save Flattened As / and Add: Both of these options save a reference movie, which is a movie that refers to the existing content. Reference movies are useful if you want to store a sub clip of some movie and give it a name. The "Save and Add..." option does the same thing (creates a reference movie) but also adds the new movie to the list of videos. Note: The movie is also flattened during this process. Flattening will ensure that the movie is streamable from the web. 5. Save Flattened Selection As / and add: These two items let you create full movies from the current in/out point. The video is "copied" into the new movie and it becomes entirely self- contained. As with the above, the "and add" item will add the new self contained movie to the list of videos. Note: THE MOVIE IS ALSO FLATTENED DURING THIS PROCESS. FLATTENING WILL ENSURE THAT THE MOVIE IS STREAMABLE FROM THE WEB. 9

10 Keyboard Shortcuts Note: YOU MUST LEFT- CLICK ON THE VIDEO, OR HAVE THE VIDEO LIST ACTIVE FOR KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS TO WORK AS EXPECTED. IF IN/OUT POINTS AREN'T BEING SET FOR YOU, CLICK THE MOVIE YOU'RE EDITING. THE VIDEO LIST (BOTTOM OF WINDOW) SHOULD BECOME ACTIVE AND KEY SHORTCUTS SHOULD THEN WORK. J K L Spacebar Left Arrow Right Arrow Command+Left Arrow Command+Right Arrow Up Arrow Down Arrow Command+Up Arrow Command+Down Arrow I O Decrease the movie playback rate Start/Stop the movie playing Increase the movie playback rate Toggle pause and playback Move one frame backward Move one frame forward Play backwards Play forwards Increase volume Decrease volume Set volume to maximum Set volume to minimum Set in marker Set out marker 10

11 Preset Management Stomp lets you store your own settings as well. These are called Presets. You'll find a number of built- in presets are included. These are known as "factory" presets. To add your own presets - click the + button on the toolbar shown below. If you've not done so already, you might want to unlock the options panel by clicking the Lock icon, just to the right of the gear icon. Your presets will always appear under the "Custom" heading. In the picture above, you can see two custom presets called DivX and Windows Media (we'll explain how to use those two components later on). Adding a preset To add a new preset you can either: 1. Click the + button 2. Right click and existing preset and choose the "duplicate" option 11

12 Removing Presets To remove a preset, click the "subtract" button (the one with a - symbol on it) in the toolbar. The Gear Menu Click on the gear menu and you'll see all of the specialist compressors installed in the system. Specialist compressors are self- contained compressors normally supplied by a third party and often have their own custom setup dialogs. Good examples are the DivX and WMV Flip4Mac components. These compressors are usually setup a little differently (for more information see the Advanced Options page in the manual) than other presets but for the most part operate the same. If you're looking for a video compressor component that you know is installed but can't see it when you use the standard video options, this is the place to check. Turbo H.264 Stomp has built- in support for the Elgato H.264 component. If you've got one of these little devices, plug it in and the Turbo H.264 option will become available on the gear menu. 12

13 Resetting Factory Presets Factory presets can be reset to their default values by choosing the "Reset Factory Presets..." option from the Edit menu. You'll be prompted to confirm the reset operation before it's carried out. Don't worry - Stomp won't loose any presets you've created yourself, it'll just reset the factory ones that it installed at the beginning. 13

14 Options Panel Each of the presets has a number of options in the panel directly below the preset listing: Lets take a look at the options, one by one shall we? Video Settings The first dropdown you see, which in the picture above says "Recompress video" lets you decide what you want to do with the video. Here you choose format you want to convert video into. Click the Settings... button to see the settings dialog for the chosen compressor. In the dropdown, you can choose to: Recompress video: Stomp will extract every video frame from the source movie and recompress it using the applied video settings. In other words, it'll process the video. Leave video untouched: Stomp leaves it along and just copies it to the output video. The video media is not touched at all. This is like a "pass through" where the source video is simply replicated exactly in the output movie. Remove it: The video track is dropped from the output movie. 14

15 Audio Settings This second dropdown is similar to the first but applies to the audio portion of the movie. Again you can choose to recompress it to a different form (PCM to AAC, for example), pass it through or remove it. This option has a few helpful common presets. Click the arrow button to see these and a dropdown menu will appear. Use video fps of source movie This is really useful for batch operations. It makes the destination FPS the same as the source FPS, for each movie that's processed. Normally when you setup compressor settings - you also provide a frame rate (such as 30fps). But sometimes you don't want to change the frame rate of the movie at all; you want to leave it as it is. This option lets you do that without having to mess around with your video settings for every movie that you process. If you enable this option, then Stomp will override the output FPS for each video so that it matches the FPS of the source / input video. This option will only work with QuickTime compressors - see "Specialist" below. Change aspect ratio If you want or need to modify the width/height ratio of the output movie, you can do that here. The drop down lets you choose from some common ratios. The output movie is then adjusted so that it's aspect ratio matches the setting here. Change video size This is how you scale a video. You can either enter in an absolute size, or a relative percentage. The size button to the right can be used to setup either dimension to be a ratio of the other. For example if I wanted to resize so that the video was 16/9, I could choose the Size Adjust width 16:9 of height option in the drop down. Keep aspect ratio Part of the above option. When you resize a movie, you've three options, which are depicted below. In the example pictures below we've resized a 960x540 movie to 640x900 (from a 16:9 ratio to something very close to 3:4) Letterbox Cropped Fit Dimensions 15

16 Note: WE'LL COVER FILTERS LATER BUT ONE THING TO KNOW IS THAT FILTERS ARE PER OPTION AS WELL. EVEN THOUGH THE FILTER TAB MAKES IT LOOK LIKE THERE'S ONLY ONE SET OF FILTERS, THAT'S NOT THE CASE. FILTERS ARE STORED PER PRESET. 16

17 The Gear Menu Most of the built- in presets use what is known as "QuickTime Compression". This means that the compressor is using built- in QuickTime video formats, such as H.264, MPEG4, Apple Intermediate, Apple Animation and so on. However not all compressors use the same settings dialogs and this can be confusing. Broadly speaking, the settings presented to you are split into two main groups. 1. Everything that "QuickTime" does (H.264, MPEG4, AIC, AAC, etc). Essentially this is anything that can be setup using the dialog (the one with the massive dropdown) below. 2. Additional third party compressors, with their own settings dialogs and controls (a good example is the DivX compressor). All of these are represented in Stomp from the gear dropdown menu. You can tell if you're looking at the standard QuickTime settings dialog. It looks something like this one, with a dropdown at the top providing a large list of video So if you're staring at a video settings dialog with a large dropdown menu like the one below, you're looking at a standard built in QuickTime settings panel. 17

18 FINAL CUT WAS INSTALLED THE IMAGE SAMPLE ABOVE CAME FROM A COMPUTER WITH FCP INSTALLED. AS A RESULT, MANY MORE CODECS ARE LISTED THAN WOULD OTHERWISE BE SHOWN. Why is this important? It's important for two reasons. First because Stomp cannot control the settings of "specialist" compressors from the normal settings panel. You must use the settings dialogs provided by the component provider. Secondly that the user interface changes as a result, and you may have to look for options in a place that you don't expect. For example, you'll see that DivX is not an option in the list above, even though I've got the DivX component installed. This is because it's not a standard QuickTime compressor type. However, if I click the gear icon, you'll see that the DivX component is listed there. All of the third party installed compressors (and a couple of the built- in special Apple ones) are listed under the gear icon. If you add a new preset of type DivX, you'll notice that the bulk of the Stomp options are now disabled. 18

19 This is because DivX is a third party compressor that gets its settings from a different place to the other components. So if you wanted to replicate the resize operation that we performed earlier, how would you do it since the Change video size option is disabled? You have to click on the Settings... button for video and change the options within the compressor itself. For DivX this is done as follows: us/articles/

20 Filtering Filters let you change the video during processing. You can apply any combination of Core Image filters in any order you like. As mentioned in Options Panel Filters are per option. Even though the Filter Tab makes it look as though there's only one set of filters, that's not the case. Filters are stored per preset. In the example video of the motorcycle (Aprilia Tuono) we see that the color is actually very "pink". Lets correct that. 1. The first thing to do is make sure I have the preset I want to use selected. I'll be converting into DivX, so I'll make sure that's selected first. 20

21 2. I then select the filters tab, so that I can edit the filters applied to this preset. 3. I add the color correction filter using the + button: 21

22 4. Sliding the angle up, a value of 10 is about right: 5. You can toggle the preview on and off to see the difference that the current filter stack is making. The Filter Stack & Properties You can apply many different filters all at once, in any order. Add more filters using the + button, and arrange them by dragging the filter up/down the stack. Filters are applied in a top down manner, those at the top being applied first. 22

23 Each filter has it's own properties, depending on the type of filter it is. These are all adjustable via the UI. You can also change how each filter is composited with the output from the previous filter. In this example we've applied perspective transform. We can see it, but the previous image is showing on the background and we want to get rid of that. All we need to do is change the layering mode of the filter from "Source Over" to "Source In". Then we have: 23

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25 Preferences Storage Locations Prompt for filename: As you process each movie you will be prompted for the location and name of the output movie. Create files in same folder: The output movie is saved within the same folder as the source movie. The name of the preset is appended to the end of the filename. Your source footage is never overwritten in Stomp. No existing output file is overwritten. If the file exists, a unique number is appended to the end of the filename. Create files in specified folder: This uses the same file naming rules as above (in that no file is overwritten), but the movie is stored in a location of your choosing. In the example above all movies would be saved to the Desktop Temporary files Stomp creates quite a few temporary files during processing. If you're running out of space, or simply wish Stomp to use some other drive for it's scratch data, you can specify that here. 25

26 Other options Select files added to the video list: When you Save As... or drag a file into Stomp, it'll automatically be selected. Always try to extend video to the end: Sometimes audio tracks can be longer than the video track. If you would like Stomp to tidy up the video so that it ends exactly when the audio does, enable this option. Stomp will extend the duration of the last video frame so that it ends at the same time as the audio. Use Growl: If you want to have Stomp send notifications through Growl, enable this. Stomp will notify you when it completes processing of some video. Preview Panel always on top: Enable this if you wish the preview (the "what it is now, what it will become" panel) panel to be on top of all other windows. Automatically Check for updates on Startup: Stomp checks to see if a newer version is available each time you start it. Performance Stomp can process many files at once. It does this by running separate "server" programs in the background. Here you can control how many programs it allows to run at once. Running more will give you more parallelism if you're processing many videos in a batch, and the expense of using more CPU and slowing down other tasks on your system. The option to "be nice", if ticked, makes Stomp run these programs so that all other programs on your computer get priority. If you're computers not doing much, then the Stomp compressors will run at full speed. If some other program wants to run, it'll get priority over the Stomp compressor. This is turned on by default. Support 26

27 If you need to provide feedback to shinywhitebox regarding Stomp, you'll likely be asked to come here and turn on some debugging options. Turning on General Logging causes Stomp and it's compressor servers to spit out potentially (depending on the number of sub options you enable) lots of debugging information to the Console. All of the options here are really only relevant for support of the product. They don't enable extra features that are useful to you (sorry about that!). Other options Use other alternate compression method: Only use this if requested by support. It's in there in case the primary method has a fault with some component in the future and we need to test it against QuickTime. Don't enable this normally as it'll disable Core Image filter processing as well. Perform compression in- process: If you don't want Stomp to spawn off server processes in the background, turn this on. Stomp will then queue up all its work inside the UI. This means that while it is still doing batch mode, only one compression task will run at once (nothing in parallel). Don't remove the temporary files at the end of compression: Most definitely for debugging! Enabling this makes Stomp leave all it's scratch files behind. Again, useful for support but not something you want to enable unless you like going out any buying larger hard drives every couple of weeks. Draw crop outline: Only enable if support requests you do so. 27

28 Automation via AppleScript Stomp version supports a limited set of commands through AppleScript - enough to setup destination folders ask Stomp to perform compression tasks using various presets. Note that the same limitations of Stomp apply from within AppleScript. The primary one being that you cannot ask Stomp to compress one file using multiple presets (the same is true in the UI at the time of writing). You can however ask Stomp to compress one file many times using different presets. Here's an example, showing me setting up the destination folder to Stomp Output on my desktop, and then compressing a test file (aaa.mov) using H264. The final "remove from recordings upon completion" ensures that Stomp removes the recording when it's done. It removes it from its internal list (the same list you see at the bottom of the window). Best explained with a video, but first, the script: tell application "Stomp" activate set destinationfolder to "/Users/neil/Desktop/Stomp" compress file "/Users/neil/Desktop/aaa.mov" preset name "H264" with remove from recordings upon completion end tell That's all there is to it! Click the link below to see a demonstration (QuickTime Movie): us/articles/ Example- of- Using- Applescript- With- Stomp 28

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