Post processing your video footage

Here is the updated blog after I initially blogged about this last week

I have always used iMovie HD and Garrage Band in the good old days but then with latest iLife I feel like having an arm broken because am yet to figure out how to effectively use Garage Band to mux my audio score.
Anyways... iMovie does not allow you to sharpen or pull the colors from your raw footage - you just have to  arrange your video sequences and create your collage!
So I was searching for ways to color grade and push the sharpness of my footage form my Panasonic GH13 (without having to use FCP or some high-end tools) and found this link. Quite interesting!
http://www.fourseasonshd.com/cgi-bin/csvsearch.pl?db=db1&tp=tp19&search=bluelight8

So the other night I started to follow the instructions but the results were not quite sharp. I was initially disappointed but then I tried to extract TIFF images out of my raw footage and wow I was able to get superb results. I am going crazy now extracting and editing all my old MTS files :)

Here are the steps I followed and at the bottom you can see links to the videos - a footage straight from my GH13 (with smooth -2,-2,-2 settings) and the "edited" footage.

1) Here is how I extracted tiff images from the video file:

ffmpeg.exe  -i 00007.mts  -preset libx264-lossless_slow.ffpreset -r 23.976 -s 3072x1728 -f image2 foo-%04d.tiff

Note: In some cases I could see some artifacts when I used the above command line so I started to use the one below instead (of course the size is now same as what your camera would record at):
ffmpeg.exe  -i 00007.mts  -preset libx264-lossless_slow.ffpreset -r 23.976 -sameq -f image2 foo-%04d.jpg
Yes, it is straight JPEG export! So I skipped the next step.

2) Then I used PhotoFunStudio which came with my camera and converted the tiff to jpeg
3) Then as per the steps in FourSeasonsHD I used Exifer to rewrite the exif info on the converted jpegs (using the same exif data provided in FourSeasonsHD)
4) Then I used SilkyPix which again came with my camera to edit (as per the steps in FourSeasonsHD). I was able to tweak pretty much everything. I still have to figure out how to create the gritty look etc... some day I will...

5) Then I extracted audio:

ffmpeg.exe  -i 00007.mts  -acodec copy -vn audio.ac3

6) Then finally I mux-ed with the original audio to create the "edited"  video:

ffmpeg.exe  -r 23.976  -f image2 -i foo-%04d.jpg -i audio.ac3 -vcodec libx264  -s 1920x820 -acodec copy videoaudio.mp4

Note: I had used -s 1920x816 earlier but looks like 1920x820 is the right aspect ratio. 

And now ...ta da....here is the original video ...

and here is the edited video...

Amazing - isn't it! What do you guys think? Have you used any similar workflow?

PS: If you are into editing with ffmpeg then check out:

• http://kwlug.org/node/854 and
• http://eugenia.queru.com/2009/05/20/basic-video-editing-with-ffmpeg-on-linux/