Harry's GPS Suite Forum

Hi

I used Harry Laptimer during my last races to take in-car video using my iphone camera and a GoPro Hero 3 to take forward video. I use avimuxer to assemble full length mp4 videos of each session (since the GoPro splits the mp4 files i chunks smaller than 4Gig), converted them to an iPhone happy format using Handbrake, edited the Metadata appropriately so that Harry Laptimer can find the videos, and sync'ed them to the iPhone using the Photo sync option of iTunes.
All of this worked and Harry Laptimer found the videos.

Now, the problem:
The Primary video is the iphone video of me driving while what I really want is the GoPro video to be the primary video. The documentation says that there is a way to re-order these two videos but I was no able to do this. Instead, I had to add a third video and added the proper iPhone in car video as a 3rd video. When I did that, Harry Laptimer seemed to automatically figure out what I wanted and I ended up with only 2 videos: the GoPro as Primary and the iPhone in-car video as picture-in-picture. Both videos contain multiple laps (The entire race) and they have the same length.
The problem is that when I then overlaid things, I encountered two problems: First, the iphone video that is now in the picture-in-picture frame is not properly sync'ed. I suspect that some of the laps, not recorded by the iphone (as shown in the lap description of the iphone video, which shows that some laps were skipped -- I am not sure why btw...) , are missing in the iphone video and that somehow this is not accounted for during the overlay process.
Second, the aspect ratio of the final product is wrong and the primary video is squished into something that looks like a 4/3 aspect ratio.

Does anybody have any suggestions?

Cheers,
N

To reorder videos in Lap Details, press "Edit" and drag the videos to the position you like.

The reason the alignment has been lost is you actually added a "new video" to the videos linked to the lap - which, as a manual assignment, requires you to realign lap data and video. To adjust the alignment, got Lap Details again, press Edit again, select the video you need to adjust, and select the video's frame matching the lap's *end*. That is all a bit cumbersome but is not needed when using the approach above.

The aspect ratio is a more difficult item. LapTimer layouts videos correctly for the standard formats used and recorded on iPhone. These are

HD: width = 1280, height = 720
FullHD: width = 1920, height = 1080
SD: width = 640, height = 480

- Harry

Hi,

Harry, are you able to do an update to allow all users to get directly overlays to prevent tampering by the cases which are not simple. For example, my iphone 4 rejects the video from my GoPro Hero 3 Black Edition if I do not put in 720 (instead of the original 1080p) and I prefer, as you can imagine, have a Full HD video instead of hd .

Thank you for your awesome software

ripper79 wrote:Harry, are you able to do an update to allow all users to get directly overlays to prevent tampering by the cases which are not simple. For example, my iphone 4 rejects the video from my GoPro Hero 3 Black Edition if I do not put in 720 (instead of the original 1080p) and I prefer, as you can imagine, have a Full HD video instead of hd .

I have the same problem. If I shoot in 2.7k (2704x1524) or 1080p (1920x1080) then my iPod won't let me put the video on it so that HLT can overlay it!!!

I've come up with a work around to keep your videos full res, just the overlay will be less res. Tried it with my 2.7k video last night and it works sweet! It's using a "blue screen" video then you can overlay it using editing software (I used Adobe Primere).

Once my video is done encoding (need a faster computer for 2.7k ) I'll post a "how to" in this forum, and I'll link it here too.

-Jamie M.

hi,

thanks for your idea. If i remember is that what V18 will do but i just want if i can just have the overlay and, for example, use a software of my choice to assemble it.

i wait your "how to" with interest

ripper79 wrote:hi,

thanks for your idea. If i remember is that what V18 will do but i just want if i can just have the overlay and, for example, use a software of my choice to assemble it.

i wait your "how to" with interest

Sounds good Well my massively huge 2.7k res video "failed to process" once it uploaded to youtube, so that's not good.

Anyway, I cut out just one lap from it and was able to get it to upload at 2.7k so not sure what youtubes issue is with the full length, but anyway, here it is in all of 2.7k glory (minus my foggy front camera, guess it got wet from me running behind people hitting puddles all morning).

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Erue7UncDIA[/youtube]

So, here it is!! How to use a "green screen" (well, actually blue) to put the HLT overlay over top of any resolution video you want (using video editing software such as Adobe Primere CS6):

1. If your iPod/iPhone only supports up to 720p then download the 720p blue screen video, if your device supports 1080p then download the 1080p blue screen video. These videos will cover up to a 10min single lap, and are in GoPro video format (29.97fps).
2. Sync the blue screen video to your iDevice (using the Photo sync option NOT the video sync!).
3. Open HLT, go to lap list, pick a lap, click edit, click add video, way down at the bottom will be your blue screen video, pick that, choose a sync point, click overlay, blah blah.
4. HLT will spit out a new blue screen video with just the overlay on it, yay! Get the new blue screen with overlay video onto your computer so we can apply it to our actual video.
5. Open Adobe Premiere CS6, start a new project, always use CUSTOM and set it to your original video settings (for my 1080p gopro video I use 1920x1080 at 29.97fps).
6. In the lower left box click on the "media browser" tab if it's not there already, browse to your original gopro video and drag it over to the Sequence window on the right, drop it in the Video1 track.
7. Now again in the media browser box, find your blue screen with overlay video you copied from your iDevice and drag it to Video2 track.

If you've done everything correctly so far your window should look like THIS. I've already trimmed up my gopro video using the RAZOR tool (picture of razor blade in center toolbar beside your video tracks) but if you were overlaying a ton of laps at once then no need to trim anything except the start and end of your entire session/race.

Now comes the fun stuff!

If you looked at the picture I linked above you'll see that my GoPro video was shot in 1080p but my iPod 4th gen can only handle 720p video, so my blue screen overlay video is 720p.

8. Scale your blue overlay video to the size of your actual video. Just for reference, 1080p video is exactly 150% larger than 720p video In your sequence window (the one with the video tracks you just dragged your videos onto) click on your blue screen overlay video so that it's selected/highlighted. In the upper left window click the Effect Controls tab and click the arrow beside "motion" if it isn't already expanded. For simplicity set EVERYTHING in this box (except for scale) to 0. Set the scale to 150%. I noticed sometimes that the HLT logo in the lower left is slightly cut off on the bottom of the video so I set the "position" of the video to 0.0, -4.0. That will shift the overlay up 4 pixels (nothing gets cut off the top, don't worry).

Your blue screen video should now be the same size as your actual video, time to get rid of all of that blue! yuk!

9. With your blue overlay video still selected in the sequence window we're going to click the Effects tab in the lower left window (where you had it on media browser to find your videos).
10. Under Video Effects -> Keying you want to double click on UltraKey. Up in the Effect Control window you'll now see an UltraKey entry. Click the arrow beside UltraKey in the effect controls window to expand it (if it's not already).
11. Beside key colour, click the eye dropper, then click on an empty blue area of your video (right in the middle works great).

BOOM! How fancy is that? Your overlay is now transparent and overlaid on your video! If the text is skinny and hard to read, under setting (in the effect controls under ultrakey) set it to "relaxed".

That's it, you're done. To adjust the timing/sync of the overlay simply click the pointer tool on the center toolbar and drag your blue overlay video in the video track (forwards or backwards in the timeline) and it'll change your overlay to video sync. I find it best to start with BOTH videos (the original and the overlay) in the MIDDLE of your sequence (empty space in the sequence before each video), then it's easy to adjust the sync and get everything set up. Then once you've got everything sync'd select all your video tracks together and drag them to the start/zero of your sequence (it'll keep the sync as long as they are ALL selected when you drag them).

When you've done everything perfectly and you're ready to encode your video (yikes, there's a whole other tutorial for that!) it should look LIKE THIS.

Give it try, let me know how it works for ya. If you can follow my directions I'll put this in a new post with a good title

-Jamie M.
(P.S. Coming soon: The best encode settings in Primere for great picture quality on youtube!! And... How to do Picture in Picture with Adobe Primere).