[FFmpeg-user] ffmpeg automation

[Cley Faye]

>
> If I have a folder with 30 clips of various formats, codecs, frame-rates
> and frame-sizes, is there a way to tell ffmpeg to grab random clips, only
> select certain sections of certain clips, add a music track, and edit it
> down to 30 seconds of exciting video and to render it out to say Mp4?
>
>
​Hi,

There's a lot of undefined things here. Do you want to transcode everything
to the same codec/format/etc or retain the originals (somehow, as it's not
really possible)?
How do you determine which part you want to cut?
How do you determine which track from each file to use/import from other
"music" files?
What do you mean by "grab random clips", process only some of them, merge
them together, cut and stitch stuff around, etc?​


> Basically, we want an automated edit of a lot of clips.
>
> Can this be done?
>

​Regardless of most of my above questions (they are not meant to get an
answer ;) ), yes, it is possible. ffmpeg command line interface works well
with scripts for a lot of stuff, which might include what you want.
If using the CLI interface isn't possible/enough, there's always the
libraries, but the CLI is quite good.

​Now, as to how to do that, you'll have to do some research... I feel that
most of the issue you'll face are not ffmpeg related​. Note that you can
also use ffprobe to easily extract information from a media file in a
script-friendly format (like json).