Error using seethru-convert

[davidsturman]

I'm trying out seeThru for the first time and it seems to be just what I need to play transparent video in my online application. I got the demo files to work and got my own code to work with your demo videos. However, I am having a problem getting seethru-convert to work properly on my videos.

When I run seethru-convert on my Windows Subsytem for Linux (Ubuntu) with this command:

seethru-convert --in myVideo.mov

--out myVideoWithMask.mov

I get a file called seethru-tmp-alpha.mov which has a good video mask, but the myVideoWithMask.mov file is zero length and the program throws the following error:

/usr/bin/seethru-convert: 2: /usr/bin/seethru-convert: /bin: Permission denied
An error occurred combining the video sources: ffmpeg exited with code 1: Error reinitializing filters!
Failed to inject frame into filter network: Invalid argument
Error while processing the decoded data for stream #0:0
Conversion failed!

I tried this again on an AWS instance with Ubuntu 16.04.4. Same inputs, same command line, and I get
/usr/bin/seethru-convert: 2: /usr/bin/seethru-convert: /bin: Permission denied
An error occurred combining the video sources: ffmpeg exited with code 1: Error opening filters!

My search for a solution indicates this is an issue with incorrect arguments to ffmpeg, but I don't have enough experience with ffmpeg to know what the right arguments are.

I don't have any other sample videos to try it with and don't have the tools to create one myself. Internet searches for sample videos with transparency did not turn up anything I could count on working (or that worked at all).

It would be nice to have a sample video here to use to test seethru-convert.

The video I was trying can be downloaded from http://www.dsturman.com/downloads/myVideo.mov. It was generated with Adobe After Effects.

Thank you.
-djs

[m90]

I'm not really sure what is causing this, it's likely some quirk in the FFMPEG filter setup here:

seeThru/bin/converter.js

Lines 70 to 75 in 60e0497

	'-vf',
	'[in] scale=iw:ih,\
	pad=iw:2*ih [top];\
	movie=seethru-tmp-alpha.mov,\
	scale=iw:ih [bottom];\
	[top][bottom] overlay=0:h [out]'

that surfaces when used against your video, but I really don't know to much about that either. Maybe you can play around with the filters, omitting one by one to find out which one is causing the issue?

As a workaround, did you try exporting the video from After Effects directly as described here: https://github.com/m90/seeThru#preparing-video-sources-in-adobe-after-effects ? This way you won't need to use the converter script at all.

[davidsturman]

Thank you. My collaborator, who is making the video files, is going to try creating the video directly in After Effects as described in the README.