So, I was hired to make screen visuals for a beauty contest here in my city. I’ve spent 2 weeks doing the visuals in the computer of the people who hired me for this, with whom I have previously worked in the past, so in that computer I have everything to work with After Effects.

Last night was it, and they told me to come to help with the visuals.

But I got there, they had all of the visuals already, and they were testing the huge multiple screens, and had severe frame drops and worse of all, it was out of sync, and needed to be perfectly synced with the music.

They were using Resolume Arena, I quickly look up about possible solutions, but it seemed like I would need to transcode to DXV, a resolume proprietary codec. But I was running out of them, people would start coming in one hour.

So, I took the visuals where sync was the most important, pull out my superior Thinkpad with GNU/Linux, and open the terminal.

I tried using ffmpeg to decode, but soon discovered that I can’t convert to DXV, so instead I recode the visuals at half the resolution.

In a few moments, the conversion is finished, and I give them the lower resolution videos.

They load the files into resolume, and the problem was fixed. Now it was synced.

The show went great, but I had other mini heart attacks during it.

But I can say that ffmpeg, a FOS software, saved the night.

As an additional note, they left me in charge of the music, so at the beginning of the night, before the event actually started, I just played my Kpop collection from Lollypop because I didn’t want to play the typical terrible reggaeton.