That’s it in a nutshell. There’s a scene I’d like to document over time, but all I have is my little Sony digital. It’s wonderful, but doesn’t have a feature that would permit me to stitch a bunch of individual shots together into a time-lapse video. Anyone know if such a thing exists? Or is there a better idea? I’d really like to get started, as the weather is warming up and my subject will soon begin to change. xo,
C.
mplayer’s mencoder can do this. It’s a command line tool and can be tricky to use but it does work well and it’s free.
documentation: 6.8. Encoding from multiple input image files (JPEG, PNG, TGA, etc.)
download page: MPlayer - The Movie Player
In Windows, I have used a program called jpgvideo. You can download it from Tucows.com. In Linux, FFMPEG will do it. Don’t know about Macs.
This is dirt simple by changing the picture format to .gif of the same size using Irfanview or some other viewer. There are many free programs. I use Microsoft Gig Animator because it’s free and so simple to use. This whole process would only take a few minutes depending on how many pictures you have. Irfanview can change all those pictures in a batch too I believe.
Can’t you just drag all your images into the timeline in Windows Movie Maker? It’s included in Windows for free.
I don’t know. Can I? I’ve never used Movie Maker. Is that a regular procedure that comes with that program?
Heck, you can even do it in PowerPoint.
Print them all out, flip through them real quick and film it.
Nope. The shortest that any single frame can be shown in a movie is one second. Much too long for my plan.
I use Virtualdub for this (I’m shooting a stopmotion video right now, as it happens)
Animated Gif’s are great for this. You can set the delay time for each frame that displays.
I do it in Photoshop using ImageReady.
There’s also free software you can find with google.
here’s a free online animated gif maker. (I haven’t used it before)
I spent some time last summer evaluating all the options I could find (including most mentioned in this thread) before settling on ImageToAVI. I then used handbrake to convert the output to my preferred video format.
BTW, how are you triggering your Sony camera to take the individual pictures? If you have to do it manually, but you are able to lay your hands on a Canon camera, the Canon Hack Development Kit will save you a lot of trouble. There are tons of intervalometer scripts you can use with it to turn a cheap Canon snapshot camera into a nice little timelapse rig.
Unfortunately not every Canon camera is supported, but if you have one in this list you are good to go.
You should be able alter the duration of any given image or clip on the timeline. I used Movie Maker recently and all the images on the timeline are less than a minute, in fact the whole movie is only about 5 seconds using about 35 images. You just have to specify how long you want each image or clip to be. Either way, any video editing software you have access to will work. Final Cut Pro, Premiere, or any of the free ones mentioned above.
Unless you’re working with very simple images (logos and such) or aiming for maximum compatibility with old web browsers (at the expense of all else), animated GIFs aren’t ideal for this:
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GIFs are limited to 256 colors, instead of the 16 million or so a JPEG or any modern movie format can display. This will be quite noticeable in bigger photos (where the interpolated or dithered colors will be more obvious).
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GIF compression was likewise designed for the days of simple graphics, not today’s true-color photographs or movies. This results in unnecessarily large files for all but the simplest animations.
Windows movie maker in options will being a single picture all the way down to .125 second.
Here is a run I made slow:
http://www.youtube.com/user/Dragon43#p/u/3/LolgwprmVnI
And one that is faster:
http://www.youtube.com/user/Dragon43#p/u/0/dVfiBrEEALA