Commands to create (time lapse) videos from individual frames

12 Feb 2022 – Ronny Errmann

Some of the time lapses can be found on youtube: Youtube Channel Ronny Errmann, for example an 8 hour time lapse of the night sky over La Palma. If you modify your images before creating a video, creating a working directory and copying the images into that will safe you from accidentally destroying the originals.

Create a Video from images:

mencoder mf://*.jpg -mf fps=24:type=jpg -noskip -vf scale=1156:868 -of lavf -lavfopts format=mp4 -ovc x264 -sws 9 -x264encopts nocabac:level_idc=30:bframes=0:bitrate=16384:threads=auto:turbo=1:global_header:threads=auto:subq=5:frameref=6:partitions=all:trellis=1:chroma_me:me=umh -o output.mp4

The following settings should be adapted to your images:

• fps=24 : if the framerate of the pictures is not high enough a lower number might be better
• scale=1156:868 : The pictures of my camera are 3 times bigger along each dimension than the values here, be sure to downsize your images without stretching one axis
• bitrate=16384 : That bitrate gives reasonable results for my time lapses, however, you might consider larger values (better quality) or smaller values (less storage space needed)

Modify images before creating a video from them:

mogrify -resize 1156x868 IMG_20220212*.jpg

Rotate the images:

mogrify -rotate 90 -background black *.jpg

Crop the images:

To remove useless bits from the image, the values are the new size + start positions

mogrify -crop 3515x2541+142+199 *.jpg

Add exif information to the image, e.g. the time:

Sometimes it’s nice to see the real time running in the time lapse, for this the exif information can be used. In the example the modified images will be copied into “prefix_<original name>”

for img in *jpg; do convert "$img" -gravity SouthEast -pointsize 70 -fill white -annotate +30+30  %[exif:DateTimeOriginal] "prefix_""$img"; done

The following options can be changed:

• gravity : this gives the corner in which the text should appear. Use geography, e.g. Northwest, South
• pointsize : size of the text, probably worth to test on a subset of images first (copy images into a subfolder)
• fill : text colour
• annotate : distance from the chosen corner

Increase the brightness of the images:

For example, when taking night images and the video is too dark.

mogrify -modulate 200 *.jpg