Create Video from JPEGs

[Cavsfan]

My 1st and only grandson turned 1 year old and we have taken about 1 million pics of him.
I wanted to make a video from pictures taken in the past year. The first one is an ultra sound picture.
The last one was taken this last Saturday. I have 153 12 MPixel pictures in a folder.
They are named C001.jpg - C153.jpg (I can rename them if needed).

Does anyone have experience doing this? I had noticed mencoder or ffmpeg can create movies from jpegs.
But, I didn't think about the frames per second. Would I need to make like 20 copies of each picture and then
make it like 10 FPS? or something like that? Optimally, I would like to have a video where each picture lasts for
8-10 seconds or so and I would be able to add a song as audio. (I think I know how to use mencoder to add the audio).

Your help will be very much appreciated and I will take notes and learn from this!
It's painful to have to ask twice for the same help!

Thanks in advance!

[ron999]

HI
I don't think it's a 'video', as such, I think that you will be making a 'slideshow'.
But I don't know how to go about doing this.

[SPazzo]

OK, so there are a couple things you can do. You can, as ron999 said, show them as a slideshow. F-spot has that option. Just make a directory that has only the pictures you want in the slideshow, open the first one with f-spot, and press F5 (or View > Slideshow). That will have a full screen slideshow of all of the pictures in that directory.

There is an alternate method. You can use a Video editing software to make a video file. On that video file would basically be the a slideshow, of all of the pictures you want, for how long you want. This is a little more complicated, but if you want to try it, try downloading Slideshow Creator or LiVES. Both are fairly easy to use and would probably work for your needs. LiVES is in the software centre, and Slideshow Creator has a .deb on their website.

Good luck.

[Cavsfan]

Thanks for the replies! Yes, I definitely want a slideshow! I will look into this!

[Cavsfan]

What I want to do is create a slideshow, but I want the output to be AVI (if possible).
I would like to be able to upload it to YouTube and possibly make a DVD for my daughter.
I have seen examples of Mencoder being able to do this.

I tried this command with 25 FPS:
mencoder "mf://*.jpg" -mf fps=25 -o output.avi -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4
But, the output went way too fast. It lasted like 1 second!).

Then I tried this one with 1 FPS:
mencoder "mf://*.jpg" -mf fps=1 -o output.avi -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4
But, it only showed 3 pictures (I think) and was only 3 seconds long.

Is there any knowledgeable mencoder users out there that can tell me how to modify the
above command to make it read the entire 153 pics and display them for a reasonable amount of time?
The pictures are not all exactly the same size and I was hoping this would not matter.
Right now it seems I just have a FPS and a time length issue.

Thanks in advance!

[Jose Catre-Vandis]

Check that you have a contigious list of filenames, no gaps and all the same format e.g. 001.jpg, 002.jpg, 003.jpg and so on. Also ensure that they are all jpgs.

You can set fps below 1, e.g 0.5 (2 second display), .02 (5 second display)

or you could play about with the speed setting and slow the whole thing down.

Then you can add some music to it

[chewearn]

http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en...nc-images.html

[chewearn]

It seemed the pictures have to be the same dimension, and the width must be integer multiple of 4.

EDIT
Further investigation on resizing the images. I tried using "convert" which comes from "imagemagick" package.

The commands below will run through all the files in the directory "in", convert each to 800x600 with black border padding, and dump the output into directory "out".

mkdir out
for a in $( ls in ); do convert "in/$a" -resize 800x600 -background black -gravity center -extent 800x600 "out/$a"; done

Your mencoder command with fps=1 should be working then.

[Cavsfan]

Thanks! You all are great and this is the best forum!

I will look over these! Thanks again!

[Cavsfan]

OK, I guess I have never really ran a script before.
On the desktop I have the In folder with the pictures.
I copied you script and added the top line:

CD /home/Cavsfan/Desktop
mkdir out
for a in $( ls in ); do convert "in/$a" -resize 800x600 -background black -gravity center -extent 800x600 "out/$a"; done

I tried adding .sh to the end of the gedit text file I saved this as.
(That changed the coloring of the text)
Then I checked Nautilus preferences > behavior to Run Executable Text files when they are opened.
But still nothing!
Sometimes you feel so insignificant and dumb over the smallest things and this is one of them for me.

Thanks!