HOWTO: Make Time Lapse Videos from Photographs

[mgerber]

Hello,

Nice tutorial. Just one problem for me. I've got an output.avi of say, 89MB, and a MKV of 100M. What's the best option to compress that properly.

I use following command line to convert it:

avconv -y -i output.avi -c:v libx264 -preset slow -crf 15 output.mkv

Thanks

[CyberAngel]

Hello,

Nice tutorial. Just one problem for me. I've got an output.avi of say, 89MB, and a MKV of 100M. What's the best option to compress that properly.

I use following command line to convert it:


Thanks

Check this link for more encoding options:
https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/x264EncodingGuide

I guess if you change CRF to a higher value (23 is the default one) and/or play with bitrate, you will achieve the compression level you need.

My intention with the command mentioned in this tutorial is to get a high quality video without artifacts, rather than compressing the video much (in your case obviously it's the opposite.. The final output is bigger).

[mgerber]

Thank you for the guide. I'll check it out.

My purpose is to have a good quality/size ratio. When I'm travelling, videos and pics take a lot of space. And I don't need highest quality yet. If I'll publish it, it will only save time (as in some third world countries internet connections are fairly slow) if it's not too big.

[Light-kun]

Nice tutorial, thanks!

1) I've ran into segfault when trying to do a TL video from more than 1000 pictures:
Segmentation faultf (38%) 11.87fps Trem: 2min 809mb A-V:0.000 [77605:0]
After this error I'm getting the video which consists of 1000 pics.

I know I can make few parts and stick them together in another utility, but I want to make this process easier.

2) >> I ran into some problems for some time lapses with this line of code:
>> ls -1tr | grep -v files.txt > files.txt
>> It should be:
>> ls -1 | grep -v files.txt > files.txt

Why? I have no problems with first command. Even the first command is better in my case:
I have camera which makes number to pictures from 0001.JPG to 9999.JPG and after last number it creates another directory and starts over from 0001.JPG.
so time sorting in ls command makes my video proper, when name sorting wil lscrew my video up.

[CyberAngel]

Nice tutorial, thanks!

1) I've ran into segfault when trying to do a TL video from more than 1000 pictures:
Segmentation faultf (38%) 11.87fps Trem: 2min 809mb A-V:0.000 [77605:0]
After this error I'm getting the video which consists of 1000 pics.

I know I can make few parts and stick them together in another utility, but I want to make this process easier.

Was it mencoder gave you the segmentation fault?
I never tried to make a timelapse with more than 1000 pictures before, but I could give it a try

2) >> I ran into some problems for some time lapses with this line of code:
>> ls -1tr | grep -v files.txt > files.txt
>> It should be:
>> ls -1 | grep -v files.txt > files.txt

Why? I have no problems with first command. Even the first command is better in my case:
I have camera which makes number to pictures from 0001.JPG to 9999.JPG and after last number it creates another directory and starts over from 0001.JPG.
so time sorting in ls command makes my video proper, when name sorting wil lscrew my video up.

I don't remember exactly what was the problem, but I remember that for a specific set of pictures, they were not in order. However, with ls -1 everything was fine.

[Vik Vasilev]

Oh my god! I spent hours of searching and trying to this with ffmpeg. and now its working!!! Thank you! I LOVE YOU DUDE!

[CyberAngel]

Glad you found this thread helpful

[Denkogami]

I used to use this technique and got great results. I'm using Ubuntu 14.04 and recently am running into problems using mencoder. When I run this command

mencoder -idx -nosound -noskip -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=ljpeg -o output.avi -mf fps=15 'mf://@files.txt

I get the following output (I'm cutting the middle of the output out, since the same three lines are repeated over and over)

MEncoder 1.1-4.8 (C) 2000-2012 MPlayer Team
success: format: 16  data: 0x0 - 0x0
MF file format detected.
[mf] number of files: 45
[demux_mf] file type was not set! trying 'type=JPG'...
VIDEO:  [IJPG]  0x0  24bpp  15.000 fps    0.0 kbps ( 0.0 kbyte/s)
[V] filefmt:16  fourcc:0x47504A49  size:0x0  fps:15.000  ftime:=0.0667
libavcodec version 54.35.0 (external)
Opening video filter: [expand osd=1]
Expand: -1 x -1, -1 ; -1, osd: 1, aspect: 0.000000, round: 1
==========================================================================
Opening video decoder: [ffmpeg] FFmpeg's libavcodec codec family
Selected video codec: [ffmjpeg] vfm: ffmpeg (FFmpeg MJPEG)
==========================================================================
Could not find matching colorspace - retrying with -vf scale...
Opening video filter: [scale]
Movie-Aspect is 1.78:1 - prescaling to correct movie aspect.
[swscaler @ 0x7f14907c2640]BICUBIC scaler, from yuv422p to yuv420p using MMXEXT
videocodec: libavcodec (1920x1080 fourcc=47504a4c [LJPG])
[ljpeg @ 0x7f148fcc4b00]Error getting output packet of size 24899584.
Muxer frame buffer cannot allocate memory!
Pos:   0.0s      1f ( 2%)  0.00fps Trem:   0min   0mb  A-V:0.000 [0:0]


...


Flushing video frames.
Writing header...
ODML: Aspect information not (yet?) available or unspecified, not writing vprp header.
Writing header...
ODML: Aspect information not (yet?) available or unspecified, not writing vprp header.
Writing index...
Writing header...
ODML: Aspect information not (yet?) available or unspecified, not writing vprp header.

Video stream:     -nan kbit/s  (-2147483648 B/s)  size: 0 bytes  0.000 secs  46 frames

And an output file that cannot be opened. Any help would be much appreciated

[CyberAngel]

@Denkogami, I tried to make a time lapse today, and mencoder gives me the same error on Kubuntu 14.04!
I guess it is something related to the libavcodec.
I'll try to find a solution since I want to make some time lapses myself

If anybody has a solution already, please post it here.

Thanks!

[CyberAngel]

Just updated the how-to and changed the mencoder command with ffmpeg which is working fine for me on Kubuntu 14.04!
Start reading from Step 1 again, because I do the file sorting in the first step.