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On the stop-motion video with your kid - that's totally awesome!! I'd love to do something like that with my daughter. What software did you use to put it toge

On the stop-motion video with your kid - that's totally awesome!! I'd love to do something like that with my daughter. What software did you use to put it together?

jerf 11y ago
Plain ol' FFMPEG can take images and turn them into videos. I did have to buy a tripod, but, I've wanted one several times now in the past couple of years so this finally tipped me over. (Amusingly, if you haven't bought one in a while, they all come with "smartphone adapators" now, at least at the consumer level. 21st century ho!) I used this command line: ~/bin/ffmpeg -r 3 -start_number $X -i %03d.jpg -vcodec mpeg4 \ -qscale:v 3 -s 1920x1080 ${MOVIE}.mp4 "-r 3": 3 frames per second. "-start_number $X -i %03d.jpg": Use JPEGS named like "123.jpg". Nominally the %03d.jpg is supposed to be a printf-style template, but I had trouble with anything but straight numbers like that (possibly my camera's naming convention confused it). I used emacs' wdired mode to bulk rename the files. "-start_number $X" is helpful so you can just grab photos off the camera's photo list without having to renumber them. "-s 1920x1080" tones down the resolution since the vast bulk of cameras take way-more-than-HD resolution, and I didn't bother with trying to fiddle with setting it down in the camera, because 32GB SD mini cards are cheap now. I'll say this to anyone thinking of trying it out: Once I had a little stubby tripod I could put on the kitchen table, it was really quite a fantastically easy project. Stop-motion is, of course, an incredibly labor intensive style of animation... for professional results. For 3 fps, grabbing some children's toys that were probably just on the floor, and moving just one or two things per frame, you can be taking a shot every 10 seconds or so, quite easily. My kids were 7 & 4 and, quite frankly, probably both below average on their patience (for various reasons), and we actually made 4 videos today. It's had a much better bang/buck for the kids than I expected. And it's yet another place where Legos really shine, by the way.
- jeffwass 11y ago
  Thanks for the detailed response!
hyperlobic 11y ago
Also check out http://toonloop.com/ http://toonloop.com/

On the stop-motion video with your kid - that's totally awesome!! I'd love to do something like that with my daughter. What software did you use to put it together?

jerf 11y ago

Plain ol' FFMPEG can take images and turn them into videos. I did have to buy a tripod, but, I've wanted one several times now in the past couple of years so this finally tipped me over. (Amusingly, if you haven't bought one in a while, they all come with "smartphone adapators" now, at least at the consumer level. 21st century ho!) I used this command line: ~/bin/ffmpeg -r 3 -start_number $X -i %03d.jpg -vcodec mpeg4 \ -qscale:v 3 -s 1920x1080 ${MOVIE}.mp4 "-r 3": 3 frames per second. "-start_number $X -i %03d.jpg": Use JPEGS named like "123.jpg". Nominally the %03d.jpg is supposed to be a printf-style template, but I had trouble with anything but straight numbers like that (possibly my camera's naming convention confused it). I used emacs' wdired mode to bulk rename the files. "-start_number $X" is helpful so you can just grab photos off the camera's photo list without having to renumber them. "-s 1920x1080" tones down the resolution since the vast bulk of cameras take way-more-than-HD resolution, and I didn't bother with trying to fiddle with setting it down in the camera, because 32GB SD mini cards are cheap now. I'll say this to anyone thinking of trying it out: Once I had a little stubby tripod I could put on the kitchen table, it was really quite a fantastically easy project. Stop-motion is, of course, an incredibly labor intensive style of animation... for professional results. For 3 fps, grabbing some children's toys that were probably just on the floor, and moving just one or two things per frame, you can be taking a shot every 10 seconds or so, quite easily. My kids were 7 & 4 and, quite frankly, probably both below average on their patience (for various reasons), and we actually made 4 videos today. It's had a much better bang/buck for the kids than I expected. And it's yet another place where Legos really shine, by the way.

jeffwass 11y ago
Thanks for the detailed response!

hyperlobic 11y ago

Also check out http://toonloop.com/ http://toonloop.com/