Free timelapse screencasts in MacOS. Part II: video from snapshots

iMovie is not enough when you want to create a movie from hundreds of snapshots. I’m not able to import them without transitions, so I switched back to what I knew, the Army Knife of video tools: FFMPEG.

Installing it on your Mac is easy with MacPorts, which is similar to apt-get in Ubuntu. Download and install MacPorts first, so you can invoke it from a command line in a  terminal.

Fetching, compiling and installing ffmpeg will probably require more than half an hour, depending on your Internet connection, because it needs a lot of packages that are not installed by default in MacOS. But MacPorts works like a charm:

sudo port install ffmpeg

and wait. Do something interesting meanwhile, like reading a book, having a walk or petting your cat…

Once ffmpeg is in your system, navigate in a terminal to the folder where you stored your screenshots (like those we created with the Python script) and type this:

ffmpeg -r 10 -i img%06d.png -vcodec libx264
  -vpre hq -bf 0 -crf 15 output_video.mp4

That will create an h.264 video using High Quality (-vpre hq, -crf 15)  and a low frame rate (10 fps. Put that BEFORE -i, or it won’t work). B-Frames are removed (-bf 0), otherwise YouTube messes the whole thing. Image file names must be consecutive, just change their name if you used a different one.

And this is the result! Not exactly useful when talking about programming… but it still looks great.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

About

This is PlayMedusa's game devlog: sketches, artwork, news, tutorials... Know more about us and our work in our MAIN SITE!

We create games mostly because we enjoy doing so. We hope you also enjoy playing them! Check them out at itchio Some can be played on the browser!

Este sitio web utiliza cookies para que usted tenga la mejor experiencia de usuario. Si continúa navegando está dando su consentimiento para la aceptación de las mencionadas cookies y la aceptación de nuestra política de cookies, pinche el enlace para mayor información.plugin cookies

ACEPTAR
Aviso de cookies