Timelapse software for Linux

Question

I was looking for software to create timelapse from a collection of pictures, that is compatible with Ubuntu. It would good if it could make HD videos and also has an option to add a background score.

Answer 1

Ffmpeg will do it. If you have images img001.jpg, img002.jpg, img003.jpg, ... then on the command line do:

ffmpeg -i img*.jpg output.mpeg

There are more options given in ffmpeg --help or man pages, or the web. These allow control over the frame rate and the output format.

Answer 2

First we rename all *.JPG files based on their creation date. Sometimes cameras change the file name or just ordering them is somehow not what we want. However, renaming them by the creation date always work:

jhead -n%Y%m%d-%H%M%S *.JPG

After that we put this list in a file:

ls -1tr | grep -v files.txt > files.txt

And then use mencoder to create an AVI video using 20 fps. Note that this will generate a huge video file, usually around the same size of all the pictures summed.

mencoder -nosound -noskip -oac copy -ovc copy -o output.avi -mf fps=20 'mf://@files.txt'

I usually take pictures for timelapse with the lowest resolution of my camera (5 MP), which has a 4:3 aspec ratio. To generate a proper 1080p video the image is first re-scalled to 1920 pixels of width and then I crop it to 1080 of height. This way I am not changing the photos' content, just cropping:

ffmpeg -i output.avi -y -sameq -vf scale=1920:1440,crop=1920:1080 output-final.avi

The reason I use mencoder to put the photos together is because I got a segmentation fault with ffmpeg.

Answer 3

You can do this with either mencoder or avidemux. There's a tutorial fr avidemux here: http://www.avidemux.org/admWiki/doku.php?id=tutorial:create_video_from_still_image_and_from_audio_file