Help me make this video last a long time!

October 8, 2011 11:13 AM

I have a 1080p60fps video which is 2m25s long, that I want to stretch to be much much longer (~2 hours) and then burn to DVD. What can I use (iMac, 10.6.8) that is preferably free or very cheap to accomplish this?

I already have iMovie '09 (v 8.0.6) and MPEG Streamclip 1.9.2, neither of them had any immediately obvious ways to extend this video in time.

I know I could change the frame rate for display on a computer, but it's important that I actually extend the clip for burning to DVD, not just changing the playback rate.

I'm not concerned with interpolating new frames to make it more smooth a la bullet time or anything... Basically I want to do a hard-change to the frame rate.

I will eventually add music to the extended video and burn it to a DVD to put on repeat during a party.

Hoping someone out there has helpful suggestions about how to accomplish this!

posted by hippybear to computers & internet (6 answers total)

Its always hard to know if stuff like this will work, but I might try: exporting the video as a series of images and then reimporting those images at a different frame rate, probably 1 fps would give you 60x duration. I do things like this with quicktime 7 on my macbook. Then hopefully iDVD or whatever will honor that frame rate when burning the video to DVD. I would find it highly annoying if it for some reason changed the frame rate after that...
posted by garethspor at 11:38 AM on October 8, 2011

You should be able to use the program JES deinterlace to do this. Also note you will also have to downsample the footage to something DVD friendly along the way if a SD dvd player is your target playback device.
posted by jade east at 3:04 PM on October 8, 2011

you probably want to interpolate across frames (not pairwise); this is actually pretty complex.
posted by rr at 4:26 PM on October 8, 2011

I'm pretty sure that either one of free and open-source Avidemux and Avisynth can do this.

I think you'll need to do some frame resampling though, I doubt that the DVD standard allows for a framerate that low. It's pretty simple though I think. Just make new duplicate frames to fit 25-30 FPS, or whatever a DVD will accept.
posted by krilli at 5:12 PM on October 8, 2011

get mencoder and try this from the command line:

mencoder normal.mp4 -speed 0.01 -nosound -ovc copy -ofps 29.97 -o slow.mp4

Modify file names and speed and frame rate as needed for your case.
posted by idiopath at 12:07 PM on October 9, 2011

I trusted the top google hit for mencoder to be the right one, but in case of any confusion, mencoder is a part of the open source mplayer project, and comes with mplayer.
posted by idiopath at 12:11 PM on October 9, 2011