Help me turn all my photos into a movie

February 25, 2013 12:40 PM

I have 30,000 photos of Things and Stuff from the last seven years, and I'd like to turn them into movie. Specifically, a movie where each photo is a frame, so you'd be seeing like 10-20 photos per second. Ideally this would work by just pointing the software at a folder where the photos are stored and saying GO TO WORK (then clicking a button, I guess, voice control not required). What software should I use?
posted by Sebmojo to Media & Arts (15 answers total)

I've done some fun stuff with Microsoft Movie Maker.

It's quick and dirty for what you want to do. You can add subtitles, and a musical sound track.

I'm sure lots of folks will have Mac programs and other nifty things, but for cheap and cheerful, you could go further and fair worse.
posted by Ruthless Bunny at 12:42 PM on February 25, 2013

Just a pointer in the right direction. Sony Vegas can do this, especially easy with the use of 'Ultimate S Lite' plugin by VAAST, as I recall you can specify the length of each photo and other variables, so you can basically drag in a load photos and set all of them at a duration of 0.1 second in chrono order or whatever...
posted by razzman at 12:46 PM on February 25, 2013

My brother wrote a program called Makeavi many years ago. It will do what you want, I'm not sure if it'll run on a modern OS though. It's about 2/3rds of the way down this page under free utilities.
posted by Confess, Fletch at 12:53 PM on February 25, 2013 [1 favorite]

As some accompanying reading, you might be interested in a very similar project that artist Aaron Ximm did several years ago. He's also got an email link at the bottom, he might be open to you picking his brain about what he got out of the process.
posted by jbickers at 1:10 PM on February 25, 2013

If the filenames are obviously a sequence (i.e. "img00001" "img00002" etc) then Flash will do that. You load the first image, and it will popup "That seems to be part of a sequence. Do you want to load them all?" And if you say "yes" then it will. You can then set the frame rate and export the (probably immense) SWF.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 1:23 PM on February 25, 2013

I've used "mencoder" to do this before (It's part of the Mplayer suite, a good choice for unix) but it's command line only.

You'll... probably want more than 1 frame per photo. 20 photos/s is way faster than people can process pictures I think.
posted by RustyBrooks at 1:24 PM on February 25, 2013

If your files are named sequentially and you have a Mac, I've had great luck with Time Lapse Assembler. For me, it was just the right amount of control without overwhelming me with options.
posted by Betelgeuse at 1:48 PM on February 25, 2013

Photo to Movie does this well... it's $50 but it's very good, they offer a demo download

http://download.cnet.com/Photo-to-Movie/3000-12511_4-26515.html
posted by bobdow at 2:28 PM on February 25, 2013

If you need to rename files sequentially then I recommend Bulk Rename Utility, it's free and awesome.
posted by Confess, Fletch at 2:32 PM on February 25, 2013 [1 favorite]

You can use ffmpeg to encode single pictures into movies at the (linux/macOS) command line (further examples).
posted by James Scott-Brown at 2:34 PM on February 25, 2013 [2 favorites]

Chocolate Pickle: "If the filenames are obviously a sequence (i.e. "img00001" "img00002" etc) then Flash will do that."

I like Rename Master on Windows for sequencing files (or any other bulk renaming needs).
posted by Mitheral at 2:43 PM on February 25, 2013

Response by poster: I should have said, sorry - I'm on Windows 7 32 bit.

Good advice all, keep 'em coming!
posted by Sebmojo at 3:07 PM on February 25, 2013

I do this sort of this with Picasa, although not with quite that many pictures.
posted by chbrooks at 9:12 PM on February 25, 2013

Response by poster: What's the process with Picasa, chbrooks - just make a slide show?
posted by Sebmojo at 11:10 PM on February 25, 2013

It's got a feature called 'create movie presentation' - just put everything into a folder or album, then select that button and it will let you choose timings and transitions and add music. I've never done more than 1000 photos with it, so I don't know how it will do with 30K...
posted by chbrooks at 3:20 PM on February 26, 2013