Stitch 'em Up

January 16, 2006 12:49 PM

I have a lot of still photographs and want to make a time-lapse movie. I am on a Mac.

Two questions:

1) I have digital photos taken twice a week over the course of a year, from approximately the same position, lighting, and zoom, but not quite. Conditions did not allow for a fixed camera, and I didn't realize for about two months that the light source was slowly burning out. However, the subject is in approximately the same position. This is an easy enough Photoshop job, but I took several angles, and that's a lot of mind-numbing work. At this point in my existence, I'm not too proud to let something else do the work. So is there software available, either free or reasonably priced, that would take a batch of photos and get 'em all matching with position and color and the like?

2) What software should I use to stitch these together? I imagine Quicktime Pro will work, but is there something better? I want the best quality/compression relationship, so I figure being able to set, say, 10 frames per second rather than repeating frames would be better. I may also want to have different frames hold for longer, but not sure if that's even possible and there are easy workarounds for that.

posted by p7a77 to computers & internet (8 comments total)

iMovie lets you import stills from iPhoto, so I bet that'd be a good place to start.
posted by mathowie at 1:50 PM on January 16, 2006

iPhoto, if you have that, can do what you ask. Not only can you export an album in your iPhoto library as a Quicktime movie, you can also export iPhoto slideshows as Quicktime movies too. You won't need some of the features there, I'm guessing (selecting different transitions between shots, selecting the Ken Burns pan-and-zoom effect) but perhaps you'll want to add a soundtrack. You'll have more export options available to you simply using Quicktime Pro, as iPhoto's slideshow-to-movie options basically only let you set the size of the resulting frames and how long to display them.

Anyway, to do a simple export in iPhoto, get the images you need into an album and in the right order, highlight the album and select Export... under the File menu. The settings there are self-explanatory. Creating a slideshow from an album and then exporting that slideshow just adds an extra step.

The recent post in the blue about the stabilzed Zapruder film footage makes me think that Quicktime Pro will be exactly what you need to center the subject of your images in each frame and correct for color.
posted by emelenjr at 1:54 PM on January 16, 2006 [1 favorite has favorites]

Quicktime Pro has an option to create movies from images. You name the pictures in some kind of order, select the first image, choose "Create movie from images" (or whatever it says) and then choose how fast/slow the images are shown on screen. Works like a charm and sounds like just what you need.
posted by qwip at 3:11 PM on January 16, 2006

iStopMotion. I've generally used it for hand-drawn animation, but it works for stop motion animation and time lapse stuff too. Basically, you've got two options for input - your camera/video camera or photo files on your computer. The program shows you an overlay of the frame you're currently inputting over the past frame [or past several frames, or whatever.] I'm not quite sure how this works for photo-input, but I know the ability to move a frame around to correct position [compared to the last frame] keeps me sane when doing animations. The program also gives you control over the fps of your finished piece. If you want to make a specific frame hold longer, just input that frame more times. The final piece can be saved as QuickTime, exported to Final Cut Pro, etc.
posted by ubersturm at 3:13 PM on January 16, 2006 [1 favorite has favorites]

You can also export multiple images from iPhoto as an animated GIF, if the frames are pretty small (don't want a 5 meg GIF!).
posted by luriete at 3:58 PM on January 16, 2006

Assuming you don't have fancy Quicktime stuff, mencoder is capable of encoding a video at arbitrary frame rate to an arbitrary codec (you almost certainly want to use mjpeg if the framerate is low) from a directory full of jpegs. Can't help you with correcting the position & exposure though. Like this:

mencoder "mf://*.jpg" -mf fps=4 -o output.avi -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mjpeg
posted by polyglot at 5:00 PM on January 16, 2006

p7a77,

Couple of questions/thoughts.

What are you doing to do with it once finished?

'So is there software available, either free or reasonably priced, that would take a batch of photos and get 'em all matching with position and color and the like?'

It'd be very easy to run a photoshop action that just does auto levels + color.

I'd have to use some serious video software to align it.

10 fps video meant to be shown on the web - flash would be an excellent choice.
posted by filmgeek at 6:32 PM on January 16, 2006

Thanks for the suggestions, everybody! My iBook decided to get all goofy on me yesterday, so I haven't been able to try anything out.

filmgeek, I'd like to have the final product available for viewing online in as widely supported and non-proprietary a format as possible.

I'm not as well-versed in Photoshop as I once was... what sort of action can one set up to get photo A to match the colors and levels of photo B? There are dozens of photos, each with slightly different level adjustments that need to be made. I can script the actions no problem, I'm just missing the key element of "match to sample".
posted by p7a77 at 9:51 AM on January 17, 2006