Back in July I created a post about testing out a stop motion camera and the steps needed to create a short video made up of individual photographs http://www.geekwhitenorth.com/linux-stop-motion/
I outlined the steps because I knew that we were going to point it at our backyard vegetable patch to make a stop motion of the plants growing.
To make this video I followed steps 2 and 3. I skipped step 1 because I was not starting from a photo that started WSCT1248.JPG and not having an issue with a zero prefix like I had previously.
This year we grew spring onions, various peppers and tomatoes.
I was testing out a camera my wife had bought that is designed to take stop motion pictures. She wants to take pictures of her garden growing (if we get ever get warm weather).
Because I will have to do it again at some point in the future I thought I would document the steps I used.
The software that comes with the camera does not work with LinuxWine. So I started looking at how I could do this.
The pictures were in the format WSCT0000.JPG where 0000 was number counting up in my case from my pictures started from the number 0635. WSCT is a name that is from the camera manufacturer.
1) I needed to rename the files to a common name, to rename the files by going to the directory then going to the terminal and typing rename WSCT “” *.JPG
This basically removes the WSCT prefix.
2) The next thing I realized was that the pictures were very large so I reduced them down to 800×600 using the Imagemagick command mogrify I typed the following.
mogrify -resize 800×600 *.JPG
This command overwrites the existing files, so make sure you have the originals.
3) Next was to join them all together using ffmpeg command this is where I had issues it did not like having zero as a prefix (0635.JPG) son I ran the command rename again to remove the prefix zero and add a letter p so my file names were now starting p635.JPG. This is because the next command would not run unless it had a prefix before the number (before %d).
4) Finally I completed the joining by running the following command
ffmpeg -f image2 -start_number 0635 -i p%d.JPG output1.mp4
This time, because I had changed the prefix, it worked.
5) Joining the pictures together, obviously there is no sound, so I used Kdenlive to transcode an audio file that I found in the Google free music collection.
