If you’ve already got your pile of jpgs to turn into a video you can skip ahead. If not, a few things to mention.
- You may want to take a VERY LONG time lapse, like many hours. If that’s the case you’ll almost assuredly need external power. I achieved this by modifying the case that came with my battery backpack. I am happy that I got the battery backpack even though it didn’t provide the life I needed I felt better about drilling and sawing on the back that came with it than I would have felt about destroying the original GoPro case. I used a drill to make the majority of the hole then spruced it up with my pocket knife.
- If you plan on overlaying a timestamp on your video, make sure that the clock is right on your GoPro.
- Each JPG on my GoPro used a little over 1MB on average. I’d suggest using 1.5MB to figure out how much memory you’ll need. I shot every 60 seconds for about 3.5 days and it would have overfilled an 8GB card. Thankfully I had 32GB so I was good.
On to the post-processing portion…
Create yourself a working directory to copy your photos into from the GoPro. If you have more than 1000 stills the GoPro will sort them into more than 1 directory so be sure to grab all of them from the various locations they may be in.
If when copying them you’re presented with an error saying that there are already files in the destination with the name, choose to copy but keep both files (hopefully you’re using an OS that gives you that option).
If you need to do any funky things such as turning your video 90 degrees or anything this is where you’ll want to do it, in batch processing on your JPGs. I use Irfanview for doing all of my image batch processing. One thing that you almost certainly will want to do to save time is resize your JPGs to match the size of video you want to get out of the project. Resizing the JPG will result in higher quality output than resizing the video would. For me I wanted to have 720p video so I resized all photos to be 720 pixels tall and just told Irfanview to preserve the aspect ratio in resizing. In Irfanview hit the “B” button on your keyboard, add all of your photos to the batch, choose the necessary options using the advanced button. Also… now is the time to rename all of the files in order. You can do that however you wish – if using Irfanview though the way to do it is to rename the results of your batch process and use the “sort files” dialogue, choose “by date ascending.” I also added my timestamp to my photos during batch processing, that can be done with “add overlay text” in advanced options for batch conversion in Irfanview. Note that in order for Irfanview to accomplish this with success you’ll have to have plugins installed.
Once you’re happy with post-processing you can move forward with encoding the movie. This is the part where FREE is important. I spent some time searching for a tool that was point and click, and they all appeared to be pay-for. Enter trusty old mencoder. I used to be something of an expert at using mencoder to transcode DVD rips into high quality cross-platform easily stored MP4s. I got out of that business a long time ago and as such I just did some copy/paste from some man pages to achieve what I wanted for this project. Here is the exact command ran from within the folder full of post-processed folders to create my file:
mencoder mf://*.jpg -mf w=960:h=720:fps=10:type=jpg -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:mbd=2:mv0:trell:v4mv:cbp:last_pred=3:predia=2:dia=2:vmax_b_frames=2:vb_strategy=1:precmp=2:cmp=2:subcmp=2:preme=2:qns=2 -oac copy -o ~/ak2mn.avi
When done, you’ll end up with the file you specify at the very end of the command, in my case ak2mn.avi in my home directory. In case it’s not obvious I moved my pictures from a Windows box running Irfanview to a Linux box for the encoding. Windows will work fine also, you’ll just have to modify your command a bit to match the Windows way of storing files. Also you’ll want to modify the width and height to match the original size of your input files.
In my case the end result was uploaded to YouTube and can be see at http://youtu.be/qclzMWxgxeA.