JPEG images to movie

I have a very large collection of jpeg images. These are actually
snapshots from a cam taken every 5 minutes.

I would like to assemble these into an AVI or MPEG2 movie making a
"time lapsed" movie.

HerHusband...

A couple of years ago I used a laptop and a digital camera to take time
lapse pictures of our house construction. Like you, I ended up with
hundreds of JPG images.

I used a program called "JPGVIDEO" (freeware) to convert the images into an
AVI file. I think I used Indeo compression (one of the few formats
available on the system I was using) to keep the file size down.

They sell a shareware program called JPGAVI, but the JPGVIDEO link is on
the left side of the screen.

My JPG's were 1280x960, which resulted in an AVI of the same resolution.

I imported the AVI into VirtualDub (freeware), and used a resize filter to
export to the DV standard size of 720x480. You can then convert the AVI
file to MPEG2 using the encoder of your choice (I use Cinemacraft Basic,
but TMPenc is good too).

In my case, I found each "Frame" of the time lapse went by too quickly in
the finished AVI. Since the background was static (our house and property),
I used a temporal smoother (or temporal cleaner, or temporal blur. Can't
remember now) in VirtualDub, to blend adjacent frames of the finished AVI.
This allowed fast moving changes to stick around a bit longer. It's hard to
describe, but it made the finished movie less "jumpy" and a little nicer to
watch. The image is still sharp, but movement tends to fade-in and fade-out
rather than just jump on and off the screen in a single frame.

I also loaded the AVI into Premiere and added fade-in/fade out effects, and
some background music before encoding to MPEG2.

Something Batch oriented would be ideal. I don't relish the ideas of
importing 10000 jpeg images into Premier and dropping them on a
timeline :)

PTRAVEL...

Premiere Pro will import sequentially-numbered stills as an AVI.

davesvideo...

Any chance that they are numbered sequentially? If so, I would use
QuickTimePro, but I;m sure there are many other applications that do
the same. There is a option, "Open Image Sequemce". You set the frame
rate and it generates a QT movie.

Suggestions? Has something worked for you?

Lawrence Lin...

VirtualDub can do this, but only with BMP or TGA. IrfanView can handle the
batch conversion so your total cost (minus time) is zero.

Thanks much
-A

Martin...

I've successfully used the freeware utility SlideShow MovieMaker from:

It has a limit of 2GBs for output files - so if you have a lot of stills to
assemble then you'll need to use some compression to keep the output file
within the 2GB limit.

davesvideo...

Any reason you couldn't just output a number of 2GB files, that you
then import and assemble in an editor application?