How to create a video from images with FFmpeg?

-pattern_type glob

This great option makes it easier to select the images in many cases.

Normal speed video with one image per frame at 30 FPS

ffmpeg -framerate 30 -pattern_type glob -i '*.png' \
  -c:v libx264 -pix_fmt yuv420p out.mp4

Here's what it looks like:

GIF generated with: https://askubuntu.com/questions/648603/how-to-create-an-animated-gif-from-mp4-video-via-command-line/837574#837574

Add some audio to it:

ffmpeg -framerate 30 -pattern_type glob -i '*.png' \
  -i audio.ogg -c:a copy -shortest -c:v libx264 -pix_fmt yuv420p out.mp4

Result: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HG7c7lldhM4

These are the test media I've used:

wget -O opengl-rotating-triangle.zip https://github.com/cirosantilli/media/blob/master/opengl-rotating-triangle.zip?raw=true
unzip opengl-rotating-triangle.zip
cd opengl-rotating-triangle
wget -O audio.ogg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/Alnitaque_%26_Moon_Shot_-_EURO_%28Extended_Mix%29.ogg

Images generated with: How to use GLUT/OpenGL to render to a file?

It is cool to observe how much the video compresses the image sequence way better than ZIP as it is able to compress across frames with specialized algorithms:

• opengl-rotating-triangle.mp4: 340K
• opengl-rotating-triangle.zip: 7.3M

Convert one music file to a video with a fixed image for YouTube upload

Answered at: https://superuser.com/questions/700419/how-to-convert-mp3-to-youtube-allowed-video-format/1472572#1472572

Slideshow video with one image per second

ffmpeg -framerate 1 -pattern_type glob -i '*.png' \
  -c:v libx264 -r 30 -pix_fmt yuv420p out.mp4

Add some music to it, cutoff when the presumably longer audio when the images end:

ffmpeg -framerate 1 -pattern_type glob -i '*.png' -i audio.ogg \
  -c:a copy -shortest -c:v libx264 -r 30 -pix_fmt yuv420p out.mp4

Here are two demos on YouTube:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grV64VE1U6c
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6D05gCWh_I

Be a hippie and use the Theora patent-unencumbered video format in an OGG container:

ffmpeg -framerate 1 -pattern_type glob -i '*.png' -i audio.ogg \
  -c:a copy -shortest -c:v libtheora -r 30 -pix_fmt yuv420p out.ogv

Your images should of course be sorted alphabetically, typically as:

0001-first-thing.jpg
0002-second-thing.jpg
0003-and-third.jpg

and so on.

I would also first ensure that all images to be used have the same aspect ratio, possibly by cropping them with imagemagick or nomacs beforehand, so that ffmpeg will not have to make hard decisions. In particular, the width has to be divisible by 2, otherwise conversion fails with: "width not divisible by 2".

Full realistic slideshow case study setup step by step

There's a bit more to creating slideshows than running a single ffmpeg command, so here goes a more interesting detailed example inspired by this timeline.

Get the input media:

mkdir -p orig
cd orig
wget -O 1.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/22/Australopithecus_afarensis.png
wget -O 2.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/Homo_habilis-2.JPG
wget -O 3.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cb/Homo_erectus_new.JPG
wget -O 4.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1f/Homo_heidelbergensis_-_forensic_facial_reconstruction-crop.png
wget -O 5.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5a/Sabaa_Nissan_Militiaman.jpg/450px-Sabaa_Nissan_Militiaman.jpg
wget -O audio.ogg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/Alnitaque_%26_Moon_Shot_-_EURO_%28Extended_Mix%29.ogg
cd ..

# Convert all to PNG for consistency.
# https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/29869/converting-multiple-image-files-from-jpeg-to-pdf-format
# Hardlink the ones that are already PNG.
mkdir -p png
mogrify -format png -path png orig/*.jpg
ln -P orig/*.png png

Now we have a quick look at all image sizes to decide on the final aspect ratio:

identify png/*

which outputs:

png/1.png PNG 557x495 557x495+0+0 8-bit sRGB 653KB 0.000u 0:00.000
png/2.png PNG 664x800 664x800+0+0 8-bit sRGB 853KB 0.000u 0:00.000
png/3.png PNG 544x680 544x680+0+0 8-bit sRGB 442KB 0.000u 0:00.000
png/4.png PNG 207x238 207x238+0+0 8-bit sRGB 76.8KB 0.000u 0:00.000
png/5.png PNG 450x600 450x600+0+0 8-bit sRGB 627KB 0.000u 0:00.000

so the classic 480p (640x480 == 4/3) aspect ratio seems appropriate.

Do one conversion with minimal resizing to make widths even (TODO automate for any width, here I just manually looked at identify output and reduced width and height by one):

mkdir -p raw
convert png/1.png -resize 556x494 raw/1.png
ln -P png/2.png png/3.png png/4.png png/5.png raw
ffmpeg -framerate 1 -pattern_type glob -i 'raw/*.png' -i orig/audio.ogg -c:v libx264 -c:a copy -shortest -r 30 -pix_fmt yuv420p raw.mp4

This produces terrible output, because as seen from:

ffprobe raw.mp4

ffmpeg just takes the size of the first image, 556x494, and then converts all others to that exact size, breaking their aspect ratio.

Now let's convert the images to the target 480p aspect ratio automatically by cropping as per ImageMagick: how to minimally crop an image to a certain aspect ratio?

mkdir -p auto
mogrify -path auto -geometry 640x480^ -gravity center -crop 640x480+0+0 png/*.png
ffmpeg -framerate 1 -pattern_type glob -i 'auto/*.png' -i orig/audio.ogg -c:v libx264 -c:a copy -shortest -r 30 -pix_fmt yuv420p auto.mp4

So now, the aspect ratio is good, but inevitably some cropping had to be done, which kind of cut up interesting parts of the images.

The other option is to pad with black background to have the same aspect ratio as shown at: Resize to fit in a box and set background to black on "empty" part

mkdir -p black
mogrify -path black -thumbnail 640x480 -background black -gravity center -extent 640x480 png/*.png
ffmpeg -framerate 1 -pattern_type glob -i 'black/*.png' -i orig/audio.ogg -c:v libx264 -c:a copy -shortest -r 30 -pix_fmt yuv420p black.mp4

Generally speaking though, you will ideally be able to select images with the same or similar aspect ratios to avoid those problems in the first place.

About the CLI options

Note however that despite the name, -glob this is not as general as shell Glob patters, e.g.: -i '*' fails: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/ticket/3620 (apparently because filetype is deduced from extension).

-r 30 makes the -framerate 1 video 30 FPS to overcome bugs in players like VLC for low framerates: VLC freezes for low 1 FPS video created from images with ffmpeg Therefore it repeats each frame 30 times to keep the desired 1 image per second effect.

Next steps

You will also want to:

• cut up the part of the audio that you want before joining it: Cutting the videos based on start and end time using ffmpeg

  ffmpeg -i in.mp3 -ss 03:10 -to 03:30 -c copy out.mp3
  

  Alternatively, you can also cut it directly in the conversion command by adding the -ss just before the audio -i:

  ffmpeg -framerate 1 -pattern_type glob -i 'raw/*.png' -ss 0:36 -i orig/audio.ogg -c:v libx264 -c:a copy -shortest -r 30 -pix_fmt yuv420p raw.mp4
  

TODO: learn to cut and concatenate multiple audio files into the video without intermediate files, I'm pretty sure it's possible:

• ffmpeg cut and concat single command line
• https://video.stackexchange.com/questions/21315/concatenating-split-media-files-using-concat-protocol
• https://superuser.com/questions/587511/concatenate-multiple-wav-files-using-single-command-without-extra-file

Different duration for each image

https://video.stackexchange.com/questions/23530/use-ffmpeg-to-create-a-video-from-a-few-images gives a solution.

You create a file in.txt like:

file png/1.png
outpoint 5
file png/2.png
outpoint 2
file png/3.png
outpoint 7

and outpoint sets the duration of the previous image in seconds.

Then we just remove -framerate from the previous conversion commands:

ffmpeg -f concat -i in.txt -framerate 1 -i orig/audio.ogg -c:v libx264 -c:a copy -shortest -r 30 -pix_fmt yuv420p black.mp4

I also like that that approach with file names in a file is nicer than having to rename the input files to have the correct order, which makes it easier to quickly reorder images on a text editor (multiple -i did not work). Having two lines per input file makes that a bit more annoying, I didn't manage to combine the file and outpoint into a single line, but still, good to know.

This approach is also convenient if you are just going to convert a subset of your images. Then, to save time on the ImageMagick, you can reuse that in.txt file to loop over only the images you care about:

grep -E '^file ' in.txt | sed -E 's/^file //; s/\..*//' | while read f; do
  echo $f
  convert -thumbnail 1280x720 -background black -gravity center -extent 1280x720 "$(command ls -1 ../$f.* | grep -v .xcf | head -n1)" "out/$f.jpg"
done

Tested on

ffmpeg 3.4.4, vlc 3.0.3, Ubuntu 18.04.

Bibliography

• http://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Slideshow official wiki

See the Create a video slideshow from images – FFmpeg

If your video does not show the frames correctly If you encounter problems, such as the first image is skipped or only shows for one frame, then use the fps video filter instead of -r for the output framerate

ffmpeg -r 1/5 -i img%03d.png -c:v libx264 -vf fps=25 -pix_fmt yuv420p out.mp4

Alternatively the format video filter can be added to the filter chain to replace -pix_fmt yuv420p like "fps=25,format=yuv420p". The advantage of this method is that you can control which filter goes first

ffmpeg -r 1/5 -i img%03d.png -c:v libx264 -vf "fps=25,format=yuv420p" out.mp4

I tested below parameters, it worked for me

"e:\ffmpeg\ffmpeg.exe" -r 1/5 -start_number 0 -i "E:\images\01\padlock%3d.png" -c:v libx264 -vf "fps=25,format=yuv420p" e:\out.mp4

below parameters also worked but it always skips the first image

"e:\ffmpeg\ffmpeg.exe" -r 1/5 -start_number 0 -i "E:\images\01\padlock%3d.png" -c:v libx264 -r 30 -pix_fmt yuv420p e:\out.mp4

making a video from images placed in different folders

First, add image paths to imagepaths.txt like below.

# this is a comment details https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Concatenate

file 'E:\images\png\images__%3d.jpg'
file 'E:\images\jpg\images__%3d.jpg'

Sample usage as follows;

"h:\ffmpeg\ffmpeg.exe" -y -r 1/5 -f concat -safe 0 -i "E:\images\imagepaths.txt" -c:v libx264 -vf "fps=25,format=yuv420p" "e:\out.mp4"

-safe 0 parameter prevents Unsafe file name error

Related links

FFmpeg making a video from images placed in different folders

FFMPEG An Intermediate Guide/image sequence

Concatenate – FFmpeg

cat *.png | ffmpeg -f image2pipe -i - output.mp4

from wiki

Simple Version from the Docs

Works particularly great for Google Earth Studio images:

ffmpeg -framerate 24 -i Project%03d.png Project.mp4