How to create a video from images with FFmpeg?

Image Problem Overview

ffmpeg -r 1/5 -start_number 2 -i img%03d.png -c:v libx264 -r 30 -pix_fmt yuv420p out.mp4

This line worked fine but I want to create a video file from images in another folder. Image names in my folder are:

img001.jpg
img002.jpg
img003.jpg
...

How could I input images files from a different folder? Example: C:\mypics

I tried this command but ffmpeg generated a video with the first image (img001.jpg) only.

ffmpeg -r 1/5 -start_number 0 -i C:\myimages\img%03d.png -c:v libx264 -r 30 -pix_fmt yuv420p out.mp4

Image Solutions

Solution 1 - Image

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

FFMPEG An Intermediate Guide/image sequence

Concatenate – FFmpeg

Solution 2 - Image

-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: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3191978/how-to-use-glut-opengl-to-render-to-a-file/14324292#14324292

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:

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

https://i.stack.imgur.com/qc2n1.gif" width="300" />

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 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21262466/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

https://i.stack.imgur.com/SzUlh.gif" width="300" />

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: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18514083/resize-to-fit-in-a-box-and-set-background-to-black-on-empty-part/18514327

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

https://i.stack.imgur.com/b5gCg.gif" width="300" />

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: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19267443/playback-issues-in-vlc-with-low-fps-video-from-images-using-ffmpeg/41797724#41797724 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: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18444194/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:

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

Solution 3 - Image

Simple Version from the Docs

Works particularly great for Google Earth Studio images:

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

Solution 4 - Image

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

from wiki

Solution 5 - Image

Your files should be named depth_00001.png depth_00002.png etc which ensures the correct order

step 1) If they are called depth_1.png depth_2.png then you can batch rename them to the required naming with this command

for f in depth_[0-9]*; do mv "$f" "$(printf 'depth_%05d' "${f#depth_}" 2> /dev/null)"; done; for f in depth_[0-9]*; do mv "$f" "$f.png"; done;

step 2) Then run ffmpeg using standard options

ffmpeg -framerate 30 -i depth_%05d.png -pix_fmt yuv420p -c:v libx264 depth.mp4

step 3) If that fails (it did for me on Windows) then try this instead

cat depth_*.png | ffmpeg -f image2pipe -framerate 30 -i - -pix_fmt yuv420p -c:v libx264 depth.mp4

NOTE: step 2 failed when I used PNGs - but when I used image magick to convert the PNGs to JPGs step 2 worked

Here's the command I used to do the conversion

for image in *.png; do magick convert "$image" "${image%.*}.jpg"; done;

Also, I found this command useful to verify that the length of the output video was as expected

ffprobe -v quiet -show_entries format=duration -of default=noprint_wrappers=1:nokey=1 depth.mp4

Solution 6 - Image

To create frames from video:

ffmpeg\ffmpeg -i %video% test\thumb%04d.jpg -hide_banner

Optional: remove frames you don't want in output video
(more accurate than trimming video with -ss & -t)

Then create video from image/frames eg.:

ffmpeg\ffmpeg -framerate 30 -start_number 56 -i test\thumb%04d.jpg -vf format=yuv420p test/output.mp4

Solution 7 - Image

For me to create video with audio it worked, you need to specify:

the normal frames: -framerate 30

the audio -i audio/audio.ogg

and the library libx264

   system("ffmpeg -framerate 30 -i #{out_dir}/%03d.png -i audio/audio.ogg 
-c:a copy -shortest -c:v libx264 -pix_fmt yuv420p out/final
/#{out_dir.sub("out/", "")}.mp4")

if you want to create a loop, for example 3 times -stream_loop 2 because of 0,1,2

    system("ffmpeg -stream_loop 2 -framerate 30 -i 
#{out_dir}/%03d.png -i audio/audio.ogg -c:a copy -shortest -c:v 
libx264 -pix_fmt yuv420p -b:v 50M  out/final/#{out_dir.sub("out/", 
"")}.mp4")

Content Type	Original Author	Original Content on Stackoverflow
Question	user3877422	View Question on Stackoverflow
Solution 1 - Image	khan	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 2 - Image	Ciro Santilli Путлер Капут 六四事	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 3 - Image	Joshua Pinter	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 4 - Image	Hunger	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 5 - Image	danday74	View Answer on Stackoverflow
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Solution 7 - Image	titleLogin	View Answer on Stackoverflow