Blue flying monkeys, coding in the dead of night
There are some technologies that none of us will miss, such as CRTs, the SCSI interface, VHS and (for me) optical storage media (CDs and DVDs). But one technological era I am particularly glad to leave behind is the 1980s, characterised by cassette-loading or actual typing in of huge BASIC programs, distributed in magazines.
These days we have an embarrassment of riches in the form of the internet. For a programmer, it's a goldmine of free resources. However, something that is often missing is an exhaustive deconstruction of the code, particularly useful to noobs. I'm a lapsed programmer, so I don't find it too hard, but Linux is new to me and has some strange “conventions”.
Anyway, as promised here is some actual code that I found (well, Google found it and I copied it) with some explanation about what the bits and pieces do. I will probably update this a bit and please let me know if you spot any errors.
FFMpeg requires an unbroken sequence of image files starting at 1 and will fail if the numbers are not continuous. This is not optional and so it is best to rename them as a matter of course.
The following two code snippets are from stackoverflow.com and I've adapted them slightly.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2829113/ffmpeg-create-a-video-from-images
This is the script for renaming the files.
x=1; for i in *jpg; do counter=$(printf %03d $x); ln "$i" /tmp/img"$counter".jpg; x=$(($x+1)); done
And here is the original FFMpeg command from the same source.
ffmpeg -f image2 -i /tmp/img%03d.jpg /tmp/a.mpg
Note:
24 seconds to ininitalise the Powershot A640 and another 9 minutes to download 2,595 images totalling 2.7 Gb (over USB 2 on 1st generation MacBook (1.83 GHz Intel dual core) running Ubuntu Linux 11.04.
Sort by creation date/time
x=1; for i in $(ls -t -r *JPG); do counter=$(printf %04d $x); ln “$i” /tmp/img_”$counter”.jpg; x=$(($x+1)); done
The $( some stuff ) contruct eveluates everything within the brackets before using the result. In this case, $(ls -t -r *JPG) returns a list of files ending in “JPG”, sorted by ascending creation time. The for i in $(ls -t -r *JPG) is a for..next loop where i is each file ending in “JPG”, sorted into creation time order.
The snippet counter=$(printf %04d $x) resolves the integer variable x into a 4-digit decimal number with leading zeros and puts it into the variable counter. The leading zeros are necessary in order to maintain the 8-character file names so that they sort alpha-numerically. The snippet x=$(($x+1)) increments the variable x by integer 1 after each renaming operation.
It’s important to get the capitalisation correct and the destination pathname, or it will just fail.
The -t modifier sorts by creation time in reverse order, most recent first. The -r modifier reverses that order to, in this case, change the order back to the correct chronological order.
Canon Powershot cameras automatically number the images files in the format “IMG_0001.JPG” and restarts the numbering after 9,999 images. It will automatically create a new folder every 2,000 images and will create a new folder and restart from 0001 once it gets to IMG_9999.JPG.
Consequently, it is possible that for a timelapse shoot, the file names will not be in continous alpha-numeric order. Sometimes they will be, but it’s as well to assume that they won’t. Also, gPhoto2 does not preserve the folder structure if you download using the gphoto2 –get-all-files command, and will dump the whole lot into a single folder.
In this case, it is very likely that the alpha-numeric order will not be strictly chronological. As a result, it was necessary to include an amendment to the code that will order them into chronological order before renaming them.
More soon.
Flying Monkey TV 