You can fly a monkey to a typewriter, but you can’t make him code
Original source image: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Monkey-typing.jpg
Well, FFMpeg is a monster. Getting it to work with some default settings was easy, but the number of parameters is breathtaking. I work in professional video on a daily basis but can hardly understand any of the plethora of options. There is extensive documentation on ffmpeg.org but most of it is meaningless unless you already know what it means.
Below is the basic structure of a Bash script. It requires the #!/bin/bash at the beginning
#!/bin/bash
clear
echo “Hello world.”
This script clears the screen and prints the words “Hello world”.
An excellent beginners’ tutorial is here and I’m not going to to duplicate it.
http://linuxcommand.org/wss0010.php
This process reminds me of teaching myself to program back in the 1980s. In a good way and a bad way. One frustratingly fatal error after another is a real test of application, and that’s the discipline, but teaching yourself may be very time-consuming but it is also very educational.
After some head scratching I got this to work. It’s a bit of a Frankenstein lash-up with bits of code I got from various places, but also with a little bit of my own intuition. I discovered by trial and error how to change the target directory on-the-fly within the script and this made it much simpler.
It’s still a bit clunky and needs the download-from-camera stage adding but it works. I decided to include absolute paths to the work directories and point the script at them in turn, and so far I am running the script using the command ./myscript from the current directory.
# !/bin/bash
cd /home/richard/Desktop/RBTest/newtest
x=1; for i in $(ls -t -r *JPG); do counter=$(printf %04d $x); ln “$i” /home/richard/Desktop/RBTest/testtemp/img_”$counter”.jpg; x=$(($x+1)); done
cd /home/richard/Desktop/RBTest/testtemp
ffmpeg -r 25 -i img_%04d.jpg -s 640×480 -qscale 1 -vcodec mjpeg movie.avi
The next bit I need to add is the download stage using gPhoto2 to get the images from the camera so that I can have a single workflow to download and assemble the thousands of images files in separate directories into a single usable video file.
Some of this coding documentation needs expanding and tidying up, but stay tuned for more soon.
Flying Monkey TV 