Fading JPEGs

[oofers]

I use avidemux for all my editing of home movies and I feel I know it pretty well. But it is not capable of what I want to do in one instance and I am looking for suggestions.

We built a house and I took pictures of the various stages of construction, always from the exact same spot. I have cropped these pictures in Photoshop so that, as I move from one picture to the next, everything is perfectly lined up and you can see the house becoming more and more complete.

I want to create a video that fades from one picture to the next. Really, just like a slideshow.

I've dropped JPEGs into my home movies before. Avidemux allows you to just drag and drop a JPEG, adding 0.40 seconds to the length, and then I just copy & paste that segment over and over until it becomes the length I want.

I want each photo to be onscreen for 5 seconds and have a 1 second fade between the images. One will fade out while the next picture simultaneously fades in.

The problem with avidemux's fade filter is that it only fades out. Thus, I could make one frame (picture) fade out over a specified amount of time, but the next picture can not fade in.

Fade-to-black works both ways (in and out), but that's not really what I want. I want one image to blend seamlessly into the next.

I found an old post describing what I want done using virtualdub, but as it hasn't been updated in years, I was looking for something more current.

I plan to continue using avidemux regularly as it does everything I need to do, with this exception. So I'd like to learn of something with a small footprint and small learning curve.

Thanks for reading and for any suggestions!

[redwudz]

VirtualDub2 is an updated version of VD. Lots of filters are also available from http://www.infognition.com/VirtualDubFilters/

But other members may have better suggestions.

And welcome to our forums.

[johnmeyer]

What you describe is trivial to do in any NLE (Non-Linear Editor). I use Vegas and it is zero work: you just select all the photos, drag them to the timeline, and the crossfade is set to one second by default. That is all there is to it.

[oofers]

VirtualDub2 is an updated version of VD. Lots of filters are also available from http://www.infognition.com/VirtualDubFilters/

But other members may have better suggestions.

And welcome to our forums.

Thanks for letting me know about this. I used VD years ago and liked its small footprint and its being free. Might be exactly what I need. Am going to give it a go now.

[oofers]

What you describe is trivial to do in any NLE (Non-Linear Editor). I use Vegas and it is zero work: you just select all the photos, drag them to the timeline, and the crossfade is set to one second by default. That is all there is to it.

Thanks for the reply. However, that Vegas is a professional NLE and costs $600, it might be overkill for what I'm needing to do.

[smrpix]

The $40 Movie Studio version of Vegas does it as well.

[johnmeyer]

What you describe is trivial to do in any NLE (Non-Linear Editor). I use Vegas and it is zero work: you just select all the photos, drag them to the timeline, and the crossfade is set to one second by default. That is all there is to it.

Thanks for the reply. However, that Vegas is a professional NLE and costs $600, it might be overkill for what I'm needing to do.

See smrpix's reply. In addition, they offer a free 30-day trial. If you are only doing this once, you can download the Vegas Movie Studio version (i.e., the cheap one), do your project, and then delete the software.

[jagabo]

What you want is called a crossfade or dissolve. Pretty much every video editor will let you do it. Here's an AviSynth script that will convert a series of images to a slideshow with each frame displayed for 5 seconds and 1 second of crossfade between them.

ImageSource("pic%05d.jpg", 0, 9) # load 10 frames (0 to 9) with names in the form pic00000.jpg, pic00001.jpg, pic00002.jpg...
AssumeFPS(1) # each frame appears once, assume it's 1 fps
ChangeFPS(5) # duplicate frames to make 5 of each
ConvertFPS(150) # interpolate between frames to make 30 frames from each original frame, creates crossfade between original images
AssumeFPS(30) # specify 30 fps output

Open that in a program like VirtualDub2 and save the resulting video in whatever format you like.

[oofers]

What you want is called a crossfade or dissolve. Pretty much every video editor will let you do it. Here's an AviSynth script that will convert a series of images to a slideshow with each frame displayed for 5 seconds and 1 second of crossfade between them.

ImageSource("pic%05d.jpg", 0, 9) # load 10 frames (0 to 9) with names in the form pic00000.jpg, pic00001.jpg, pic00002.jpg...
AssumeFPS(1) # each frame appears once, assume it's 1 fps
ChangeFPS(5) # duplicate frames to make 5 of each
ConvertFPS(150) # interpolate between frames to make 30 frames from each original frame, creates crossfade between original images
AssumeFPS(30) # specify 30 fps output

Open that in a program like VirtualDub2 and save the resulting video in whatever format you like.

Wow, thanks so much for this. I am familiar with scripts and will try this with avidemux.

[jagabo]

I don't think AviDemux can open AviSynth scripts. You could use AVFS to route the output of the AviSynth script through the file system. That makes it look like an AVI file to any editor that opens it.