Convert a long avi video into a short time lapse avi

[Grampold]

I have been trying to find a way to convert a long video I have of Robin eggs hatching into a time lapse like short video only a few minutes long. My thought was to remove all but one frame of say every 1000 or something along this line. Does anyone know if this is possible? I have tried a few web suggestions but none have been succesful. You should know I don't have much video expertise (or money) so answers will have to be quite dumbed down and cheap. Thanks

[manono]

AviSynth's SelectEvery command can do it easily:

SelectEvery(1000,0)
AssumeFPS(29.97)

That says to keep the first frame out of every 1,000. It's followed by the AssumeFPS command to set a framerate. It'll require reencoding, though. Depending on the format of the video, there's a chance it can be done without reencoding.

...so answers will have to be quite dumbed down and cheap.

As AviSynth is free, you can't get any cheaper than that. As for difficulty, maybe if you told us the kind of video we could get you going well enough to get through this one. A MediaInfo text screen would provide the details.

[Grampold]

It was a WMV but I converted it to AVI/xvid

[manono]

So, already one quality degrading step. Anyway, since it's an XviD AVI now, after installing AviSynth you can use AviSynth's AVISource on it:

AviSource("Video.avi")### replace with real name
SelectEvery(1000,0)###or whatever number you wish to use
AssumeFPS(29.97)###or whatever the original framerate was.

Open it in VDub as you would any video (File->Open Video File), choose and configure codec and encode. Let us know if you run into problems. If so, provide the script used and any error message