Good, free (hopefully) JPG/JPEG stitching software recommendation

[TonyR]

Well, the live streaming of the Bluebird Box Cam is going well, the pair finally started working on the nest. I began this morning having Blue Iris save a snapshot JPG/JPEG every 10 minutes and am looking for a program to stitch them together to make a time-lapse MP4 .

Any suggestions? Free would be great but not at the sacrifice of function.

 

[Ri22o]

I used to use Windows Movie Maker for time lapse videos. You could set time for imported images and it was pretty painless. I feel the newer WMM isn't as easy to use though.

I have used Video Meld for some stuff, but never put together a time lapse with it. A license isn't too much money if you wanted to get rid of the water mark or go past the free editing video time limit.

 

[bp2008]

ffmpeg is free and very powerful. To get started,

1. Get ffmpeg for Windows and extract it wherever you like.
2. Open a command prompt in the folder with ffmpeg.exe (if you shift+right click and open Powershell, then enter cmd in powershell, it will change to a regular command prompt).
3. ffmpeg -framerate 30 -pattern_type glob -i "folder-with-photos/*.JPG" -s:v 1920x1080 -c:v libx264 -crf 17 -pix_fmt yuv420p my-timelapse.mp4

You should adjust the resolution to match whatever your jpeg frames are. You can adjust the quality if needed by changing the crf number (17) above. Lower number is better quality, higher number is worse. The rest of this is fairly self-explanatory I hope.

 

[bp2008]

The Bing chatbot also has some suggestions.

 

[TonyR]

The Bing chatbot also has some suggestions.

View attachment 157873

Time Lapse Creator quick and easy, made a quick MP4 of today's 8 AM to 3 PM construction (they knocked off early); looking forward to them finishing up the nest soon and going to the next stage...egg laying.

Which reminds me, one of the 2 hardware cloth screens for snakes has fallen too low, got to move it up tomorrow. We lost several eggs to a racoon and then 4 baby birds to a rat snake in the spring of 2021. A baffle for the 'coon (like an upside-down funnel) and 2 big squares of the screening (for the snakes) seems to have worked fine, no issues in 2022.