I’m very new to shotcut, forgive me if this is a repeat question.
I have about 1800 .jpg images that were taken at 3 images per second interval (total 600 seconds). My hope was to create a video from these images and play it back at 30 frames per second for a total of 60 seconds.
I’ve been reading numerous posts on this forum and I tried adjusting to 60 fps under “settings” and “image sequence” and “duration” under “Properties” but overall I can’t figure out how to make this happen.
Is there a way to do this with Shotcut?
Is there a youtube video or tutorial that explains how to do this?
Is there another software tool that does this sort of operation?
Save yourself the headache and use MakeAVI, a free OS utility I use for my time lapses.
Shotcut is very likely to crash trying to import an 1800 image sequence.
thank you. that’s what I was looking for. It crashed tring to load the first 50 images.
… 8 minutes later: That’s awsome… the download and to create the video litterally only took a few minutes.
I consider Shotcut to be a video editor that is, to edit video rather than a JPG>Video maker.
It’s fine to add a still image here and there to a sequence of video clips, but at this stage even importing a single JPG will often cause Shotcut to stall momentarily. More than one image at a time will display the (Not responding) flag.
SC stops responding and white screens if you have many images (which of course one does for a time lapse sequence, such as the OP’s 1,800 jpg files) It also takes much longer to load them all, even with only a dozen photos. But crashing leaves no chance to get to Export.
Sorry Dan, I’ve not found it to be the best tool for the job and less so if your image sequence is intended as a slideshow where you want transitions between each image. An option to apply the transition to all would help.
MakeAVI is much faster for time lapse and AVC faster and simpler for slideshows. Shotcut however is the best for small and simple video productions, for this I thank you and Brian (and any other developer involved)
It used to be much worse than several versions ago when I made an improvement. I just did a test of 1800 images in UHD resolution in Windows, and it took about 8 seconds after clicking the Image Sequence checkbox for it to respond again. What is doing? enumerating the files to determine the duration as it cannot trust the numbers in the file names; there could be missing files. After that you can export to work with something nicer. That’s not so bad. I have noticed that image handling on Windows builds are slower than Linux. Not sure about macOS.
if your image sequence is intended as a slideshow
Well, image sequence and slideshow are different. Shotcut does not yet have any dedicated slideshow features.
I did that. It worked well when I only imported 12 images as a test. When I upped it to 100 images it took forever. There are no missing images (all numerical sequence). But finally, the goal was to play the images at 15 to 30 fps. Since it is seen as a slideshow it appears 1 image per second is the fasted rate I could find. The MakeAVI tool did exactly what I wanted and then I imported that sequence into shotcut and it worked great.
It is very easy. 350 images took about 3 Seconds to import. At 1 frames per second. Exported as mp4 in 14 seconds. Reset the image sequence to 24 fps took about another 5 Seconds. The export took 00:01:15. The entire process of importing and exporting the images twice took about 3 minutes +/-.
Not bad for free software not bad at all.
Based on this comment I tried this again.
I did get acceptable, good results.
My .jpg images are 3456 x 2304.
I have 1800 images to import.
I’m running a Microsoft Surface Pro 4
ShotCut version 18.01.02
Test 1:
I started a new session of Shotcut.
Selected “Open File”
Selected 40 (sequencal) images and clicked “open”.
40 photos took 4 minutes 50 seconds.
I killed the process as it was way too slow, but did not crash.
Test 2:
I started a new session of Shotcut.
Selected “Open File”
Selected 1 images and clicked “open”.
Selected “Properties” and clicked the “Image Sequence”
It imported 900 images in 6 seconds.
I then selected “Export” and selected MPEG-4
It took 20 minutes to export.
The mp4 file was 8.7 Mbyte
// –
I then closed Shotcut.
Re-opened Shotcut.
Imported the newly createrd mp4 video file
And… it played (900 images) in 33 seconds.
The video quality was excellent. Crystal clear.
I’m quite happy with the process
I uploaded it to youtube, that took about 3 minutes.
It took youtube about 45 seconds to process it.
I played the video on youtube (play time was 33 seconds).
Video quality was much lower, a grainy appearance.
It was acceptable, but much lower quality than when I played it on ShotCut.
I’m ok with the video, but it’s not the quality I was hoping for.
Which begs the question - how do you get a good quality video loaded onto Youtube and retain the high quality?
Test 3:
I did the same as Test 2 but during “export” I selected HDV1080.25p.
It took 22 minutes to export.
The .m2t file was 111.493 Mbyte
//
I then closed Shotcut.
Re-opened Shotcut.
Imported the newly createrd .m2t video file.
And… it played (900 images) in 33 seconds.
The video quality was excellent. Crystal clear.
I uploaded it to youtube, that took about 30 minutes. (this file is 14x larger than the previous).
It took youtube about 45 seconds to process it.
I played the video on youtube (play time was 33 seconds).
Video quality was much lower, a grainy appearance.
It was acceptable, but much lower quality than when I played it on ShotCut.
I’m ok with the video, but it’s not the quality I was hoping for.
This was a test just to see what would happen with 900 .jpg images.
Here’s a link to this video.
I’m very new to shotcut and video editing. I think I know the difference between Kodak and a Codec… well heck, what is a Codec come to think of it?
I like the product. I’m’ strill trying to learn the tool.
I tried using AVSVideo Editor several months ago and I liked the product but the output videos were always very low quality no matter what I did so I gave up on it. There was virtually no support.
YouTube encodes at multiple resolutions and bitrates. You need to check and set the resolution in the YouTube player settings.
I then selected “Export” and selected MPEG-4
MPEG-4 is generally not good quality (it is the part 2 video codec from the standard, not the H.264/AVC MPEG-4 codec).
during “export” I selected HDV1080.25p
That is OK, but it is older MPEG-2 technology, which requires high bitrates for good quality as you noticed.
There is a YouTube preset, and Export defaults to the YouTube preset. It is good for many people, but it is possible to get even higher quality, which I will not go into detail now.
OT - but just to clarify
Output is based on what you select. I always choose to output to File>Advanced and enter the desired bitrate, resoution and so on. Output is equal to any video editor.
