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xine out/video.mpg
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You can click here to view a small version of this
video.
p2d supports many different transitions. Given all the choices,
it's almost as easy
to take a list of photo names, pick some transitions that fit and generate the
configuration file by manually editing it. Here
is another configuration file, built that way. I called this file show1.cfg.
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0.5s "-black"
1s 20050621_1500.jpg fill 1000% pan 100%
5s 20050621_1500.jpg
1s 20050621_1500.jpg box in 20050622_2053a.jpg
5s 20050622_2053a.jpg
1s 20050622_2053a.jpg wipe fromleft "-black" slide
0.5s "-black"
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I'll explain what's happening (or just view the video
and you may see what's happening. Better yet,
if your following along and doing this with your own pictures, you can look at
the video p2d generated from that.
The pan is an interesting transition.
I wanted to start with a black screen, show the first picture as a small dot
in the center and slowly expand it to full screen. I figure that a small dot
means about 10% of the image in the center. This is a magnification of 10x or
1000%. The second line will start with that small image and then expand the
image over 1 second to fill screen. The box transition, seemed appropriate
next since it starts with the first photo on the line and slowly maps in
the second image from the outer edges in to the center. (Imagine a box
shrinking from full screen to the center, and as it procedes in, the second
photo is revealed as the box passes thru the image.) Finally this uses
a slide transition. I read the wipe transition as 20050622_2053a.jpg wipe in
fromleft "-black" slide out.
The black screen appears to push the last image off the screen.
Let's talk a little about transitions. First the wipe/slide transitions.
As you saw in the previous example, a "wipe in fromleft .. slide out"
transition can be described as follows. Imagine a vertical line moving from
the left to the right of the screen, the "wipe in" means that the new image
is revealed as the line passes that portion of the screen. The slide out,
makes the old image appear to be pushed off the screen. You can use wipe or
slide for either image, and from any side, fromleft, fromright, fromtop, or
frombottom. You can also do wipes from the corners. So you could say
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1s 20050622_2053a.jpg wipe fromtopleft "-black" wipe
0.5s "-black"
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The corner wipes can only be a wipe. It doesn't really make sence to
slide the image in or out diagonally.
The box transition can either start at the center and grow out, or at the
edges and shrink in. Thus 'box in' and 'box out' transitions. There is also a
'diamond in' and 'diamond out' which behaves similarly, but uses a diamond
shape.
We now have a video, although its only about 14 seconds long. What about
audio? If you have been trying this yourself as you read along, you will
notice that p2d generates a storyboard when it finishes. For my second
example it looks like this:
this
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Time Duration Event
0:00:00.00 0:00:14.00 audio : -silence ( 0:07:00.00)
0:00:00.00 0:00:00.50 video : -black crop 720x480+0+0 resize 720x480
0:00:00.50 0:00:01.00 video : 20050621_1500.jpg(2608x1952) center=1304,976
mag=0.027 (10%,11%) pan to center=1304,976
mag=0.276074 (100%,112%)
0:00:01.50 0:00:05.00 video : 20050621_1500.jpg crop 2607x1738+0+107 resize
720x480
0:00:06.50 0:00:01.00 video : 20050621_1500.jpg box in 20050622_2053a.jpg
0:00:07.50 0:00:05.00 video : 20050622_2053a.jpg crop 2607x1738+0+107 resize
720x480
0:00:12.50 0:00:01.00 video : 20050622_2053a.jpg wipe in FROMLEFT slide out
-black
0:00:13.50 0:00:00.50 video : -black crop 720x480+0+0 resize 720x480
Run Time 0:00:14.00
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Notice it supplied an audio track for us. But it's not very exciting.
14 seconds of silence. The config file below, adds a mp3 audio clip.
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- clip.mp3 audio
0.5s "-black"
1s 20050621_1500.jpg fill 1000% pan 100%
5s 20050621_1500.jpg
1s 20050621_1500.jpg box in 20050622_2053a.jpg
5s 20050622_2053a.jpg
1s 20050622_2053a.jpg wipe fromleft "-black" slide
0.5s "-black"
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This will use the audio clip "clip.mp3".
When the last slide is finished the audio will
stop. Notice that instead of a number the line starts with a minus sign.
This means, use the length of the audio clip as the duration, well at least
as much of it is needed. Another special
case is using a minus sign for the duration of a photo. This means to display
the photo until the current audio clip is finished.
You can also specify a fadein or fadeout on an audio clip. In our example,
our 14 second video, the audio will end abruptly at 14 seconds. If we want to
fade the sound out over the last second as the image wipes to black then
stays on black for a while we could have used either of the following for the audio
line.
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14s clip.mp3 audio fadeout 1
- clip.mp3 audio fadeout 1
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Finally, if you want to skip the beginning of the audio clip, you can use the
trim modifier.
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- clip.mp3 audio trim 2 fadeout 1
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This will start the audio clip 2 seconds into it.
Zoom
Each image allows a number of options to be set. You can specify a location
on the image that you want to be at the center of the screen, and you can
specify a zoom or magnification factor.
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5s 20050621_1500.jpg 200% 800,600
5s 20050621_1500.jpg 200% bottomleft fill
5s 20050621_1500.jpg 200% bottomleft
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The first line will magnify the picture to 200% and use 800x600 as the center.
This of course means you need to know the size of the photo to figure out
where you want the center to be. p2d provides 9 predefined points for
you. The 4 corners (topleft, topright, bottomleft, bottomright),
the mid-points of each side (top, bottom, left, right), and
the center of the image. For everything else, I find it easier to
bring up the photo in gimp and have it tell me the coordinates desired.
The second line above, specifies the bottomleft corner, which in this
case happens to be 0,1952. Adding the
word fill causes p2d to actually place the specified point at the
center of the final image. It says to allow all the space where the image
doesn't appear to be filled with the background image. This is the
image on the left below. Since we haven't done anything with the background,
the default is just a black screen.
The third line, doesn't use fill. p2d will move the center and adjust
the zoom if necessary so that there are pixels to be seen everywhere. This is
the picture on the right. In this case,
p2d will increase the x, and decrease the y coordinates for the center
so that the bottom left corner of the image is at the bottom left of the screen.
While the image on the left doesn't look very attractive, there are situations
where it creates an interesting effect.
Titles
Other tools are much more capable of adding text to images. p2d does
provide some very limited capabilities. Hopefully, just enough. Here is
one more iteration of our example with some title information
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- clip.mp3 audio fadeout 1
0.5s "-black" title "The Oregon Coast" color blue
1s "-black" title "The Oregon Coast" color blue dissolve 20050621_1500.jpg
5s 20050621_1500.jpg
1s 20050621_1500.jpg wipe fromtopleft 20050622_2053a.jpg
5s 20050622_2053a.jpg
title color yellow
subtitle 12 color yellow
1s 20050622_2053a.jpg diamond out "-black" title "That's All Folks" subtitle "Copyright 2005 Stephen Dum"
0.5s "-black" title "That's All Folks" subtitle "Copyright 2005 Stephen Dum"
2.0s "-black" title "That's All Folks" subtitle "Copyright 2005 Stephen Dum" wipe frombottom "-black" slide
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title and subtitle are modifiers that can be applied to images. There is some
control over placement, but title is placed left justified, and a sub title is
centered. The second and third line show a simple use of adding a title to an
image. title and subtitle are also separate commands that can be used to
change the default values. These are used in the 7th and 8th lines, so I
didn't have to retype the data as many times. Putting everything needed on a
single configuration line for a complex line like line 9 can make for very
long lines. You can put a backslash at the end of a line and continue on the
next line.
You can try the final video clip.
If you have been following along, you may have noticed that the videos linked
to in this tutorial are not the same as the ones you have been generating.
p2d has a special option, -w, which causes it to halve the dimentions
of the images, making for a much faster download, and of course smaller
images. This was used to generate the videos in the tutorial.
Because the default settings for title and subtitle are really for 720x480
sized images, (they should be close enough for PAL users who use 720x576)
when the image is reduced to 360x240, they don't work very well. Here is
the config file that was actually used to generate the smaller video
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- clip.mp3 audio fadeout 1
0.5s "-black" title "The Oregon Coast" color blue 24
1s "-black" title "The Oregon Coast" color blue 24 dissolve 20050621_1500.jpg
5s 20050621_1500.jpg
1s 20050621_1500.jpg wipe fromtopleft 20050622_2053a.jpg
5s 20050622_2053a.jpg
title 24 color yellow
subtitle 10 0,170 color yellow
1s 20050622_2053a.jpg diamond out "-black" title "That's All Folks" subtitle "Copyright 2005 Stephen Dum"
0.5s "-black" title "That's All Folks" subtitle "Copyright 2005 Stephen Dum"
2.0s "-black" title "That's All Folks" subtitle "Copyright 2005 Stephen Dum" wipe frombottom "-black" slide
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One final item. If you want a background other than the simple black you get
by default, you can use the background command to change the default.
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background "-blue"
background myimage.jpg 110%
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The first line, would set a blue background. The second uses myimage.jpg
with a slight zoom.
If you haven't downloaded and tried p2d yet, I hope this persuaded you
to give it a try.
And now what do I do with this video
There are two obvious answers to this:
- The video is playable with xine and windows media player, share it with
friends.
- Share it on the web. The -w option, generates a 360x240 lower resolution
image video more suited for web viewing.
- Create a dvd from it with a authoring tool like
dvdstyler. One
caution, I found that dvdstyler version 1.4 has a problem on Fedora Core 4
that prevents it from generating menus correctly. Until it's fixed, a hack to
work around it, is to bring up the configuration settings menu and add the
option '-S 420mp3g2' as an option for ppmtoy4m in the Jpeg2Mpeg command.
