Making Animations

There is a nice tool out there called motion that generates single picture snapshots from a video4linux device. We will use this tools as an example to generate the pictures and convert the pictures to a movie. Assuming we have a webcam on /dev/video1, try

  motion -d /dev/video1 -Q

for a couple of seconds to generate snapshots in a directory tree that is based on time formats. The current year 2002/ is assumed to be the top level directory. The import module -x imlist simply takes a list of frames that will make the final movie. One picture/frame per row. Generate the list with

  find 2002/ ! -type d | sort > list

and start transcode to convert the sequence to a XviD codec movie with. But wait a second. There is no auto-probing for this mode. Use tcprobe on a single image and write down the frame parameter. We find

  andromeda:transcode>tcprobe -i 2002/04/24/23/04/39-03.jpg
  [tcprobe] JPEG image
  [tcprobe] summary for 2002/04/24/23/04/39-03.jpg, (*) = not default, 0 = not detected
  import frame size: -g 352x288 [720x576] (*)
  frame rate: -f 1.000 [25.000] frc=0 (*)
  no audio track: use "null" import module for audio

which provides the required information to start

  transcode -i list -x imlist,null -g 352x288 -y xvid,null -f 1 -o movie.avi -H 0

We choose a frame rate of one frame per second and switch auto-probing and audio (import/export) completely off. This will generate our fancy surveillance movie.