I am having trouble creating a good time lapse video from still pictures. I have taken 300 pictures via the interval timer mode in the Nikon D5500 camera. There are two problems, 1 quality is not as good as I think it should be. Not my main issue. Main issue is the time lapse video plays in a reverse sequence. I thought that might happen as the first image loaded becomes the last image. The total process takes about 5 hours to complete. The process I am following, saw in two YouTube videos is: 1. Load 300 pictures from camera to computer. 2. Open pictures as layers within Gimp - takes about 40 minutes 3. Convert Images: Image - Mode - Indexed. Set Dithering to Floyd-Steinberg - click convert. Process takes about 3 hours 4. Filters - Animation - Optimize (for GIF). Takes about 2 hours 5. Export: Give file name with .Gif . Tick box "as animation". Frame delay in seconds - take default. Check Use delay entered above for all frames.

Hopefully someone will see a step left out or reversed in order to get time lapse video in proper sequence. If not, maybe someone could recommend a good free piece of software that I could use instead of Gimp. I do not want to pay for software as I will not take a lot of time lapse videos, just want the ability and flexibility to create one when I find a good reason to. I have seen Chronolapse software which I will investigate if I cannot get Gimp to work for me.

My computer specs are: Sixth generation I7, 3.4 GHz processor; 16 Gig Memory - I have allocated 12.5 Gig to GIMP, HHD hard drive. Via Task Manager saw the process is very heavy with Disk I/O - 95-100%; Memory usage - takes all I can give it. CPU processing only about 10-15%.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Chuck Devlin

I am having trouble creating a good time lapse video from still pictures. I have taken 300 pictures via the interval timer mode in the Nikon D5500 camera. There are two problems, 1 quality is not as good as I think it should be. Not my main issue. Main issue is the time lapse video plays in a reverse sequence. I thought that might happen as the first image loaded becomes the last image. The total process takes about 5 hours to complete. The process I am following, saw in two YouTube videos is: 1. Load 300 pictures from camera to computer. 2. Open pictures as layers within Gimp - takes about 40 minutes 3. Convert Images: Image - Mode - Indexed. Set Dithering to Floyd-Steinberg - click convert. Process takes about 3 hours 4. Filters - Animation - Optimize (for GIF). Takes about 2 hours 5. Export: Give file name with .Gif . Tick box "as animation". Frame delay in seconds - take default. Check Use delay entered above for all frames.

Hopefully someone will see a step left out or reversed in order to get time lapse video in proper sequence. If not, maybe someone could recommend a good free piece of software that I could use instead of Gimp. I do not want to pay for software as I will not take a lot of time lapse videos, just want the ability and flexibility to create one when I find a good reason to. I have seen Chronolapse software which I will investigate if I cannot get Gimp to work for me.

My computer specs are: Sixth generation I7, 3.4 GHz processor; 16 Gig Memory - I have allocated 12.5 Gig to GIMP, HHD hard drive. Via Task Manager saw the process is very heavy with Disk I/O - 95-100%; Memory usage - takes all I can give it. CPU processing only about 10-15%.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Chuck Devlin

Forgot to mention: Gimp 2.8

You also missed out operating system, assuming a version of Windows.

Judging by conversion times stated (and Nikon) these are big individual frames? Gif format was really meant for an earlier smaller size era.

The immediate issue with frame order is easily solved in Gimp. Use Layer -> Stack -> Reverse Layer Order.

Then it becomes a matter of work flow.

Keep in RGB mode for as long as possible. A Gimp gif has the same 256 colour palette for all layers. Exporting to gif automatically converts to indexed mode. I think it is better to export the gif, then reopen in Gimp then optimise, export again. Up to you.

Is the reason for using gif the ability to loop? Otherwise a video format will give better results. There are applications that will easily produce a video 'slideshow'.

rich: www.gimp-forum.net

Thanks for the response. Now to answer what I forgot to mention. Operation system: Windows 10, picture format is JPG-fine. Don't need or want NEF format as 300 pictures too many to edit and I have not found a batch edit process that will take all edits from one picture and apply to the others. Reason for exporting as .gif - I do not know better, a newbie in creating time lapse videos from still pictures. I also am guessing that the use of Layer - Stack - reverse layer order is to be done right after "Opening as Layers" - all layers will be recognized by the command.

Again thanks for the response, I really appreciate it as I want to use GIMP for this process.

One other question: To replace .gif you mentioned looping - I do not care about looping - actually want it to play just once and then stop. What are your suggestions for other video formats and applications for producing a video timelapse? Chuck Devlin

...snip...
This mailing list format is not the best for giving information other than basic.

I generally use linux, so this short 5 minute video demo is in a Win10 virtual machine, not my favourite OS.

https://youtu.be/9d5P1AXQSLU

It uses the free commandline application Imagemagick which which you can get here:

https://www.imagemagick.org/script/download.php bottom of the page - direct download is

https://www.imagemagick.org/download/binaries/ImageMagick-7.0.7-1-Q16-x64-dll.exe about 25 MB

The two main commands used are:

magick convert filename.xcf %03d.jpg which extracts the xcf layers as jpg's in numbered order 001.jpg ..002.jpg...

You might already have a sequence of jpgs and that might not be necessary.

ffmpeg -r 10 -f image2 -i "%03d.jpg" -vcodec libxvid filename.avi which converts the numbered sequence into a video that should be playable on computers or media players (xvid = divx)

The alternative, is a GUI application, Avidemux, which can open a sequence of files and make a video, ask about it if you can not get the above to work.

Again, thanks for the input - really appreciated. Chuck Devlin