ffmpeg for time-lapse, sets of images, and even *archiving*!

I now use the FFMPEG package compiled locally on my Mac Leopard laptop.

If you want to take a bunch of JPEG images, you can turn them into a “motion JPEG” AVI video file (which is ideal for time-lapse). What’s neat about ffmpeg, is you can turn a directory of JPEGs into an AVI and later recreate the JPEGs from the AVI.

Thus, I can take 100-1000 JPEG images from a “shoot” and create a video time-lapse of all the JPEG images in a given subdir in a command-line shell (terminal):
ffmpeg -r 6 -i "%04d.jpg" -an -vcodec copy out.avi

Even cooler, you can go directly back to *the same JPEG* images like so (this is where you can see it is a lossless conversion from JPEGs to Motion JPEG and back):
ffmpeg -i out.avi -vcodec copy "%04d.jpg"


“-r 6″ is the framerate, ie: “make the video play 6 JPEG images per second”.

It doesn’t get much nicer than that! Not to mention, the encoding is FAST! I recently moved from mencoder/mplayer to ffmpeg since you can specify a complete copy of the input JPEGs (lossless from the source) as well as compress them down a bit (as you like).

For the lossless conversion, the (not entirely obvious) *key* to success is to use the “-vcodec copy” *after* the source file(s).

You can get this running on Windows with Cygwin, Mac with terminal, and any linux distribution like Ubuntu.

THANK YOU DONORS!

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU

donors to my AIDS LifeCycle8 bikeride!

I took about 500 photos myself during the seven days of riding. Hunter also took about that many photos, too. I will make a combined album soon and edit a video as well and put links to them on this site.

However, for now, you can see    ~100 of my best photos on my public albums here:

Photo album (1 of 2)

Photo album (2 of 2)

Finished the ride!

Well, Hunter and I made it home safe and sound last night!

We finished just before the course formally closed, yesterday (saturday) around 3pm.
(A lot of us were late due to two accident-caused road closure/delays and then Hunter and I decided to sneak off course a block to reward ourselves with Peets mocha freddos just before riding in.   We flew from LAX to SFO and then BART-ed and were home just after midnight.  Was sooo nice to see the kitties again and get things airing out!

Some interesting summary thoughts:

• Day 6 got entirely cancelled and we had to be bussed from camp to camp. We originally thought it was due to the uphill and downhill being deemed “too dangerous” in the rain by the CHP, but it was actually because that pass got closed temporarily due to rain related accidents and only ~250 riders (~10%) made it out on the rainy road before the “hold”. We had a 3 hour permit to cone off a single lane of route 101/1 on this narrow “no shoulder” bridge, and by the time the pass was reopened, not all the riders were likely to make it through the pass. CHP didn’t want to extend the times so they asked us to cancel that day. *First time* that has happened in 16 years of LifeCycle / AIDSRide !   Of course, the irony is that the rains stopped early in the morning by about 8am, and Hunter and I (and the riders who have similar pace — at least 50% of the riders) could have easily made that road closure for a really wonderfully beautiful perfect biking weather day.
• Although the weather was a bit ominous at times, we only got about three 5-10 minute very light sprinkles of rain while biking or in the nonsleeping hours of camp.  It did rain one morning pretty good — causing a lot of tents to flood.  We prepared a bit better with a tarp under our tent (and had a thick air mattress) so we didn’t get tooo wet.
• I was slightly crabby or something Day1 (due to lack of sleep and foggy wet start) but every day pretty much got *more* beautiful and better as it went on.  If fact, I loved every day but day6 (which wasn’t awful — just disappointing that the route got cancelled.)
• This year the biggest difference was the fact that while last year was hot and dry nearly every single day, this ride was a slight bit cool (though nicely never cold at all) and *very* humid (comparatively) every day.  Strange this time of year!
• Day 5 was a big change of course this year.  Last year was a total cakewalk (or “champagne ride” as the pros sometime call last day of Tour de France ) at only 43 miles and limited hills (w/ so so scenery).  This year was a noteably tougher nearly 70 miles where the ride to lunch was *jaw droppingly* gorgeous (riding wine country a al the movie “Sideways” into Solvang for the first time in ALC history) and fantastic.  However, after lunch was quite challenging where we headed directly westward for Lompoc — which meant the picking up strong wind was all headwind on flats and downhills and we were working hard on a *lot* of uphills.  So there was “no recovery” period from lunch to camp.  

Overall, once again an utterly fantastic ride!

We knew so many people this year it was like a rolling party of socializing and eating (well with determined-to-finish work on the bike in between ).  It’s soooo nice to have found this wonderful community of people who care for others and everyone in the Ride.  I’ve been thinking it’s a lot like the communities people find in churches (having grown up Methodist but now non-religious).

Rain delay at start day6

Well we are all waiting to roll after CA Highway Patrol
Shut down the course due to early rain.
Not sure if we’ll get cleared to ride
Was an early accident on only
big downhill of the day.

Rumor is now day may be cancelled
and will have to bus 2000+ riders
and bikes. We will see…

Starting Day 6!

So far so good.
We made it safe and dry until now.
Today started light rain with wet tent.
It’s let up over breakfast mostly
so we are hoping hoping for a break
Today and crossing our fingers

Today’s highlights are Santa Barbara,
Hopefully dolphin coastal sightings,
And an ice cream stop — it’s
Normally super hot today!

Yesterday’s day 5 “red dress day” was
A blast even though it was a bit of a
Hard finish with hills and headwinds

Thanks all for your support, interest,
And comments!

Halfway through AIDS LifeCycle

We finished day three’s ride today. I an feeling very strong still and enjoying the unbelievably pretty inland agricultural “salad bowl” of CA and then the dryer wide open grasslands too. The weather has been quite good – not too hot and not too cool. The colder mornings are offset by the rather unseasonly humidity

Hunter is doing well too. Each day seems to get more social and more fun. We know and keep meeting more wonderful people

What a fantastic event!

It’s OK to be a TRL (video)

Hunter and Tracey finish up their season of being

Training Ride Leaders

and share a little of what they’ve learned

It’s OK to be a TRL

tracey bike accident — walks away scraped but OK

tracey bike accident -- walks away scraped but OK

ouchie!

A steel cruiser bike roared blindly out of a blind drive and ran into me.  The impact “taco-ed” (crumpled) my wheel and pitched me over the handle bars and the 2nd bike. I hit the pavement, but managed to not break anything or hit my head. I scraped up my fingers, tore up 4 fingernails, and scraped my elbow and knee. Later we’d learn it was all surface stuff and only my front wheel needed replacing. Amazingly lucky to have had so little damage!

I was prolly doing 10-15 mph; other rider maybe 7-10.  All of this happened right in front of Hunter’s horrified eyes!

More pictures on public Facebook album.

Breakfast with Amy Goodman of “Democracy Now!”

Amy Goodman, Tracey, the Kahles

Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now!,  is on tour this month across the country.  She visited San Francisco for two days this week.  My boss, Brewster Kahle from Internet Archive, knew that I am a raving fan of Amy and her amazing show of independent journalism. He was kind enough to invite me along to a long breakfast discussion with Amy.

Brewster and Amy found a common interest on issues of the potential monopoly of Google books, so she scheduled a followup discussion the next day with Brewster on Amy’s show “Democracy Now!” (for likely broadcasting Apr20-25). In person, Amy is an incredibly sweet and inquisitive individual. She is brilliant as well as thoughtful, generous and full of grace. I was thrilled to meet her in person and see how a part of her day goes. I look up to her tremendously as an award-winning pioneer in the field of journalism.

photo album

Oh this made me sooo happy!  8-)

ffmpeg building on mac intel/x386

ffmpeg v0.5 just came out. it’s the bomb. it’s got tons of fixes and massive amounts of new codecs that it can read. for example, it can now decode my professional filmmaker brother’s “DVC ProHD” highly proprietary (and massive bitrate!) format! it can also decode flac and 24-bit flac. (encoding flac is disappointing though).

at any rate! macports is a great way to get it installed on your mac.
the current way of setting up macports and then doing
sudo port install ffmpeg
works fine on my PPC at work (oddly — pretty old computer now) but not my Air (intel x386)

So I set out to find the fixes needed to make it work. Here they are:

step 1: install macports — see http://www.macports.org/install.php

sudo port install x264 +noasm # for i386 (not needed for PPC)
sudo port fetch ffmpeg
sudo port checksum ffmpeg
sudo port extract ffmpeg
sudo port patch ffmpeg
remove “–enable-shared” from /opt/local/var/macports/sources/rsync.macports.org/release/ports/multimedia/ffmpeg/Portfile
sudo port install ffmpeg

[May update] I think the packages are improving so some of the above steps may not be necessary, depending on your Mac model, xcode version, and such. So I’d suggest just trying “sudo port install ffmpeg” first to see if it works and try some tweaks above if that doesn’t work