Converting Video to Image Sequences with ffmpeg

Another little aide-memoire masquerading as a blog post; the specific incantation required to turn a video into a named sequence of images with ffmpeg is…

ffmpeg -i <path to source video>  -vf fps=<frames per second> <output directory/basename->%d.png

…where…

<path to source video> is the path to the video file in question.
<frames per second> is the number of frames per second of footage to extract. This can be less than 1 if you wish to extract at a lower rate than one frame per second.
<output directory/basename->%d.png is a composite instruction to create files in the directory ‘output directory’, for these files to have the prefix ‘basename-‘, and for these files to have an incrementing count appended to the end. It also specifies that the output files should be in the ‘.png’ format.

Northern Ireland’s Most Wanted: The Lost Television Dramas

Having recently re-watched ‘Missing Believed Wiped‘, I stumbled across a pair of nice articles covering the lost and wiped dramas of Northern Ireland – a region that, like the rest of the UK, lost a number of pieces to a poor archiving policy and the the claws of the bulk eraser.

Continue reading “Northern Ireland’s Most Wanted: The Lost Television Dramas”

Night of the Mini Dead (Love, Death & Robots)

This is a funky little thing – Night of the Mini Dead, from Netflix’s Love, Death & Robots. Apparently it’s from the show’s third season which, having firmly bounced off the first season (twice!), I’ve not yet seen. The uploader looks to have chopped it into two parts, though neither part is excessively long.

Part One

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgV2uB4lPi4

Part Two

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2v09DEqrAMI

And The Now Obligatory VFX Breakdown

There’s also a nifty VFX breakdown showing how the majority of the piece is actually augmented stock photography overlaid with GCI and with a tilt-shift effect applied.