Danux
24th September 2006, 02:58
Not quite sure how to pose this question, so perhaps I'll start by describing what I would like as a finished file.
I'd like to try and encode a few flicks with full stereo sound, but using still images changing at significant moments, rather than full motion video. Another way to look what I am after, would be to say that I'd like to make an "audio book" of a movie, but with stills to augment the soundtrack. It would have to be something more than grabbing a frame every 3 seconds, because I looking to use relevant, clean images, and the "frame rate" would vary with the relevance. A long speech by a character may need three images over 15 seconds, whereas a car chase or gun fight might use a frame a second.
Why encode this way? I prefer to be somewhat aware of my surroundings, on a bus or sitting public, etc, and I've watched most of my DVDs often enough that full motion video just isn't necessary any more. This is especially true for stage plays taken to the silver screen (Shakespeare, Glengarry Glen Ross, etc). Additionally, I can fit more entertainment onto a single piece of media, which gives me more variety on the move, or less expenditure on, say, SD cards.
Although I confess only mediocre knowledge of the whole encoding process, it seems to me that a codec like XviD already has the ability to detect scene changes, so perhaps grabbing the first frame of every scene change would be an "easy" way to automate the encoding process. A better, but more time-consuming, method would be to have a button to click, and as one watches a movie in real time, it grabs the stills as the user inputs them.
An additional appeal, in my mind, is that anything capable of playing XviD files right now should probably be able to play a "movie" encoded in this fashion.
I've seen Mac stuff where a user takes a series of JPEGs and dubs audio over it to make a movie, but I believe that takes a tremendous amount of user input for timing and editting.
Is something like what I am after already available?
I'd like to try and encode a few flicks with full stereo sound, but using still images changing at significant moments, rather than full motion video. Another way to look what I am after, would be to say that I'd like to make an "audio book" of a movie, but with stills to augment the soundtrack. It would have to be something more than grabbing a frame every 3 seconds, because I looking to use relevant, clean images, and the "frame rate" would vary with the relevance. A long speech by a character may need three images over 15 seconds, whereas a car chase or gun fight might use a frame a second.
Why encode this way? I prefer to be somewhat aware of my surroundings, on a bus or sitting public, etc, and I've watched most of my DVDs often enough that full motion video just isn't necessary any more. This is especially true for stage plays taken to the silver screen (Shakespeare, Glengarry Glen Ross, etc). Additionally, I can fit more entertainment onto a single piece of media, which gives me more variety on the move, or less expenditure on, say, SD cards.
Although I confess only mediocre knowledge of the whole encoding process, it seems to me that a codec like XviD already has the ability to detect scene changes, so perhaps grabbing the first frame of every scene change would be an "easy" way to automate the encoding process. A better, but more time-consuming, method would be to have a button to click, and as one watches a movie in real time, it grabs the stills as the user inputs them.
An additional appeal, in my mind, is that anything capable of playing XviD files right now should probably be able to play a "movie" encoded in this fashion.
I've seen Mac stuff where a user takes a series of JPEGs and dubs audio over it to make a movie, but I believe that takes a tremendous amount of user input for timing and editting.
Is something like what I am after already available?