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Producing videos out of pictures

Currently Camera FV-5 does not include built-in functionality to produce videos from the pictures taken with the intervalometer functionality. Therefore, if your purpose is to build a timelapse video with the pictures taken with the intervalometer, you need another application for either Android or desktop computer.

Although application for mobile devices might exist to produce such timelapse videos, a full-fledged application for desktop computers is still recommended.

Some of the reasons a desktop computer is a better options are:

  • Mobile devices have limited memory and serious power constraints. Therefore applications built for mobile devices are usually optimized with those constrains in mind. Optimizing an application for mobile devices is always a tradeoff of quality. Applications sacrifice quality in order to meet power and memory contrains. On mobile devices you would expect a video to be produced in a few seconds, but it normally takes minutes to hours on full-fledged desktop computers, with a lot of available memory and power. This is because computer software doesn’t sacrifice quality for speed (or you can always choose to go for speed, but at least you have the choice to go for quality or this is the default option).
  • You might want to do additional post-editing on your captures pictures before producing the timelapse, like cropping the picture, leveling it, adjusting colors or doing something more complex like inpainting to remove undesired objects or image stabilization. Although it is theoretically possible on mobile devices, most post-production image editing apps lack batch processing features, therefore makes the processing of multiple pictures simply not possible or realistic.
  • If you are aiming at a professional production, you’ll want to take time to produce a good timelapse video. Therefore it is always a good option to spend more time with a computer than trying to accomplish everything with a mobile phone.

Most video software and NLEs (non-linear editors) let you import picture series as video clips. Commercial software like Sony Vegas and Adobe After Effects are suitable for this, as well as VirtualDub among the free alternatives, but the same applies to other software. For this to work, it is important to use sequential file naming for images produced, since most software relies on this to determine the files that form part of the same clip.