help turning pictures back into movie

[james42519]

i accidentally deleted some pictures and video off my moms kodak camera and ran a recovery thing but the problem is it turned the .mov into a lot of pictures. can someone tell me a easy way to turn them back into video. thanks for help and sorry if this is in the wrong place.

[boldfire]

Is it every single frame which has become a still image? Or just *some* of the frames?

Also, did the video originally have audio?

[tehboris]

If the video was recovered like you suggest, it is likely that each of the pictures is a key frame from the video. Depending on the camera, each key frame can be between 1 second to 30 seconds apart, you can't make a usable video from this (normal video is usually 23+ frames per second).

[james42519]

every frame. if you scroll through them fast enough it looks smooth. not key frames. the camera didn't do sound so not worried about that. just would like to connect the pictures back together to make it a movie. think i used this but forget now. looked at a few and it's been a few days and deleted it already. don't like to keep stuff on computer that i won't use often. http://www.download.com/PhotoRescue/3000-2248_4-10160919.html

have dell dimension 8200 with winxp pro and 256 MB rdram so kinda limited i guess with what i can use.

[tehboris]

Every frame that isn't a key frame will look 'broken' as each non key frame only contains data the changed from the key frame or the last frame.

That is to say, if you recorded your self standing perfectly still, all the frames between the key frames would contain no data. If you then move your hand the frames that captured this would show your hand and nothing else.

[james42519]

Every frame that isn't a key frame will look 'broken' as each non key frame only contains data the changed from the key frame or the last frame.

That is to say, if you recorded your self standing perfectly still, all the frames between the key frames would contain no data. If you then move your hand the frames that captured this would show your hand and nothing else.
well what you are describing is not what is happening. really it made every frame into a picture. now what can i use to connect them. it's not key frames. how else you explain a 10 sec long video being a couple hundred pictures? guess i could show them but kinda not sure if that is good idea since it's kinda personal and stuff.

[tehboris]

You could use the GIMP to create an animated gif from them.

[james42519]

You could use the GIMP to create an animated gif from them.don't have gimp and have no idea how would do that.

[tehboris]

don't have gimp and have no idea how would do that.

Here. (http://tinyurl.com/88blnp)

[james42519]

Here. (http://tinyurl.com/88blnp)

gimp sure seems like a lot of work to just put pictures together. oh yeah nice site. might use that sometime. know i could have just looked it up but thought someone else might know something too. maybe windows movie maker?

[sembazuru]

well what you are describing is not what is happening. really it made every frame into a picture. now what can i use to connect them. it's not key frames. how else you explain a 10 sec long video being a couple hundred pictures? guess i could show them but kinda not sure if that is good idea since it's kinda personal and stuff.

It sounds to me like the final video was lost and only the cached frames were recovered, or the recovery software mistook a single mjpeg (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mjpeg) file as it's individual frames. For those too lazy to follow the mjpeg wikipedia link, above, basically a mjpeg file is a container that holds every frame as it's own unique jpeg image. There is no temporal compression (key frames and tweens) like there is in mpeg. mjpeg actually stands for "Motion JPEG" and many cameras create these files as it's easier to throw the jpeg frames together in a mjpeg than having to figure out decent key frames and calculate the deltas to get the tweens. Digital still camera processors are optimized for processing individual images, not video streams.

Quickly looking around for files to re-concatenate the frames into a video I found a couple programs, but they are command line only. MEncoder as usually installed with MPlayer (http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/info.html) (see section 9.8 (http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/menc-feat-enc-images.html) of it's manual (http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/index.html) for the syntax) should work, as well as ffmpeg (http://ffmpeg.org/) (it's manual isn't as helpful with examples, so a google search of "ffmpeg mjpeg" may be in order for examples of proper syntax). There may be more programs that do what you want using a GUI, but I only did a quick search before leaving for work. Hope this gets you going in the right direction.

I just hope the individual jpeg frames/files are named in a way that will make stitching back together easier. (i.e. file names like fubar001.jpg through fubar999.jpg.)

[james42519]

It sounds to me like the final video was lost and only the cached frames were recovered, or the recovery software mistook a single mjpeg (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mjpeg) file as it's individual frames. For those too lazy to follow the mjpeg wikipedia link, above, basically a mjpeg file is a container that holds every frame as it's own unique jpeg image. There is no temporal compression (key frames and tweens) like there is in mpeg. mjpeg actually stands for "Motion JPEG" and many cameras create these files as it's easier to throw the jpeg frames together in a mjpeg than having to figure out decent key frames and calculate the deltas to get the tweens. Digital still camera processors are optimized for processing individual images, not video streams.

Quickly looking around for files to re-concatenate the frames into a video I found a couple programs, but they are command line only. MEncoder as usually installed with MPlayer (http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/info.html) (see section 9.8 (http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/menc-feat-enc-images.html) of it's manual (http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/index.html) for the syntax) should work, as well as ffmpeg (http://ffmpeg.org/) (it's manual isn't as helpful with examples, so a google search of "ffmpeg mjpeg" may be in order for examples of proper syntax). There may be more programs that do what you want using a GUI, but I only did a quick search before leaving for work. Hope this gets you going in the right direction.

I just hope the individual jpeg frames/files are named in a way that will make stitching back together easier. (i.e. file names like fubar001.jpg through fubar999.jpg.)

yeah thanks. that seems like what happened. when recovered files it recovered in the order they were taken so they are in order like you are talking about. will try and look into what you gave. guess it makes sense that a camera that takes pictures will just take a lot of pictures to make video instead of another format to make the video in.