How to smooth timelapse movies by adding a Blur (or IIR) filter

Here is a movie processed by a IIR* filter. Essential each frame is blended with the previous frame.

This is the movie without filter:

The key line of the script is

composite -blend 15 new.jpg last.jpg -matte blend.jpg

So imagine a directory full of images. Image001.jpg to Image100.jpg

Each newly processed frame is a blend of the current frame with the previous frame. The parameter -blend 15 you can change from anything from -blend 01 to -blend 99. Play around a bit to understand it better.

The exact script I used is available here on github:

https://gist.github.com/1123061

It’s a bash script and it uses Imagemagick to do the image processing and FFMPEG to make the frames into a movie. Both Imagemagick and FFMPEG are free, open source programs that run on linux, windows and macosx. Plenty of other ways to do the same in other languages as well.

*(Infinite Impulse Response) a technical term for the engineers.

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4 Responses to How to smooth timelapse movies by adding a Blur (or IIR) filter

  1. europeancataclism says:

    Where to find the IIR filtered version? Thanks!

  2. europeancataclism says:

    On another note, are IIR filters meant to be always a frame blending effect?

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