web
Quick animations from slides for youtube
Quick animations from slides for youtube.
Some things are better shown in motion. Full stop. In a paper, you can only present still images, but linking a youtube video with a supplemental animation is certainly an acceptable option nowadays.
So I created a quick and dirty animation from slides I had prepared already a while ago. The result is puristic (no audio comment, no fine tuning), but I managed to get it in less than 40 min effort, including some trial and error and uploads.
So here’s the three simple steps to create a quick-and-dirty animation from you existing (pdf) slides.
pdftk slides.pdf burst
To split into pages.
for x in pg*pdf
do
convert -density 400 $x "${x%pdf}png"
done
Create raster images using imagemagick; density adjusts the resolution.
mencoder mf://*.png -mf fps=1:type=png -ovc copy -oac copy -o output.avi
Create video with one slide per second; adjust fps if not appropriate
Check out my result on youtube.
For embedding the animation in a website, a gif image might be more handy; that is just another command away:
convert -geometry 40% -delay 100 -loop 0 pg*png output.gif
Here, -loop 0
means infinitly repeat loop, -delay 100
is a 1 second delay
(as we used it for the video above). The -geometry 40%
is optional,
but for most applications, the gif should be a substantially smaller file,
so reducing the resolution is a good idea here.