How to align a sequence of images to create a video?

[StewartR]

I've got some sequences of images which I'd like to tun into stop-motion videos. I'd appreciate some advice on how to do it.

The situation is that each sequence has up to about 100 images in it. But they were shot hand-held, so the individual images won't be aligned perfectly and in some cases won't be aligned very well at all. Here's a quick mock-up of the kind of thing I have - each black rectangle represents one individual frame in the sequence, though of course in my sequences there will be many more than 10 images:

So what I'd like to do is:

1. Align each image onto a larger canvas.
2. Compile the images into a video.

Any suggestions as to how I can do this automatically?

 

[sirch]

Photoshop has Align Layers, I'm not sure how well it will do if they are as far displaced as your illustration suggests but might be worth trying.

 

[Box Brownie]

This is something that I would like to do and your post reminded me about this.

AFAIK it needs to be a software (video or something like ProShow???) that can create a "key frame".......I have not fully grasped how it works but if you look up the description of it it seems to make sense.

Making a sequence of stills into a video where you need, as you describe, to lock a datum point in the frame for all the following ones to 'lock to'.

 

[StewartR]

Photoshop has Align Layers, I'm not sure how well it will do if they are as far displaced as your illustration suggests but might be worth trying.

OK, ta. I don't use Photoshop much, but I have access to it via my CC subscription so I'll give it a try.

Do you know how many images Photoshop can align at once? I'm concerned that trying to align 100 or so images might cause problems with memory usage.

 

[sirch]

I've only ever done a few at a time and even then it's not fast. My guess is that if you have a reasonably fast computer it will churn through them, it will just take a long time so leave it running overnight. PS can create the animation for you as well, just get the layers in the correct order, open the timeline widown and use the Make Frames from layers option. I've used this to create animated GIFS

 

[Box Brownie]

I've only ever done a few at a time and even then it's not fast. My guess is that if you have a reasonably fast computer it will churn through them, it will just take a long time so leave it running overnight. PS can create the animation for you as well, just get the layers in the correct order, open the timeline widown and use the Make Frames from layers option. I've used this to create animated GIFS

I wonder if this feature (as never thought to look ) is in CS6 version of PS?

 

[robhooley167]

ImageJ/ FIJI should do the first part of this at least. It's free software used a lot for scientific image processing.

You can import your images and add them to a stack, then apply a stack registration plugin which should align the images, then the whole stack can be cropped to the common area.

From this you should be able to export it as a video file

I'll write up a more detailed method later, but I have done this kind of processing with FIJI before

 

[sirch]

I wonder if this feature (as never thought to look ) is in CS6 version of PS?

I have no idea, I've got the CC subscription so I'm on the latest version and only used it in the last year or two.