different aspect ratios
vlog_00.019
January 20, 2021
Today's video is an experiment in editing together shots with different aspect ratios. A naive attempt to simply concat all the clips together with ffmpeg did work, but playback would cause the video window to change size to fit the currently playing clip. Pretty disorientating.
A second approach involved using ffmpeg to upscale the 640x480 clip to 1280:720 while maintaining the 4:3 aspect ratio and padding the sides with black bars, And then, once the 640 clip was upscaled to 1280, I could concat all the clips together. And that is the video you see here!
A third option, similar to the second approach, involved using ffmeg to perform the same upscale of 640x480 to 1280x720, but not maintaining the original 4:3 aspect ratio. This resulted in a video that was 1280x720 with no black bars, which is exactly what I want. However, in order to achieve this conversion, the video is stretched in the horizontal (left/right) direction. It doesn't actually look all that bad. Just a bit...off. This slight stretching just doesn't feel right to me, so I actually prefer the second approach.
Command Lines
Second Option (maintain aspect ratio)
ffmpeg -i input.MOV -vf "scale=1280:720:force_original_aspect_ratio=1,pad=1280:720:(ow-iw)/2:(oh-ih)/2" output.MOV
Third Option (stretch)
ffmpeg -i input.MOV -vf "scale=1280:720:force_original_aspect_ratio=0,pad=1280:720:(ow-iw)/2:(oh-ih)/2" output.MOV
The only difference is that force_original_aspect_ratio flag.
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My Day
Skipped my usual bi-weekly grocery shop today to listen to the inauguration ceremony for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. It was good.
Spent much of the day working to get one of my old computers up and running so I can continue work on my video editor project while I wait for a new microSD card to arrive to the RPi. Once I got that working, I spent some time getting nginx and flask configured.
(Side note: I booted up an old old old i686 machine I got for free years ago; it's the old pizza box style. It POSTed fine and I got into the BIOS without issue and...it still had the correct time and date! This thing is like 20 years old and hasn't even been plugged in for a couple of years now. Crazy!)
In the afternoon I had several calls with recruiters; trying to find me a job. Then evening walk/jog (where I took today's video). Then Wednesday (virtual) Movie Night with friends over Discord. And, finally, editing/ffmpeg experiments and posting the vlog.
Cheers.