Blink - Unable to Create Video

[dcarr]

Hi

I am currently unable to create a video using Blink.

The situation is as follows:

1.   Blink initially failed because ‘ffmpeg.exe’ was not present in ‘C:\Program Files\PixInsight\bin’ on my system. I am using the latest update of PixInsight (01 08 06 1475); not sure of the software distribution arrangements for ffmpeg.  So, I downloaded the 64bit version and stored the executable in the required folder.

2.   With the ffmpeg executable in place, Blink did produce the png files (Blink00001.png onwards) using the default arguments (-y -r 25 -i Blink%05d.png Blink.avi). However, after creating all of the png files, the ‘Make Video’ window displayed “Could not open 'Blink%05d.png”. 

3.   Replacing part of the argument with “Blink*.png” enabled further progress but ended with the error: “Blink00001.png: Unknown file format”.

4.   There were posts in 2015 and 2016 on a similar situation:

https://pixinsight.com/forum/index.php?topic=9510.0
https://pixinsight.com/forum/index.php?topic=9125.msg58617#msg58617

Using the suggested arguments in one of the posts "-r .5 -i Blink%05d.png -c:v libx264 Blink.mp4” gave the same results as in steps  2 and 3.

Any suggestions?

Regards
Dean

[peabody1998]

Not sure if you ever solved your issue but this worked for me for with PixInsight v 1.8.8-4 (x64) Windows OS.

1. Download ffmpeg (latest version-64 bit-static) from https://ffmpeg.zeranoe.com/builds/
2. Extract zip file and place only ffmpeg.exe into ie: C:\Program Files\PixInsight\bin directory
3. XISF Image files MUST be resampled to a smaller size ie: 4656x3520 -> 1429->1080
4. Have blink do an auto stretch (or I prefer to permanently stretch all the linear images with ONE identical histogram stretch)
5. Load resampled images into Blink
6. Click Create Video in blink
7. Set arguments to the following: -y -r 25 -i Blink%05d.png Blink.avi
8. Set output directory to an empty folder
9. Run

The new folder will have the png frames and the AVI movie.

Hope this helps!
--Rich

PS:For short movies I have found that an animated GIF looks better than an AVI!

[Juan Conejero]

Hi Rich,

Thank you so much for posting a structured solution to perform this task on Windows. Just a quick note:

4. Have blink do an auto stretch (or I prefer to permanently stretch all the linear images with ONE identical histogram stretch)

Both actions are not the same. The automatic stretch is adaptive (based on image statistics), so it will be different for each frame precisely to achieve the same visual representation. In general, this is just what we want when we create a blink video.

[peabody1998]

Appreciate the info and your efforts! PixInsight keeps getting better and better!