hi all, ive tried using shotcut and kdenlive but the outputted file ends up being huge. i have a single image and want to put audio on top (releasing a song) but these programs end up making video files where they render the same image on each frame and the files end up being huge. what is the best way to achieve my use case of making a single photo music ‘video’ that doesnt degrade the quality of the image and can be posted to youtube?
tl;dr: need a still image video (image is lossless) where rhe imsge isnt reduplicared and has audio
The answer is always ffmpeg
im confused sorry, i tried the libx265 codec but the image still has blurry edges??
Since the end goal is to post a video to YouTube, you will have to create a video file. Personally I would probably just be lazy and upload the large file, since YouTube is going to reconvert the video anyway.
That said, to optimize the file you need to know how videos work, specifically key frames. Speaking generally, when a video gets encoded, it doesn’t add the whole image for each frame. Instead, it only does that when the current frame is a key frame, and then only stores the difference to the previous frame for every regular frame. There’s a lot of different strategies when placing keyframes, like every X seconds, when the scene changes, or both. This is usually you can change somewhere in the encoding settings of the application you’re using. You will need to use a codec/format that supports interframe compression though, so avoid AVI and MJPEG.
So the TL;DR is: Try to decrease the amount of key frames as much as possible, maybe even down to only one if possible.
This might depend on where you’re uploading/how you’re playing this file, but you could add a thumbnail to the audio file? I know that vlc and mpv will play your audio file and show the thumbnail, but I’m not sure if YouTube would take that. Not sure if this is exactly what you’re looking for but it is pretty efficient.
In kdenlive, the following settings work well for me (you can transfer the options to ffmpeg cli as well if you prefer that):
f=matroska movflags=+faststart vcodec=libx264 tune=stillimage progressive=1 g=1000 bf=2 crf=%quality acodec=flac ar=48000For reference, I get a 3.7 GB video with a duration of over 5 h @4k resolution. The audio itself is already 3.7 GB and it’s just a still image. For CRF, set something around 23, that should do.
Are you sure your rendering settings are correct? It sounds like the video isn’t being encoded at all. Video encoding works by storing a frame in full quality every couple seconds or so. For the rest of the frames, only their differences from the previous full-quality frame are stored. But from what you describe, it sounds like the latter sentence isn’t happening
oh i didnt think this is how it worked, i ended up using ffmpeg to make a one frame a second video but it still looks blurry??
Recommended YT settings might be helpful here.
What command have you been using?
