Everytime I want to put together a timelapse from a bunch of still photos, I have remember what I did before and try to do it again. This time I’m going to document what I did so I can remember for the future!

If your pictures are coming from any recent camera, then they are probably too big of resolution for a 1080p timelapse.
First you have to resize them.

mogrify -path resized -format jpg -resize "1920x1080^" -gravity south -crop 1920x1080+0+0 +repage *.JPG
This will resize the pictures to exactly 1920 by 1080 cropping out all needed sections except for the “south” part of the image.

ls -1tr | grep -v files.txt > files.txt
Make a list of jpgs

mencoder -nosound -noskip -oac copy -ovc copy -o output.avi -mf fps=15 'mf://@files.txt'
Turn those files into a stream of jpgs with a frame rate of 15

ffmpeg -i output.avi -y -s hd1080 -sameq output-final.avi
Compress that other jpg avi into a 1080p video. May want to use -vcodec libx264 to give it a H264 codec to compress.

Examples:

Timelapse of Feb 18th Northern Lights in Lake of the Woods, MN from bryce johnson on Vimeo.

AK timelapse from bryce johnson on Vimeo.