Movie Thumbnails is a utility that can create a thorough storyboard from your video files. It includes information like file name, size, resolution, duration, date of creation, frames per second, codec information for both video and audio, and data rate. All this is accompanied by small snapshots of various frames from the video file. The report is saved as a JPG file.
From the Settings window, you can customize the process quite a lot. You can specify the number of snapshots that you want to take, and their size, change the background color and the quality of images. The tiles can be given a colored border, and you can increase or decrease its thickness using a sliding bar. A time stamp will be added to the snapshots by default, but you can omit it or add milliseconds to the stamp from this window. As I mentioned above, the application uses meta data to create the report. You can change the color of the text used and choose what metadata you want to use. Unfortunately, you can't change the formatting of the text or its location in the final report.
In my testing, I used an H.264 file, and it was processed in less than 10 seconds, which was very fast for a 20-minute file. The report looked absolutely gorgeous.
In conclusion, this can be a very handy application to have. I like that it is easy to use, fast, and it creates good-looking images. It is also very customizable.
v1.2 [Aug 26, 2011]
- More image formats in addition to JPEG (BMP, PNG, and TIFF).
- Opacity settings for PNG and TIFF formats.
- Even better support for QuickTime Plugins.
- A few bug fixes.
Time Lapse Assembler allows you to create movies from a sequence of images.
