Alright, so I wanted to mess around with this “slow rick” thing I saw online. Basically, it’s about making a video play really slowly. Thought it’d be a fun little project, and maybe I could learn something new.
Getting Started
First, I needed a video. I just grabbed a random video from my computer. Nothing special, just something to test with.
Then, I had to figure out how to slow it down. I remembered I had this program called “ffmpeg” that I used for basic video editing.I did try to search online but, you know, it does have all this jargon, all I needed was to slow down a video.
Figuring Out ffmpeg
I knew ffmpeg was powerful, but I’d never really dived deep into it. I started by just playing the video using ffplay, to make sure everything was working:
So,I type this to my terminal:
ffplay *4
Yup, video played fine. Now for the slow-down part.
The Slow-Down Command
After a bit of searching, I found this command that seemed to do the trick. I had to tweak it a bit to get the speed I wanted:
ffmpeg -i *4 -vf "setpts=20PTS" slow_*4
Let’s break that down, or at least, what I think it does:
ffmpeg -i *4: This part just says “Hey ffmpeg, use this file (*4) as the input.”
-vf “setpts=20PTS”: This is the magic part. “-vf” means “video filter”. “setpts” is something about presentation timestamps… And that “20PTS” basically multiplies the time each frame is shown by 20. So, 20 times slower!
slow_*4: This is just what I wanted to call the new, slow video file.
Running It and Tweaking
I ran the command, and it took a little while (since it’s processing every frame). Then I played the “slow_*4” file… and it worked! It was super slow. I experimented with different numbers instead of 20. Like, “10PTS” made it half as slow, “50PTS” made it even slower. You get the idea.
The Final Result(sort of)
I ended up with a video that was crawling along. It was pretty funny to watch, actually. Exactly what I was going for! This whole “slow rick” thing was a success, at least for my little experiment.
It is pretty simple, I might try to put together several videos next time!
