How to create slideshow/video from still images using a varying point of interest?

Question

I have still images of a motorcycle's odometer, taken by hand whilst riding (varying angles) over the course of a 20000km motorcycle journey (i.e. the odometer is not always centered in the still image).

I plan to create a slideshow/video from these stills, but I would like to align the odometer to the centre of the frame, so that the viewer can focus on the increasing mileage as the stills are played in a timelapse/slideshow fashion, rather than have the odometer jitter around.

Does anyone know of any software that would allow me to quickly select the area of the odometer for each image, and then have the software rotate or pan the images based on this manually defined 'odometer region'? Or another method that is somewhat automated as opposed to adjusting each image inside Premiere Pro.

I hope this make sense...!

Thanks.

Answer 1

You can import all the images as a video i.e. an image sequence and then try to stabilize the "video" by selecting a distinctive part of the odometer as your target anchor. The result may still need some manual tweaking especially if there's a huge change in light, but it will be faster than doing it manually.

You might have to rename the images to form an unbroken naming sequence i.e. img0001.jpg, img0002.jpg, img0003.jpg..etc. You can use Advanced Renamer to do this.

Answer 2

You can import all of the images into Photoshop as layers (File>Scripts>Load to Stack).

On import you can auto-align the layers (check the box that says auto-align) or following the import you can go to (Edit>Auto Align-Layers).

You could then create the video in Photoshop via the Timeline function if you wished - or export the aligned individual layers as JPEGS and import them to Premiere.