Convert Video to Grayscale
I'm a JavaScript fanatic but I've always been fascinated with media manipulation. Maybe it's because I've secretly always wanted to be a designer, but I'm fine with being able to manipulate art with software instead of create the art myself. One type of art I've always enjoyed was black and white (/grayscale) video.
To convert a video to black and white, you can utilize ffmpeg with a few simple arguments:
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf hue=s=0 output.mp4
The preceding command turns this color video:
... to the following grayscale video:
If you were to search ffmpeg on this blog, you'd find dozens of tutorials about how amazing the tool is. Play around with ffmpeg and let me know what awesomeness you come up with!
![Animated 3D Flipping Menu with CSS]()
CSS animations aren't just for basic fades or sliding elements anymore -- CSS animations are capable of much more. I've showed you how you can create an exploding logo (applied with JavaScript, but all animation is CSS), an animated Photo Stack, a sweet...
![Create Namespaced Classes with MooTools]()
MooTools has always gotten a bit of grief for not inherently using and standardizing namespaced-based JavaScript classes like the Dojo Toolkit does. Many developers create their classes as globals which is generally frowned up. I mostly disagree with that stance, but each to their own. In any event...
![Font Replacement Using Cufón]()
We all know about the big font replacement methods. sIFR's big. Image font replacement has gained some steam. Not too many people know about a great project named Cufón though. Cufón uses a unique blend of a proprietary font generator tool...
![Chris Coyier’s Favorite CodePen Demos]()
David asked me if I'd be up for a guest post picking out some of my favorite Pens from CodePen. A daunting task! There are so many! I managed to pick a few though that have blown me away over the past few months. If you...
Nice, ffmpeg seems to be quite handy!
Btw the same effect may be achieved on the client using CSS grayscale-filter, which is nowadays supported by any major browser (but IE). E.g. https://codepen.io/MattDiMu/pen/pBqQqR
Doing this on the client-side, however, will probably result in much larger file sizes than necessary, as grayscale videos offer much better compression. In your example the difference is 399kB vs 270kB.
I noticed the file size difference as well.
David, could you confirm that just adding
-vf hue=s=0reduced the file size by 129KB, there were no other transformations?Thanks
In my case, the file size dropped to 1/3 of original file.
Hey David! Since there is difference between BLACK AND WHITE filter and GRAYSCALE filter.
A truly black and white image would simply consist of two colors—black and white. Grayscale images are created from black, white, and the entire scale of shades of gray.
Is method you mentioned rather grayscale? Or rather black and white filter?