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!
![Welcome to My New Office]()
My first professional web development was at a small print shop where I sat in a windowless cubical all day. I suffered that boxed in environment for almost five years before I was able to find a remote job where I worked from home. The first...
![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...
![MooTools FontChecker Plugin]()
There's a very interesting piece of code on Google Code called FontAvailable which does a jQuery-based JavaScript check on a string to check whether or not your system has a specific font based upon its output width. I've ported this functionality to MooTools.
The MooTools...
![Duplicate DeSandro’s CSS Effect]()
I recently stumbled upon David DeSandro's website when I saw a tweet stating that someone had stolen/hotlinked his website design and code, and he decided to do the only logical thing to retaliate: use some simple JavaScript goodness to inject unicorns into their page.
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?