dallewood

A CLI to convert uncropped DALL·E 2 images into infinite zoom videos

hitchcock.mp4

Getting Started

Dependencies

You must have the following installed:

  • Go (such as via Go’s official website or Homebrew)
  • ffmpeg (must be available on your machine’s PATH)

Installing

Simply run go install github.com/mikeford/dallewood and verify you have the dallewood command available in your terminal.

Usage

Overview

dallewood v0.1 supports two main operations:

  • dallewood zoom [X] creates an “infinite zoom” video from PNG images in the specified directory
  • dallewood zoom downsize [X] downsizes a .png, .jpg, .jpeg, or .webp image and outputs the result to X_downsized.png

The downsize operation is used to prepare each frame for the next round of inpainting as the underlying images for an infinite zoom video are developed. Its operation is inspired by this useful p5.js downsizing app. The idea was to create a CLI tool that can combine both the image preparation + video creation stages.

Watermarks

dallewood requires you to use images without the official DALL·E 2 watermarks. This approach was taken to both simplify the tool’s operation and avoid performing interpolation to remove the watermark, which creates information differing from the original “master” image generated by DALL·E 2. To retrieve a non-watermarked version of an image, simply Inspect the image’s HTML on the DALL·E 2 website with your browser’s dev tools and then look for the underlying URL in the format https://openailabsprodscus.blob.core.windows.net/private...

This URL contains the non-watermarked image that can be downloaded.

Command Line Options

Both zoom and zoom downsize come with help menus accessible by running zoom --help and zoom downsize --help respectively.

In these, you’ll notice each command comes with several options. For example, when calling zoom downsize, you can disable the stippled edge transitions around downsized image edges using the --transition=false flag. In addition, you might want to change their size using --transition-scale, a floating point value representing the percentage of the image the transition should occupy.

When it comes to zoom, the most important options are --duration, crop, and easing.

  • --duration (-d) specifies the length, in seconds, of the video to be output
  • --crop specifies the floating point percentage frame N occupies within frame N+1 for the entire sequence
  • --easing specifies which animation timing function, otherwise known as easing, the video should follow. The choice of this setting dramatically affects the overall feel of your video.

For example, if you’re working on a particular video and for each frame you generate, you have DALL·E 2 inpaint the outer 30% to achieve your outcrop, then --crop should be set to 0.7. In other words, the central 70% of the frame is used by DALL·E 2 as the basis for each inpainting.

In fact, 70% cropping is the default used by both zoom and zoom downsize. If you decide to change the cropping from the default, make sure you also use dallewood zoom downsize --scale=X to specify the same decimal value you use with zoom.

Directory Structure / File Naming Convention

As mentioned, dallewood zoom downsize is pretty flexible in that it will accept any .png, .jpg, .jpeg, or .webp file.

dallewood zoom on the other hand is a bit more picky: to ensure proper ordering of your images, keep two requirements in mind:

  1. the directory you specify should only contain images you want included in the video (recommended to make a separate folder)
  2. the PNG files in the directory should be ordered using left padded names. For example, if you have more than ten frames, files should follow the pattern frame_001, frame_002. Furthermore, if you have more than 100 frames, files should follow the format frame_0979, frame_0980, and so on.

GitHub

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