Having created a video, I want a call to action image that plays after the video is complete, and I want this to be standardised for a lot of my videos.

I can do that with ffmpeg

Previous posts have covered ffmpeg for helping with video marketing.

I now know how to create videos for various sites. Ideally I want a post roll video which links to my site.

I could create a video for that, but to make it easier to change I’m going to use a single image that displays for a few seconds.

Create a video from an image

I can create a 5 second video from a png as follows:

Remember when you type it in, all lines will be on a single line.

ffmpeg -loop 1 -i image.png
 -pix_fmt yuv420p -t 5
 promo-image.mp4

This will create a video called ‘promo-image.mp4’ with a duration of 5 seconds.

I will want to control the size of the video so that when I join them they are the same dimensions, I can do that in a single command.

ffmpeg -loop 1 -i image.png
 -pix_fmt yuv420p -t 5
 -vf scale=1920:1080
 promo-image.mp4

It doesn’t matter what size the image was previously, the video will be 1920 x 1080 pixels.

I found that when concatenating the videos, I needed to add a silent audio track otherwise the videos would not concatenate, so the following is the command I used to create my post roll video.

ffmpeg -f lavfi
-i anullsrc=channel_layout=stereo:sample_rate=44100
-loop 1 -i image.png
-pix_fmt yuv420p -t 5
-vf scale=1920:1080
 promo-image.mp4

Concatenate videos

I can join any number of videos together, but in this case I’m just combining two:

ffmpeg -i video.mp4 -i promo-image.mp4
-filter_complex
"[0:v:0][0:a:0][1:v:0][1:a:0]concat=n=2:v=1:a=1[outv][outa]"
-map "[outv]" -map "[outa]"
video-with-promo.mp4

If I wanted more videos I would add them as -i anothervid.mp4 and I would have to change the filter complex definition

e.g. "[0:v:0][0:a:0][1:v:0][1:a:0][2:v:0][2:a:0]concat=n=3:v=1:a=1[outv][outa]"

Better for distribution

And with this I can have a call to action in the final slide, as well as in the video description because there is no guarantee that people actually read the video descriptions.

Useful links

• https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Scaling
• https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Concatenate#protocol
• https://superuser.com/questions/1062507/ffmpeg-convert-image-to-mpeg-mp4
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12368151/adding-silent-audio-in-ffmpeg

You can find the commands in an easy to copy and past format in this gist page