CODEWITHSUNDEEP
imageimage-processingvideovideo-processing
JahKnows
JahKnows

Reputation: 2706

How can I overlay an image onto a video

How can I overlay an image onto a video without changing the video file?

I have many videos and I want to be able to open them and overlay a ruler onto them and then measure the distance an individual moved visually. All I want is to play a video and then to open up an image with some transparency and position the image over the video. This way i would be able to look at the video and see how far the individual moved.

I would like to do this without having to embed the image like a watermark, because that is computationally expensive. I would need to copy the video, embed it with the ruler and then watch the video, then delete that video file. This seems unnecessary. I would like to just watch the video and have a transparent image over it while I a watching.

Is there a program that does this all together?

Alternatively, is there a program which I can use to open an image and make it transparent and then move it over the video that is playing?

Note: I am using Windows.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 2417

Answers (2)

Dimitri Podborski
Dimitri Podborski

Reputation: 3784

What about using good old VLC for that?

Open VLC go to Tools→Effects and Filters→Video Effects→Overlay and select Add logo checkbox:

screenshot1

Then, add your transparent overlay image and play any video with VLC. The output looks like this:

screenshot2

Upvotes: 1

Mick
Mick

Reputation: 25511

It sounds form your requirements that simply overlaying a separate image layer over the video will meet your needs.

Implementing this approach will depend on the video player client you are using, but you could implement an HTML5 based solution and play the videos locally with this (or even from a URL on the web if you have them there).

There is a nice answer with a working fiddle which shows how to do this with HTML5 here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/31175193/334402

One thing to note - you have not mentioned scale in your question. If you need to measure how far the person has moved in real distance, rather than in just cm's across the video screen, then you will need to somehow work out the scale of the video. This makes things considerably harder as the video may zoom in and out during the sequence you want to measure, so you would need some reference to calculate the scale for each frame. One approach would be to use the individual as a reference, assuming they are in all the frames you are interested in.

Upvotes: 1

Related Questions