Thumbnail Sheets (Tile / Montage)

~8 min · thumbnail, tile, preview

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Storyboard / preview grids

The tile filter assembles N frames into a single grid image. Useful for video index sheets, scene-by-scene overviews, hover-preview thumbnails (HLS streaming uses these for scrubbing previews).

Code

Thumbnail sheet recipes·bash

# 4×4 grid, one frame every 5 seconds, 320px wide tiles
ffmpeg -i in.mp4 \
  -vf "fps=1/5,scale=320:-1,tile=4x4" \
  -frames:v 1 \
  thumbs.png

# 8 frames evenly spaced across the clip (computed)
DURATION=$(ffprobe -v error -show_entries format=duration \
  -of default=noprint_wrappers=1:nokey=1 in.mp4)
INTERVAL=$(awk -v d="$DURATION" 'BEGIN { printf "%.2f", d/8 }')
ffmpeg -i in.mp4 \
  -vf "fps=1/${INTERVAL},scale=320:-1,tile=4x2" \
  -frames:v 1 \
  storyboard.png

# 'Smart' thumbnails (FFmpeg picks interesting frames)
ffmpeg -i in.mp4 \
  -vf "thumbnail=300,scale=320:-1,tile=4x4" \
  -frames:v 1 \
  smart_thumbs.png
# thumbnail=300 means 'pick the most representative frame from every
# 300-frame batch'.

External links

tile filter docs

Exercise

Pick a 5–10 minute video. Make a 4×4 storyboard with frames evenly spaced. Then make a 4×4 with the thumbnail filter for 'smart' selection. Compare — does smart picking actually capture more interesting frames?

Progress

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