Timelapse video with meta information on every frame

Question

I have a set of images that I want to make a time lapse video with. I have done this a few times but now I want to add some meta information to every image.

For example I have taken a picture every day from the same spot and it would be quite nice if I had some calendar along the border where I could show the current day of month so the user can virtually see the time passing on the video.

Another example would be an analogue clock, which shows the current time for images that were taken in quick succession.

At the moment it's very hard for me to figure out how I can achieve such a thing, so any help would be greatly appreciated. Unfortunately I don't have access to "Pro-Style" Video Editing Software like After Effects and the like.

Answer 1

This may only answer the first part of your question:

I found this article on superuser. It's on extracting the metadata from a batch of images. They are using ExifTool, a command-line tool for Windows and OS X.

ExifTool is a platform-independent Perl library plus a command-line application for reading, writing and editing meta information in a wide variety of files. ExifTool supports many different metadata formats...as well as the maker notes of many digital cameras...

You can find ExifTool here. It looks pretty handy, I'll be installing it today. It looks like it will output a csv with all the metadata you want. That csv is what a program would use to burn into your video.

As far as burning the data into your video, I'm not finding anything online that would take any sort of data set and burn it onto a video or even to a jpeg, especially without "Pro" software.

I would be interested to hear your solution to this, if any. It seems just putting the raw metadata in there wouldn't serve much purpose, because of the framerate. It'd be nice to see some sort of graphical ebb and flow of the data, again, don't know how it could be done without paid software.