How to get FFMPEG to join non-sequential image files? (skip by 3s)

Question

I have a bunch of images, that follow this pattern.

0001.png
0004.png
0007.png
0010.png
0013.png
0016.png
0019.png
...

They're in the correct order, but FFMPEG ignores anything after the first file, because it can't find a 0002.png. How can I get it to join these files?

I tried

ffmpeg -i %04d.png out.avi

Answer 1

with ffmpeg 0.11.1 it's as easy as:

ffmpeg -f image2 -i %*.png out.avi

From the man page, in an example under "Video and Audio file format conversion":

When importing an image sequence, -i also supports expanding shell-like wildcard patterns (globbing) internally. To lower the chance of interfering with your actual file names and the shell's glob expansion, you are required to activate glob meta characters by prefixing them with a single % character, like in foo-%*.jpeg, foo-%?%?%?.jpeg or foo-00%[234%]%*.jpeg.

Answer 2

I would actually suggest the same thing Mulvya suggested. Whenever I've needed to do stuff like this when dealing with 3D animation renderings, I've renamed the files to make them sequential. It's just easier to work with that way in a lot of different software unless you need to preserve the file names for some reason. Total Commander is also a great tool for multi-renaming.

Answer 3

Besides the workaround in my comment, you should be able to use this syntax from the ffmpeg documentation:

ffmpeg -f image2 -pattern_type glob -i *.png out.avi