Frame differencing with FFmpeg

I often want to create motion videos, that is, videos that only show what changed between frames. Such videos are nice to look at, and so-called “frame differencing” is also the start point for many computer vision algorithms.

We have made several tools for creating motion videos (and more) at the University of Oslo: the standalone VideoAnalysis app (Win/Mac) and the different versions of the Musical Gestures Toolbox. These are all great tools, but sometimes it would be nice also to create motion videos in the terminal using FFmpeg.

I have previously written about the tblend function in FFMPEG, which I thought would be a good starting point. However, it turned out to be slightly more challenging to do than I had expected. Hence, this blog post is to help others looking to do the same.

Here is the source video I used for testing: