With all the AI-generated images taking up space on hard drives, it was only natural that people would start looking for a tool to make those images into videos. There are already a number of video editors out there that can import a video sequence or folder of images but not everyone has access to the higher-end editors. Also, there is a large number of new users that have never used editors of any sort so what is natural to us at this point is a bit more than confusing to newbies.

Flowframes differ a bit from video editors in that it uses AI and is also for videos, not just images. From the Flowframes webpage over at itch.io:

Flowframes is a simple but powerful app that utilizes advanced AI frameworks to interpolate videos in order to increase their framerate in the most natural looking way possible.

• Newer AI models with faster speeds and higher quality
• Real-time output mode
• VapourSynth implementation (no need to extract video frames for interpolation)
• Video and audio encoding improvements

I never tested the video functionality other than to try loading a few videos that it promptly refused to work with, spitting out error messages while canceling the interpolation. Since I wasn’t after this feature I didn’t look into it any further and went back to working with images which is what brought me here in the first place.

Now is also the time to clear things up about what exactly we’re talking about by image to video as that means different things to different people. This does not take 2 existing images and tween a video between them. Those AI apps are in the works and hopefully will see the light of day soon. Flowframes takes a folder of images and creates a video out of them.

I wrote about SD Video earlier, a Google collab runtime running online with Google Drive that does actually generate images between the beginning and ending word prompts. While it is great at using the Stable Diffusion model, it is lacking the control necessary to become a more useful tool. The images between the prompts can go off the rails sometimes producing no more than a group of random images, usually with the same theme, that may or may not be what you expected.

Where Flowframes comes into the picture is the extreme simplicity of use and the ability to load all compatible images from a folder without sequential filenames. It’s not foolproof. The folder needs to only have images, at least that has been my experience with it, so creating a work folder to temporarily hold the images works well. Just delete the folder or contents when finished. This also allows you to focus more on the images in case you want to delete some of them before creating the video.

Flowframes Video Created with Midjourney Images

While it appears that its main function is to increase framerate in existing videos, the usage I’m seeing on Facebook and other places involves the import of images and export of video from those images. These videos are more like morphing than animation as the images appear to morph into each other but that can be achieved with any video editor and random image sequences.

It’s a “name your own price” download that you can elect to download for free and try it out. What you do after that is up to you but I’m sure the author would appreciate a few dollars if you found a use for it. So, if you are looking for a simple and budget-friendly tool to dump a folder of images into for a video then hop on over to their webpage and take a look. It’s a very simple tool to use with no learning curve.

Click here to go to the Flowframes product page.

M.D. McCallum, aka WarLord, is an international award-winning commercial graphics artist, 3D animator, published author, project director, and webmaster with a freelance career that spans over 20 years.  Now retired, M.D. is currently working part-time on writing and select character development projects. You can learn more about MD on his website.