stamp-carousel

Stamp carousel

An iPhone mockup swipes through your pictures. Each picture is a perforated postage stamp with a slight 3D tilt, and the screen's gradient changes to that stamp's colour on every swipe. The timing, swipe curve, colour change, tilt and UI were measured frame by frame from a reference clip.

• 1080×1350, 30 fps. The default reference rhythm runs about 13.4 s for 26 pictures.
• Two variants: with a background (MP4) and with a transparent background (ProRes 4444 / WebM VP9 / HEVC with alpha).
• No AI calls and no credits. It renders locally with Python (Pillow + numpy) and ffmpeg.

This template is a local Python tool, not a .tsx varg SDK render. It needs no VARG_API_KEY.

Usage

1. Put pictures in images/. They play in filename order (01.jpg, 02.jpg, …). Any aspect ratio works; 3:4, 1:1 and 5:4 look like the reference.
2. Double-click make.command on macOS, or run bash make.command.
3. Collect the results from out/:

file	what
stamp-carousel.mp4	phone on a page background (page_bg)
stamp-carousel-alpha.mov	transparent background, ProRes 4444: Premiere, Final Cut, After Effects, DaVinci
stamp-carousel-alpha.webm	transparent background, VP9: web, Chrome
stamp-carousel-alpha-hevc.mov	transparent background, HEVC (macOS only): Keynote, Safari, iMovie; small file

Run preview.command to render two stills (a card at rest and a mid-swipe frame) and check colours without a full render. Put an audio.mp3, audio.m4a or audio.wav next to make.command and it is muxed under the video. No pictures yet? Run python3 engine/make_demo_cards.py images --count 12 to make abstract placeholder posters.

Requirements: ffmpeg (brew install ffmpeg) and Python 3. On first run make.command sets up Pillow and numpy in engine/.venv if they are missing. A full 26-card render with all four outputs takes about 1.5 min on an M-series Mac.

settings.json

key	meaning
title, placeholder, time	pill text, note-field placeholder, status-bar clock
variant	bg: background only; alpha: transparent only; both
page_bg	page colour around the phone in the bg variant
alpha_formats	which transparent files to write: mov, webm, hevc
timing	reference: the original rhythm (speeds up from 0.7 s to 0.47 s per card); uniform: hold seconds per card
border	stamp margin: auto (from the picture's edge), none or #hex
overrides	per picture, by filename: bg (screen colour), note (text in the note field), border, rot (tilt in degrees)

"overrides": { "03.jpg": { "bg": "#1e4c88", "note": "Experimental typography" } }

The screen colour comes from the picture's edge colour. Set bg by hand when the edge does not match the main colour, such as white margins around a red poster.

CLI

python3 engine/render.py images -o out/stamp-carousel.mp4 --variant both --alpha-formats mov,webm
python3 engine/render.py images --still 31 --variant alpha -o frame.png   # one RGBA frame
python3 engine/render.py --help

Every measured number (swipe curve, card geometry, gradient, UI tint) lives in engine/preset.json.