Making video with coding agents

Member lesson

Contact sheets, so you can judge a batch at once

Lesson 6 of 10 in Making video with coding agents.

Checked against the makers' documentation on 25 September 2026.

tile-thumbnails - create thumbnails from a video and tile into an image · NapoleonWils0n
Lesson

Photographers judged a roll of film by its contact sheet, and a batch of generated clips needs the same thing more, because six takes of one shot differ in ways you only see side by side. The ffmpeg version takes a few frames from each clip, shrinks them and lays them in a grid with the tile filter. The version we built and tested makes one row per clip, four frames spread evenly across its length, each fitted into a 320 by 180 box with white padding so vertical and horizontal clips line up, and then stacks the rows into one JPEG. One image per batch. It reads the batch log, so it already knows each clip's length and prompt.

clip, 4 secondsfps = 4 ÷ length; each frame fitted and padded to 320 × 180sheets/batch.jpgindex.html: clip, cost, promptone page to judge a whole batch
How a contact sheet is built: a four-second clip sampled at one frame a second gives four frames in a row, each fitted and padded to 320 by 180; the rows stack into one page, with an HTML page beside it listing clip, cost and prompt.
An ink drawing of a yellow lightbox on a table with a strip of negatives laid in front of it and a magnifying loupe resting on one frame.
Judging many frames at once, the photographer's way.
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  1. Question 1, locked

    Which of these words means this? “Every clip in a batch shrunk to a row of stills on one page.”

    • Stream copy
    • Local server
    • Contact sheet
    • Environment scrub
  2. Question 2, locked

    Which of these words means this? “The ffmpeg filter that lays frames out in a grid of columns and rows.”

    • Budget
    • Letterbox
    • Remote server
    • tile
  3. Question 3, locked

    Which of these words means this? “Sets how many frames a second ffmpeg keeps. fps=1 keeps one each second.”

    • fps filter
    • Native installer
    • Import
    • Dry run

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