Steps Animation

Extension to create animation sequence from denoised intermediate steps
Registers a script in txt2img and img2img tabs

Creating animation has minimum impact on overall performance as it does not require separate runs
except adding overhead of saving each intermediate step as image plus few seconds to actually create movie file

Supports color and motion interpolation to achieve animation of desired duration from any number of interim steps
Resulting movie fiels are typically very small (~1MB being average) due to optimized codec settings

Example

mci-girl-in-a-city-beauty.mp4

Notes

By default, previews are generated in quarter resolution
For full resolution set Settings -> Live previews -> Image creation progress preview mode -> Full
Some built-in samplers are not supported as they do not trigger a callback
For example, DDIM and PLMS
Use sampler that creates variations to make more interesting animations
Good example is Euler A
ffmpeg must be installed present in system path
Batch size and count must be set to 1 to use single seed value during entire animation
Metadata details are stored in title / description / artist sections of a generated movie file
Good rule-of-thumb is 1 sec animation duration for each 10 steps
That means that real FPS is 10 while interpolation raises it to 30
Note: Default max step size in automatic1111 is 100,
you may want to increase it to 200 in ui-config.json for longer animations when using some samplers

Options

Duration: Target duration of animation in seconds
When interpolation is enabled, target duration is approximate
Media Codec: Media codec to use when creating animation
Interpolation method: Used when creating extra frames to archieve duration
- None: Simply extends duration each image to match desired duration
- MCI: Motion compensated interpolation
- Blend: Color blend interpolation
Skip initial steps: Allows to skip n initial steps when creating animation as they may be overly noisy
Print debug info: Prints verbose information on console
Run on incomplete data: If run was interrupted, should animation creation still run on partial results
Note: This also happens when using some samplers (e.g. DPM adaptive)
as they perform early-exit when complete regardless of desired step value
Delete intermediate files: Delete all generated intermediate (per-step) images after run
If not, new files will be appended so you can single animation of multiple generative runs
Create output animation file: Runs ffmpeg to create animation from intermediate files
Disable if you want to use intermediate files manually
Path for intermediate files: Relative to save location
Path for output animation file: Relative to save location

Naming

Intermediate files have file format of
<batch-of-batch-count><batch-of-batch-size><current-step>-<seed>-<prompt>.<samples-extension>
Output animation file has file format of
<seed>-<prompt>.<codec-extension>

Where:

Batch values are 2 digits padded with leading zeros
Step value is 3 digits padded with leading zeros
Seed value is actual seed extrapolated from current batch, not input seed
Prompt is parsed to be file-system safe and cropped to 96 characters

Performance

Dependent on your system and settings used to produce images

Type of interpolation used has direct impact on performance: None and Blend results in almost instant animation creation while MCI takes twice as long as its a two-pass interpolation method

Example: Using Euler A sampler with 100 steps to produce a 10 sec blend animation of a single trained embedding with 30 frames-per-second takes just ~1 min on nVidia RTX3060

Interpolation

Uses ffmpeg minterpolate filter

Codecs

Compare resulting size & time to create 30sec blend animation from 100 frames:

codec	size	time
h264	1100 KB	5.3 s
h265	350 KB	6.0 s
vp9	700 KB	6.6 s
av1	850 KB	7.8 s

Default parameters used for each codec:

h264: -vcodec libx264 -preset medium -crf 23
h265: -vcodec libx265 -preset faster -crf 28
vpx-vp9: -vcodec libvpx-vp9 -crf 34 -b:v 0 -deadline realtime -cpu-used 4
aom-av1: -vcodec libaom-av1 -crf 28 -b:v 0 -usage realtime -cpu-used 8 -pix_fmt yuv444p
prores: -vcodec prores_ks -profile:v 3 -vendor apl0 -bits_per_mb 8000 -pix_fmt yuv422p10le

Credits

Original idea from #5464 by @kevinschaul
Previous requests: #1026, #2137, #2094, #2739, #4709, #2137, #41

vladmandic / sd-extension-steps-animation