Andera Mosaic- Video to Photo

This is a tutorial to allow you to make a cute mosaic out of a video that you find on youtube! This tutorial starts with the impression you have the program "Andrea Mosaic" already installed, but explains all the steps you need to follow from there. There is also a video attached if you would prefer to watch that!

I've decided to use this photo of Zonbi (@Zzzonbi) in her Aloy cosplay! I chose this photo because I know she has a video of her creating the costume on her youtube channel, and because I know the video has a lot of varied shots that will lend itself well to all the different colors and looks in the picture. You may use any photo you like, this is just one I liked the best.

Go ahead and open up the progam you will be using. You'll be approached with several options on how you might want your "pixels" to be arranged. You can use whichever shape your prefer. This only suggests what shape each of your "pixels" will be. I'm going to pick square tiles for now, since I think they will look best when we finish the project. Feel free to pick whichever shape you would like!

You should be greeted with a page that looks a bit like this! This is where we are going to go ahead and upload our photo we want to create. Under the title that reads: "Main Image to reproduce as a Mosaic" you should see some little picture icons. Press the one that has a green plus next to it, and it should open your file directory. Find the image you want to use, select it, and press "Open".

Now you should see the picture you chose covered in a grid like this! If you had trouble reaching this point, be sure the image you chose is in the .JPG format and you have the correct program opened. If you had no trouble, now we can move on to the next step, downloading and converting the video!

I'm going to be using an online video converter to download and turn the video into a format usable by Andrea Mosaic. You can use any type of video converter you like to download and make your video into the right format, just make sure the video is in an AVI XVID format, or else Andrea Mosaic will not allow you to extract frames. I've included a link to a converter that you can use to convert the video into the XVID AVI.

http://video.online-convert.com/convert-to-avi

You may also need to go to the link below and download the "mega" pack from the page. Follow the installer instructions, but ONLY download the required codec. Which is titled "VFW Video Codecs".

http://www.codecguide.com/download_kl.htm

Click "Tile Images" then click the "Extract Tiles from Video", at this point, another dialogue should pop up warning you that Andrea mosaic only accepts certain video file times. We already know this and have converted our video accordingly, so just click "OK", now you will be asked to locate the video you want to use. Do so and press "Open".

Now you will be greeting with a page asking if you want to resize how frames are gathered, for this purpose, we don't need to change anything, so just press "Extract". Now you'll see a set of increasing numbers on the bottom of our window that will show progress of how far the program is with extracting frames. Wait for it to be finished (it will stop increasing) and then click "Save List". It should have a pop up that says something alone the lines of "Ready to make mosaic" click okay on this dialogue box, and on the tiles window.

Almost ready to create the final mosaic! Change any last settings here you would like. (I upped the tile amount, resolution, and limited the amount of times a tile could be used for the kind of look I like best.) You can use whichever settings you like best! Once you are satisfied, click "Create Mosaic"!

Once the image is done being created, you should be able to find it within your file directory! This was the finished mosaic I made of Zonbii! You can go back and change the settings however you like to get a look you think is best.