Timelapse of Writing a Thesis in 180 Days🎓
While procrastinating during the research phase for my thesis, I came across a timelapse of a research paper in the making by Tim Weninger. I wanted to create a video similar to his but for my own thesis.🥳
Timelapse
Making-of
The basic idea is to create montages from different versions of the pdf and stitch them together as a video. All it needs is a versioned LaTeX document, a bit of github magic, and the power of ImageMagick and FFmpeg.
First, I set up a github action in my thesis repo, that compiled my document and committed the binary to a second repo. The action runs on every push to the reports/ directory. Every pushed commit becomes a new frame in the final video.
name: Build LaTeX document
on:
push:
paths:
- reports/**
workflow_dispatch: null
jobs:
build_latex:
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
- name: Set up Git repository
uses: actions/checkout@v4
- name: Compile LaTeX document
uses: xu-cheng/latex-action@master
with:
latexmk_shell_escape: true
root_file: |
thesis.tex
working_directory: reports
latexmk_use_lualatex: true
- name: Release
uses: softprops/action-gh-release@v1
if: startsWith(github.ref, 'refs/tags/')
with:
files: |
reports/thesis.pdf
- name: save tmp copy
run: |
mkdir ~/tmplatex
mv reports/thesis.pdf ~/tmplatex/thesis.pdf
- name: setup target repo
uses: actions/checkout@v4
with:
repository: KarelZe/thesis2video
ref: main
token: ${{secrets.API_TOKEN_GITHUB}}
- name: setup git config
run: |
git config user.name "GitHub Actions Bot"
git config user.email "action@markusbilz.com"
- name: Move file and push
run: |
mv ~/tmplatex/thesis.pdf ${{github.event.repository.pushed_at}}-thesis.pdf
git add -A
git commit -m "Version @ ${{github.event.repository.pushed_at}}"
git push origin main
After I had created the final version of my thesis, I had a second repo (KarelZe/thesis2video) full of pdf files versioned by timestamp. As some commits like the removal of unused packages did not affect the layout, I decided to deduplicate files before moving any further.
find . -type f -exec md5sum {} + | sort | uniq -w32 -d --all-repeated=separate | sed -r 's/^[^ ]* //' | xargs rm
To create the montages from the pdfs, I used the paper2movie script by Raymond Vermaas. I tweaked the script to adapt to my preferences. In particular, I adjusted the scaling logic to dynamically scale the size of the tiles in the montage with the number of pages in the document and removed the code for compiling the LaTeX documents and reading the git history, as I had compiled the pdf files already.
Initially, I experimented with converting the pdf to frames using a GitHub action but ran into memory issues quickly. Therefore, I decided to perform the conversion locally.
#!/bin/bash
# adapted from: https://github.com/momentofgeekiness/paper2movie
############################
### INPUTS ###
############################
# Name of the (input) paper file (without extension)
filename=thesis.avi
# Video size (by default 4k)
totalWidth=3840
totalHeight=2160
# Video frames per second
# Use low values (< 5) on papers with many pages (> 50).
# It will give a better results, since there is much more to look at. ;-)
fps=4
############################
### CLEANUP STUFF ###
############################
echo -e "\nCleaning up...\n"
rm *.png > /dev/null
rm *.avi > /dev/null
############################
### CREATING IMAGES ###
############################
for f in `ls -1 *-thesis.pdf`; do
pages=`pdfinfo $f | awk '/^Pages/ { print $2}'`
# maximum number of pages
# The width/height ratio of A4 paper (1/sqrt(2))
ratioA4="0.7070"
# The height of an individual tile
tileHeight=`echo "scale=10;sqrt(($totalWidth*$totalHeight)/($ratioA4*$pages))" | bc`
tileWidth=`echo "scale=10;$tileHeight*$ratioA4" | bc`
# Calculate grid
numTilesHeight=`echo "scale=10;$totalHeight/$tileHeight" | bc`
numTilesWidth=`echo "scale=10;$totalWidth/$tileWidth" | bc`
# Ceil tiles to integers,
numTilesHeight=`awk -v var="$numTilesHeight" 'BEGIN{var = var < 0 ? int(var) : (int(var) + (var == int(var) ? 0 : 1)); print var}'`
numTilesWidth=`awk -v var="$numTilesWidth" 'BEGIN{var = var < 0 ? int(var) : (int(var) + (var == int(var) ? 0 : 1)); print var}'`
# Report measurements
echo -e "Processing File: $f"
echo -e "\nMovie measurements:"
echo -e "Number of horizontal tiles: $numTilesWidth"
echo -e "Number of vertical tiles: $numTilesHeight"
# Having ceiled the number of tiles, they exceed the totalWidth and totalHeight.
# So, we also need to recalculate the tileHeight and tileWidth. This step will
# (slightly) change the A4 ratio, but it beats half pages in the video.
tileHeight=`echo "scale=5;$totalHeight/$numTilesHeight" | bc`
tileHeight=`echo $tileHeight |cut -f1 -d"."`
tileWidth=`echo "scale=5;$totalWidth/$numTilesWidth" | bc`
tileWidth=`echo $tileWidth |cut -f1 -d"."`
montage $f -tile ${numTilesWidth}x${numTilesHeight} -background white -geometry ${tileWidth}x${tileHeight} $f.png
done
############################
### RENDER MOVIE ###
############################
echo -e "\nRendering movie...\n"
cat $(find . -maxdepth 1 -name "*.png" | sort -V) | ffmpeg -r $fps -i - $filename
echo -e "Movie available at $filename"
Depending on the image magick version installed, you might have to adjust policies for pdf conversion. That’s all it needs.