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Still-to-video mode with animated drift #39

@RichardBray

Description

@RichardBray

Summary

Add a --still-to-video flag (or similar) that converts a still image into a short animated video clip with hance effects.

Motivation

When using stills (e.g. website screenshots) in video projects, you currently need an external tool (ffmpeg) to convert the image into a video before hance can animate its effects (grain flicker, bloom, etc.). A static image with just grain overlay looks dead — it needs motion to feel cinematic.

Proposed behavior

hance screenshot.png -o output.mp4 --still-to-video --duration 3
  • Applies a subtle default animation to give the still life:
    • Slow ~2-3% zoom drift (Ken Burns style)
    • Gentle pan/sway
  • All existing hance effects animate naturally over the frames (grain flickers, bloom pulses, aberration, vignette)
  • Duration configurable, default 3s
  • Should feel cinematic out of the box with no extra params

Context

Built vidshot (a CLI that screenshots websites → animated video → hance) and the zoom/drift step is currently done via ffmpeg as an intermediate encode before passing to hance. This feature would let hance own the full still→video pipeline for the common case, eliminating the extra encode step and quality loss.

Scroll/pan animations over tall images would remain external since that's a different use case.

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    P3Low — nice to have / someday

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