Creating animation with raster data in QGIS?

Question

I have 4 raster images showing different conditions of air flow distribution at different times. I'd like to create an animation to show the change from image 1 to image 4. How can I do this? I tried Time Manager Plugin because I read it works also with raster but it didn't work. It says that I don't have a valid start time. That's true but because they are raster data I don't have something like a Time-Attribute...and I actually have to choose the attribute containing "time"-attribute in the Time Manager settings.

I'm working with QGIS v. 2.0.1.

Answer 1

If you are working with air flow data, the Crayfish plugin might be more suitable than Time Manager.

The Crayfish plugin aspires to be a time explorer for structured and unstructured mesh and vector datasets within QGIS. With Crayfish, users can load time varying mesh into QGIS. It currently supports several meteorology, hydrology and oceanography file formats.

See, for example, this video of dust aerosol data:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2COoDANrHE

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Original answer:

You have to manually enter the time values as shown in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdijfgqhsPI.

Additionally, there is still an issue with raster animation in Time Manager for QGIS 2.x https://github.com/anitagraser/TimeManager/issues/55

Answer 2

Here's my "Lo-Tek" example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwC6gMWzgM4

Using QGIS 3.2.1 I created a project with 4 rasters (Sentinel-2 images over 4 successive dates).

I displayed one of the four rasters (along with some assorted vector labels) to my satisfaction, then:

Project > Import/Export > Export Map to Image...

In the subsequent "Save Map as Image" window I (optionally) checked the "Lock Aspect Ratio" button on and adjusted Output width and height. I made no changes to any "Extent" values. I clicked "Save" to export a .jpg file.

Without altering the map extent, I repeated the above process for the other three rasters, one at a time. I edited the vector labels to match each raster's time period.

I now had four .jpg files, one for each time period. I loaded those files into video software (Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum 11, but many others will work). I displayed each .jpg image for 6 seconds, with a 2-second overlap between images. Output to an .mp4 movie file which was uploaded to Youtube.

Voila! Lo-Tek movie from QGIS rasters!