Show HN: I convert videos to printed flipbooks for living
54 comments
·February 3, 2025illwrks
I studied design and visual communication. Around 2005/2006 I was doing a short animation but didn’t have a suitable way to show it when my project was being assessed. I did the same, I manually printed and trimmed each frame of animation and then blind them into a little flip book. It was such a pain to do but the lectures loved it! I can’t imagine how cumbersome it must be if you’re doing it for hundreds of orders!
apparent
How long of videos do you recommend this for? How many flips are the books good for? Any tips on keeping them in good flipping condition, in your experience?
Also, your title is missing an "a" before "living". Love the idea and execution!
rectalogic
Interesting. Back in 2007 my company Motionbox partnered with flipclips.com to sell themed flipbooks very similar to these. Both companies are defunct now. Demo at a trade show: https://youtu.be/FIiLsyeAM_I?si=BQHt5Q4Q80y3Il5f
momciloo
wow!!!! true pioneer! amazing!!
HarHarVeryFunny
Is this just supplemental income, or are you actually making a living from it?
Isn't it a bit of a risk to tout the success of this idea among a tech crowd capable of going off and creating competitors?
momciloo
It's supplemental, but it's enough to make living where we live. When I first started, I worried about creating competition by sharing too much. But after 6 years of refining production, I've realized this product isn't easy to replicate at all
j45
It's almost always the case that anyone who thinks something is easy to replicate will realize the product is the marketing, sales, creating/building, delivery, billing, and not just any tech.
Happy for you having a family activity.
Binding is a good skill to have, remember it from my school days.
rhubarbtree
I used to think tech was a small part of a startup. Now I think it’s a _very_ small part.
cptskippy
How does your product differ from the Flipbook Photobooths that people have at their weddings? They're able to create flipbooks on demand that are very high quality.
momciloo
I haven’t held a flipbook like that in my hands, but the main benefit of ours is that you can upload any video from your phone anytime - you don’t need to be at a wedding. The downside, of course, is the delivery time
SoftTalker
Ideas are a dime a dozen. Guaranteed that others have thought of this. Execution is where you succeed or fail.
flog
How do you actually do the manufacturing? What machines does one need to do something like this?
benuuu
I uploaded a vertical video and it was a little unclear to me where the binding would be. I'm assuming it's on the left. It might be helpful to have a ui element to the side of the video container that looked like the binding so it was clear that would be the end product.
kristopolous
probably not worth the manufacturing effort, but if you could make a book that flips on both sides, with different clips, that would potentially be novel enough to pass virality coefficients.
You'd need some radically different zig-zag binding process ... sounds like a lot of effort but might pay off.
Just to be clear I'm not saying duplex print, I'm saying flip right and flip left, same side up
kamens
Fun idea!
Building on that: there's a common children's magic trick involving a flip book that magically "colors" its pages (https://www.magicinc.net/products/fun-magic-coloring-book?va...)
It works by moving your thumb to a different position while flipping the pages -- every Xth page is cut at slightly different lengths, so when you move your thumb to the next position, different pages become visible during the flip
Using this trick you could show multiple different video clips in the flipbook just by moving your thumb to a different spot
waltbosz
I love that magic trick, but wouldn't that significantly thicken the cardstock flipbook ?
kristopolous
would it? I assume the trick is the sheets are slightly trapezoidal. Shouldn't that be enough?
Of course you're doubling the page count regardless of the approach ... that's likely unavoidable.
throw03172019
Is our video deleted after the book is created?
momciloo
Yes, all videos are deleted regularly.
ggambetta
This looks pretty great, seriously considering ordering one!
The length is fixed at 72 pages/frames, but you support uploading up to 30s of video. How does this work? You sample 72 frames from a video of any length? Is there a recommended frame rate (and therefore duration) that is somehow optimal? What's the natural frame rate range of humans flipping flipbooks? So many questions!
momciloo
We evenly sample 72 frames from any video length. No required frame rate, but 12-24fps works best. Most people flip at around 10fps, so short, clear-motion clips work best. When you upload your video on the order page, you'll get an accurate preview of how it'll look in hand!
escapecharacter
What if you converted video essays to flipbooks, by only taking the frames that a new subtitle appeared on?
talkingtab
A very long time ago there was a program on the Mac. You drew one picture (macdraw maybe), just lines, then a second picture. You could then watch as pix 1 morphed into pix 2. Anyone know where something like that is. A flip book for that would be great.
latexr
That is an animation technique called “tweening”. Using that term you should be able to find some software to do it.
AntiEgo
It almost looks like something I could make myself, but cutting those tiny pages while keeping them perfectly indexed would surely be where my diy would go wrong. Good work OP for working out that special sauce!
It's a clever idea, and it's encouraging to see that there are still clever ideas at the small-business scale still waiting to be invented.
momciloo
We’re thinking of adding a DIY version where you can buy a pattern made from your video, print it at home or a local print shop, cut it, and bind it with a clip binder. Would that be something you’d find interesting?
I built this product back in 2018 as a small side project: a tool that turns short videos into physical flipbooks. After launching it, I didn't touch it for years. Life and work took over, and it sat idle. But it kept getting a few orders every month, which made it impossible to forget. So in December 2024, I decided to rebrand and revive it.
The initial version relied on various local printing offices. I kept switching from one to another, but the results were never quite right. Either the quality wasn't good enough, or the turnaround times were too long. Eventually, me and my wife bought all the necessary machines and moved production in-house.
Now, it's a family business. My wife and I handle everything: printing, binding, cutting, addressing, and shipping each flipbook. On the technical side, it’s powered by Next.js, with FFmpeg extracting frames and handling overlays, and ImageMagick used for adding trim marks and creating the final PDFs.
After many years of working in IT, working on something tangible feels refreshing. It's satisfying to create something that brings people joy. And that is not hard to sell (like dev tools, for example haha). There are still challenges: we're experimenting with different cover papers, improving production, and testing new ideas without making things confusing. But that’s part of what keeps us moving forward.