editly VS media2

Sounds like you already have a process for most of this, but I found https://github.com/mifi/editly to be incredibly helpful to run ffmpeg and make my little time lapse video. Could be useful for others

For example, this declarative video editor lib has JSON configurations for defining an output video:

Maybe this tool helps: https://github.com/mifi/editly

You seem to misunderstand what ffmpeg is for - namely the stream conversion of media. Only limited filters are available. You can write your own shaders and use cli tools like https://github.com/mifi/editly for automation surely

I used Editly to make a clip of several videos with transitions and screenshots. It worked out great with me just editing the json5 file to tweak things

https://github.com/mifi/editly (Node JS)

It's intended to work nicely with Editly, a CLI-based https://github.com/mifi/editly

The way I would do it would be using MoviePy (for Python). You may also have luck with editly (JavaScript). MoviePy has functions to create a TextClip, Images and overlays. It sure is possibly with ffmpeg filters - transparency mixing filters etc. yet you'd get faster results with modules like MoviePy / editly.

The ffmpeg command line is a shitty programming language. I'd rather work with it in some other shitty programming language.

I use it in conjunction with the moldy old ffmpeg C API for video processing. Here's the current iteration of my wrapper library -- I'm still missing something in remuxing, but it works pretty well. I haven't done an update to it in a while because work's been busy. I've been doing a bunch of cloud stuff there and am meditating on rolling a new iteration of this library with cloud functionality baked in. The segmenter/desegmenter stuff in the current library works pretty well for that sort of thing, but it feels a bit awkward to use.