Turn a few seconds of video into a real paper flipbook. You get a print-ready PDF with the cards already imposed for cut-and-stack, so one cut through the printed pile gives you stacks that are already in order. Free, and the video never leaves your computer. You supply the rest: a printer set to 100 percent scale, something to cut with, and a clip, a staple or a little glue for the bound edge.
Ordering a custom flipbook online costs roughly 25 to 40 dollars a copy and takes a week, and most of that money buys layout work a browser can do in a minute. This page does the layout part: it pulls the frames out of your clip, crops each one to the card, adds the binding margin and the card number, and imposes the sheets so the book can actually be assembled. The printing, cutting and binding stay with you, which is also why it costs nothing.
This is the part every naive flipbook layout gets wrong. If sheet one carried cards 1 to 9 in reading order, then after cutting you would be holding nine separate cards from nine different points in the book, and you would have to interleave several hundred slips by hand. Instead the sheets are imposed for cut-and-stack: sheet one carries card 1, card 26, card 51 and so on, one card from each pile. Print the sheets, keep them in order, stack them and cut once through the whole stack. Each little pile that falls out is already in sequence. Put pile 1 on top of pile 2 on top of pile 3, square the edges, and the book is built. The number printed in the binding strip of every card is only there so you can recover if a pile gets knocked over.
Short and repeatable beats long every time. A wave, a jump, a dog catching something, a first step, blowing out a candle. Four seconds at 12 cards a second is 48 cards, a thin book anyone can flip. Twenty seconds is 240 cards, close to the limit here, roughly 25 mm thick on ordinary paper and genuinely hard to hold. Phone video shot upright works well with the portrait card shape, which crops far less of the picture than forcing a tall video into a wide card.
Set the scale to 100 percent and turn off anything called fit to page, shrink to fit or scale to fit, because those shrink the sheet by a few percent and the cut marks stop matching between sheets. Print single sided. Check that the pages come out of the tray in the order they were sent, since some printers reverse the stack, and sheet 1 has to end up on top. Slightly heavier paper, around 120 gsm, flips much better than standard copier paper, but it also makes the book thicker.
Everything on this page happens in your browser. The video is read from your own disk, the frames are drawn to a canvas on your machine, and the PDF is assembled locally, so no part of your footage is uploaded to us or anyone else. The only limit that comes from that is memory: the whole PDF has to be held in the browser tab, which is why the card count is capped and why very high print quality is discouraged for long clips.