[yt-users] How do you make movies?

John Wise jwise at physics.gatech.edu
Fri Sep 21 08:32:49 PDT 2012


Hi Geoffery and everyone else,

I usually use avconv (the replacement for ffmpeg) to make movies, which doesn't have the limitation of a maximum variable bitrate.  Here is the command I use.

avconv -r $fps -f image2 -i frame_%04d.png -b 160M $output

which uses the mpeg4 codec by default with a bitrate 160 Mb/s, and you can go even higher than this.  I used this for a 8k x 5k pixel movie.  Anything lower gives you serious compression artifacts for such a high resolution.

I'd imagine that you can get fancier with variable bitrates and other options, but this spartan command gets the job done.

John

On 21 Sep 2012, at 01:59, Geoffrey So wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> Playing around with mencoder and the mpeg4 codec, I think there's a hard limit to the width, if I set it to greater than w=2048, there will be artifacts in the movie (will not even encode 4096).  And the maximum vbitrate seems to be around 15000, anything higher I think it turns to the default and I'd get a lower quality video instead along with smaller file size.
> 
> Found these out the hard way when I tried to stitch together two 2048^2 images and encode it, each encode fine by itself but not when stitched together.
> 
> Just thought people should know and keep in mind when using mencoder.
> 
> From
> G.S.
> 
> On Wed, Sep 19, 2012 at 6:37 AM, Brian O'Shea <bwoshea at gmail.com> wrote:
> I actually just use Quicktime Pro, which has a very convenient GUI and is actually quite flexible in terms of frame rates, image quality, export format, etc.  The only odd thing is that Quicktime 10 can't be upgraded to Pro, so one has to use an older version (7.6, I think).
> 
> --Brian
> 
> On Tue, Sep 18, 2012 at 6:07 PM, Nathan Goldbaum <nathan12343 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm curious what sort of scripts, tools, and invocations thereof that people in the yt community use to stitch frames together into movies.
> 
> It seems like there are a number of solutions to do this.  It would be nice if we could gather some solutions for this process and put them in the documentation or on the website so that future users have a place to start when they're trying to make their first movies.
> 
> For what it's worth, here's a script I just wrote to process a bunch of slices and projections dumped by a timeseries script: http://paste.yt-project.org/show/2703/
> 
> I've had good results with ffmpeg, although it's a pain to install and has an inflexible command line syntax to tell it to stitch together frames for a movie so I would love to hear of other solutions that don't use ffmpeg.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Nathan
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--
John Wise
Assistant Professor of Physics
Center for Relativistic Astrophysics, Georgia Tech




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