[yt-users] How do you make movies?

[Geoffrey So]

Thanks John, "avconv" seems just as good as mencoder and better in some
aspects.

I was able to get the built-in media player on my mac QuickTime to play the
mp4 file I produced using:

#!/bin/bash
fps=25
output=output.mp4
avconv -r $fps -f image2 -i %04d.png -b 45M $output

some things I noticed:
- for any bit rate above 45M it just stays at 45M for max during encoding
(for mencoder when above the limit is specified, it defaults to the lower
limit), but this could be due to the dimensions of my png files
- the fps it displayed while encoding is around 12-13, not sure why even
though I specified fps to be 25
- QuickTime can play the movie, not just VLC.
- Being on the mac, I had to use MacPorts to install "yasm", but after that
it's just ./configure;make;make install

The image quality is definitely better than what I can make with mencoder
when the bitrate is cranked high, so I think I'll use this from now on :-)

Thanks again!

From
G.S.

On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 8:32 AM, John Wise <jwise at physics.gatech.edu> wrote:

> 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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