I have a recollection of once being able to use Microsoft Windows Movie Maker to
turn a stack of bitmaps into a movie.  A movie that is 20 or 25 fps, where each
frame is one of our own bitmaps.

I was just tinkering with it and now it seems to be insisting on showing a
series of still images, with a minimum duration of 0.250 sec.

Am I missing something?

TMPGEnc, too, didn't seem to be as cooperative as I remember from my youth.  Is
it not taking PNG's?

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Just use VirtualDub.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote:
> Just use VirtualDub.
>

VirtualDub gave me what I wanted with two minutes of intuitive look at the
menus.

Is it possible that Move Maker withdrew support for image sequences?

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"gregjohn" <pte### [at] yahoocom> wrote in message 
news:web.48aaf908c456477037d25c810@news.povray.org...
> Is it possible that Move Maker withdrew support for image sequences?

I have Ms Movie Maker v5.1 the docs say png is supportted file type. I've 
never used it to take a series of stills and turn it into a movie or 
animation. Just used it to make slideshown type presentation of stills with 
transitions. I think (it was a while back) I grew tired of it quickly as it 
was limited in that aspect. I've been using QuickTime Pro for awhile now. It 
can do all the things MM and more. I've made animations from a series of 
rendered images from Pov. It supports many import/export types. For me it 
was worth paying for a license key.

Cheers Jim

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"gregjohn" <pte### [at] yahoocom> wrote:
> I have a recollection of once being able to use Microsoft Windows Movie Maker to
> turn a stack of bitmaps into a movie.  A movie that is 20 or 25 fps, where each
> frame is one of our own bitmaps.
>
> I was just tinkering with it and now it seems to be insisting on showing a
> series of still images, with a minimum duration of 0.250 sec.
>
> Am I missing something?
> [...]

Unfortunately the WMM UI does not do it, which is strange, because the
underlying engine can do it. I wrote a simple application to test it out and it
works just fine. I wonder why the UI designers don't give users access to that
facility. :o

At least you found different software to accomplish your goal.


Cheers
Eddie

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gregjohn wrote:
> Is it possible that Move Maker withdrew support for image sequences?

It never did. It always had support for still images as clips. It's not
really intended for each image being a frame, but for each image being a
photo of your holidays, so you can put transitions between each.

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gregjohn wrote:
> TMPGEnc, too, didn't seem to be as cooperative as I remember from my
> youth.  Is it not taking PNG's?

It can if you install an extra plugin.

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I see that blender has added FFMPEG as an option for rendering-- your animation
goes straight to video!,  no bitmaps saved.

How practical would that be for POV-Ray?  Would it just be a coding headache, or
a complete redesign?

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gregjohn <pte### [at] yahoocom> wrote:
> How practical would that be for POV-Ray?  Would it just be a coding headache, or
> a complete redesign?

  It's not a question of how difficult it would be to implement. It's a
question of whether you want povray to support creating lossy output or
not. Nothing would be more aggravating than starting your final render,
waiting 50 hours for it to finish, and then notice that you used the
wrong compression settings and your video looks like absolute crap.
At least if you have the lossless original frames, you can re-encode
easily without having to re-render.

  (Another issue is that creating an mpeg video (regardless of the mpeg
version) is not an unambiguous process. Some mpeg codecs are able to
create noticeably better image quality at the exact same file sizes
than other, lower-quality codecs.)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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On 23 Aug 2008 13:24:35 -0400, Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote:

>
>  (Another issue is that creating an mpeg video (regardless of the mpeg
>version) is not an unambiguous process. Some mpeg codecs are able to
>create noticeably better image quality at the exact same file sizes
>than other, lower-quality codecs.)

Would you expand on this, Warp?
-- 

Regards
     Stephen

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