Hi,

So I *finally* got around to obtaining a bmp->avi animation program by 
the name of AviCreator. It's the one with a two-star rating at 
povray.org's link section. Works fine, AFAICT, with 200x200 cyclic 
animations running almost perfectly in Windows Media Player. The trouble 
comes when I make a larger resolution animation, or compress one of any 
size (saved as a WMF). Stuttering, jerky execution and slow looping are 
the main problems plaguing these other animations.

Can anybody tell me why these problems are occurring? My system is 
reasonably fast. My system is composed of a multi-core 2.4ghz CPU, 2gb 
RAM, good nVidia card and Windows XP. An animation should run at 
full-speed. DVDs work just fine. Do I need to convert the AVIs into 
MPEGs or something? Somebody must have run into a similar problem...

Sam

Post a reply to this message

stbenge wrote:

> Can anybody tell me why these problems are occurring? My system is 
> reasonably fast. My system is composed of a multi-core 2.4ghz CPU, 2gb 
> RAM, good nVidia card and Windows XP. An animation should run at 
> full-speed.

My best guess is that your harddrive isn't fast enough. I see exactly 
the same problem - animations above a certain size just won't play smoothly.

> DVDs work just fine.

DVDs use MPEG-II compression, so there's vastly less data per second to 
be whisked around.

Basically it doesn't matter *which* codec you use, just so long as you 
compress it down to a bitrate your I/O system can handle. [Which, unless 
your I/O system is especially slow, should be a pretty easy target to hit.]

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

Post a reply to this message

stbenge <stb### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
> So I *finally* got around to obtaining a bmp->avi animation program by 
> the name of AviCreator.

  I hope that's not the one which loads *all* the input images into memory
(in raw format) before even attempting to write the avi file...

  I don't know about your problem, but I bet there are better programs
for what you want to do. VirtualDub is a popular free program for creating
and converting avis (using any codec installed in your system). While it's
not completely intuitive at first how you convert a series of image files
into an avi with VirtualDub, it's perfectly possible.

  Another free alternative, which is the de-facto encoder in linux,
is mencoder (its Windows port, to be more precise). Of course it's a
powerful "hacker tool" and thus not designed for maximum user
friendliness, so you might find it quite daunting at first. OTOH once
you learn to use it, it can be quite handy.
  (OTOH, VirtualDub probably meets your needs, and it's a bit easier
to use, so you might want to check that first.)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

Post a reply to this message

Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> stbenge wrote:
> 
>> Can anybody tell me why these problems are occurring? My system is 
>> reasonably fast. My system is composed of a multi-core 2.4ghz CPU, 2gb 
>> RAM, good nVidia card and Windows XP. An animation should run at 
>> full-speed.
> 
> My best guess is that your harddrive isn't fast enough. I see exactly 
> the same problem - animations above a certain size just won't play 
> smoothly.
> 
>> DVDs work just fine.
> 
> DVDs use MPEG-II compression, so there's vastly less data per second to 
> be whisked around.
> 
> Basically it doesn't matter *which* codec you use, just so long as you 
> compress it down to a bitrate your I/O system can handle. [Which, unless 
> your I/O system is especially slow, should be a pretty easy target to hit.]

This explanation makes some sense, though I'm not sure why a compressed 
WMF file performs worse than an uncompressed AVI. Do you know of any 
lightweight AVI->MPEG converters for Windows?

Sam

Post a reply to this message

Warp wrote:
> stbenge <stb### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
>> So I *finally* got around to obtaining a bmp->avi animation program by 
>> the name of AviCreator.
> 
>   I hope that's not the one which loads *all* the input images into memory
> (in raw format) before even attempting to write the avi file...

Yes, it's the one. I know this because I have to unload/reload all the 
images after writing new ones from POV, or else the animation is not 
changed. For being a simple program, it's not very user-friendly.

>   I don't know about your problem, but I bet there are better programs
> for what you want to do. VirtualDub is a popular free program for creating
> and converting avis (using any codec installed in your system). While it's
> not completely intuitive at first how you convert a series of image files
> into an avi with VirtualDub, it's perfectly possible.

I'll give VD a try (that sounds a little wrong...).

>   Another free alternative, which is the de-facto encoder in linux,
> is mencoder (its Windows port, to be more precise). Of course it's a
> powerful "hacker tool" and thus not designed for maximum user
> friendliness, so you might find it quite daunting at first. OTOH once
> you learn to use it, it can be quite handy.
>   (OTOH, VirtualDub probably meets your needs, and it's a bit easier
> to use, so you might want to check that first.)

By "hacker tool," do you mean it has some sort of command-line 
interface? I'm not too fond of having to type out several commands and 
paths every time I need to do something, unless I can save the text as a 
batch file command sequence. Or is it as difficult as Blender? If so, 
that will be no problem.

I'll look up both of these apps. Thanks!

Sam

Post a reply to this message

You might want to try Windows Media Encoder,
it's a bit clunky but it makes compresed WMV files.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/forpros/encoder/default.mspx

Post a reply to this message

stbenge wrote:
>>   Another free alternative, which is the de-facto encoder in linux,
>> is mencoder (its Windows port, to be more precise). Of course it's a
>> powerful "hacker tool" and thus not designed for maximum user
>> friendliness, so you might find it quite daunting at first. OTOH once
>> you learn to use it, it can be quite handy.
>>   (OTOH, VirtualDub probably meets your needs, and it's a bit easier
>> to use, so you might want to check that first.)
> 
> By "hacker tool," do you mean it has some sort of command-line
> interface? I'm not too fond of having to type out several commands and
> paths every time I need to do something, unless I can save the text as a
> batch file command sequence. Or is it as difficult as Blender? If so,
> that will be no problem.

Of course, mencoder has no GUI :)

I personally use ffmpeg (which is command-line as well).

Post a reply to this message