I have an 8-way opteron machine to run some POVRay renders on and it seems
to work well creating frames one at a time.  Does there exist some tool
that will allow me to do the following ?

  ( 1 ) issue 8 povray commands that produce animation frames in
        sets.  So CPU0 works on frames 1 to 32 and then CPU1 will
        work on frames 33 to 64 etc etc.  This is done with the
        +KC and start and end frame number options easily.

  ( 2 ) process all frames into an MPEG4 animation file

My objective here is to take a given POV input file and a well described
camera path based on the clock parameter and have an animation all done
by the computer at the back end.  I am not interested in seeing frames
unless there is a problem.  The only thing I care about is how many
frames in total.

Is there a tool that takes sets of PNG input files and creates MPEG4 ?

Dennis

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"Dennis Clarke" <dcl### [at] blastwaveorg> wrote:
> I have an 8-way opteron machine to run some POVRay renders on and it seems
> to work well creating frames one at a time.  Does there exist some tool
> that will allow me to do the following ?
>
>   ( 1 ) issue 8 povray commands that produce animation frames in
>         sets.  So CPU0 works on frames 1 to 32 and then CPU1 will
>         work on frames 33 to 64 etc etc.  This is done with the
>         +KC and start and end frame number options easily.
>
>   ( 2 ) process all frames into an MPEG4 animation file
>
> My objective here is to take a given POV input file and a well described
> camera path based on the clock parameter and have an animation all done
> by the computer at the back end.  I am not interested in seeing frames
> unless there is a problem.  The only thing I care about is how many
> frames in total.
>
> Is there a tool that takes sets of PNG input files and creates MPEG4 ?
>
> Dennis

This are two steps.

For the first step I wrote such kind of tool for my personal use.
It's a PyQt/KDE -application and run's under SuSE-LINUX x64 10.1
and a Shuttle Barebone with an AMD64 DualCore
It's possible to create up to to 20 parallel running tasks. But I mostly
use 2-4 tasks.

But you can also write a simple shellscript, just like:

 povray inifile_01.ini&
 povray inifile_02.ini&
 povray inifile_03.ini

The trick is the "&"-sign at the end of line. This allows you to run
more than one povray-instance parallel.


For making the MPEG-4 Video(as the the second step), I'm using the
"ffmpeg"-Encoder.

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On Sun, 17 Dec 2006 21:12:22 -0500, Dennis Clarke wrote:

> 
> I have an 8-way opteron machine to run some POVRay renders on and it seems
> to work well creating frames one at a time.  Does there exist some tool
> that will allow me to do the following ?
> 
>   ( 1 ) issue 8 povray commands that produce animation frames in
>         sets.  So CPU0 works on frames 1 to 32 and then CPU1 will
>         work on frames 33 to 64 etc etc.  This is done with the
>         +KC and start and end frame number options easily.
> 
>   ( 2 ) process all frames into an MPEG4 animation file
> 
> My objective here is to take a given POV input file and a well described
> camera path based on the clock parameter and have an animation all done
> by the computer at the back end.  I am not interested in seeing frames
> unless there is a problem.  The only thing I care about is how many
> frames in total.
> 
> Is there a tool that takes sets of PNG input files and creates MPEG4 ?
> 
> Dennis

First, congrats on having two CPUs.  Very nice.  :)

In linux I use mencoder or transcode to take a series of pngs (or tgas,
mostly) and generate mpeg4.  Command line options are nonintuitive and
you will spend hours going though the man page and performing some trial
and error but since you use povray you're up to it.  :)

As for the rendering as groups of frames, probably you need to
play with shell scripting, calling povray with aproporate command line
options to have povray render only those frames.  It might be easier to
render the first half of the animation on one CPU and the second half on
the other CPU.  Then later on encode them to mpeg4.  This means you will
need a lot of space free on your HD which is usually a problem.  Doing it
this way does allow mpeg4 two-pass encoding which will get you slightly
better quality.

Ideally it would be nice to have the povray process running on CPU1,
generating a pipe of images and sending that to a mencoder or transcode
process on CPU2.  This would eliminate all of those pesky tempfiles.  As
far as I know this is impossible.  If I am wrong I need to know so I can
do it this way.  ;)

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On Sun, 17 Dec 2006 21:12:22 EST
"Dennis Clarke" <dcl### [at] blastwaveorg> wrote:

> Is there a tool that takes sets of PNG input files and creates MPEG4 ?

... or you could wait till the next version of povray comes out, which
recognizes multiple CPUs. In this case the animation won't be distributed
image by image, but POVRAY will distribute the work of each image among
the processors available (automatically).

The beta which was available for a while did that already.

John

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