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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