Hi,

I'm new to both povray and linux and I'm trying to create an animation of a 
rotating ic.  I've managed to create the animation as a series of png 
files, and I'm now trying to make the animation.

I've tried using ImageMagick's animation command line to create both mng and 
gif animations.  The problem is the size of these.  there doesn't seem to 
be any options for compressing this down to a reasonable size (it'll be a 
logo in a website.)

currently the mng file is >500k, and the gif blows up to over 2Mb -- WEY too 
big!  Has anyone got any suggestions about recusing/tuning the size or 
quality to make the animation a reasonable size.

Thanks.
Paul

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Paul Hannah wrote:

> big!  Has anyone got any suggestions about recusing/tuning the size or
> quality to make the animation a reasonable size.

I recommend to use mencoder (http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/encoding.html)
which comes with MPlayer (http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/). It can
convert almost everything to everything, including a set of PNGs to
MPEG4 (aka divx/avi).

BTW, an animated gif is very bad, because it uses only 256 colours and 
the compression in GIFs is patented.

Thomas

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Thomas Willhalm <tho### [at] uni-konstanzde> wrote:
> It can
> convert almost everything to everything, including a set of PNGs to
> MPEG4 (aka divx/avi).

  Just nitpicking, but it's wrong to say "MPEG4, also known as divx/avi".

  MPEG4 is not divx nor avi.
  DivX is either a pure subset of MPEG4, or it's heavily based on a subset
of MPEG4 (I don't really know which). It's wrong to say that MPEG4 *is* DivX
(and if you are saying it the other way around, you have to remember to use
the words "subset of" because DivX does not implement everything the MPEG4
standard defines).

  Comparing it to AVI is even worse, as AVI has nothing to do with mpeg
standards. AVI is simply a multimedia container format which can contain
virtually anything in any format.

> BTW, an animated gif is very bad, because it uses only 256 colours and 
> the compression in GIFs is patented.

  According to someone the patent expires in the very near future.

-- 
#macro N(D)#if(D>99)cylinder{M()#local D=div(D,104);M().5,2pigment{rgb M()}}
N(D)#end#end#macro M()<mod(D,13)-6mod(div(D,13)8)-3,10>#end blob{
N(11117333955)N(4254934330)N(3900569407)N(7382340)N(3358)N(970)}//  - Warp -

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Warp wrote:

> Thomas Willhalm <tho### [at] uni-konstanzde> wrote:
>> It can
>> convert almost everything to everything, including a set of PNGs to
>> MPEG4 (aka divx/avi).
> 
>   Just nitpicking, but it's wrong to say "MPEG4, also known as divx/avi".

Yes, I know. Can we agree on "sloppy" instead of "wrong"? I was just too
lazy to type everything you typed. Most people use "divx" and "avi" 
synonymously and don't even know anything about MPEG4.

Thomas

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Thomas Willhalm <tho### [at] uni-konstanzde> wrote:
> Most people use "divx" and "avi" synonymously

  I didn't say it's wrong to say "divx/avi". I said that it's wrong to
make an equivalence between MPEG4 and that, as if they were the same thing.

-- 
#macro N(D)#if(D>99)cylinder{M()#local D=div(D,104);M().5,2pigment{rgb M()}}
N(D)#end#end#macro M()<mod(D,13)-6mod(div(D,13)8)-3,10>#end blob{
N(11117333955)N(4254934330)N(3900569407)N(7382340)N(3358)N(970)}//  - Warp -

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