How to create a movie from a sequence of individual frames
Easy version
Use the mediaconvert program on an SGI to create a movie
file from the individual frames.
- All the frames should be put into a single directory, and should
have the same format of a base name plus numbers (i.e.
00002.stuff.tiff or something like that).
- Enter the directory name into the "Video to Convert" input field.
- Pick the Numbered Images radio button which should then appear.
- Enter the start and end frame numbers. The total will be
automatically computed for you.
- Enter the file template. For the example above, the template
would be "#.stuff.tiff".
- When you hit return after filling in the file template, a small
Video Input Parameters dialog box should pop up. The
defaults are fine, just hit Close. If you made a mistake,
you'll either be thrown back to the radio button step
above or the box just won't pop up and the right half of
the panel will stay greyed out.
- The Output (right) half of the mediaconvert panel should now be
active. Click on the Video Parameters arrow button to the
panel that lets you control the type of movie, the image size,
compression, amount to crop, and so on. Click Start when you're
satisfied with the settings. The defaults are probably
just what you need. Be warned that the conversion may take
a few minutes per hundred frames. You'll see an estimated
time to completion dialog as it's crunching. You should
definitely have the output file be on a locally mounted
disk to speed things up. Ideally the input files should be
local as well.
- If you want to record your movie onto videotape:
- You should use the JPEG compression option. Moviola has
hardware supported JPEG recording and playback, so your movie
should play back smoothly even if the movie is bigger than will fit
into main memory.
- You can use the
movieplayer program on moviola to
play back the movie in real time on the screen, and follow the recording live monitor output
instructions to record from the screen onto a tape.
- You can follow the instructions for using Premiere on moviola if you want to
assemble many movies into one finished product, which you then want
to record to tape. You'd import the movie you just made as a clip.
Although according to the documentation you could theoretically use
Premiere to import individual files and dispense with
mediaconvert
altogether, in practice I've found that it's horribly slow (hours
of processing time).
More detail
Additional notes
The old way to do single-frame recording was to use the Abekas A60
framestore. That path is still available for use, but not recommended
anymore since it's quite slow. The A60's special-purpose disk only
holds 740 frames and takes 20 minutes to load them.
The mediaconvert executable is also aliased to
movieconvert.
If you want to do the frames->movie conversion as part of a script,
you could use the dmconvert program, which is
what's actually being used behind the GUI frontend of
mediaconvert. The command-line syntax is quite
complex, there are examples in the extensive man page.
[At the moment moviola doesn't seem to have that man page, but
radiance does. TMM Wed Jan 13 19:06:23 1999]
Troubleshooting
The mediaconvert program is very finicky about the file
template. It will often take you more than one try to convince it to
accept your files. Don't give up, eventually you will beat it into
submission. My current conjecture is that filling in the file template
after the start and end fields will make it behave. If even
that doesn't work, you could try using one '#' for each decimal place
and having files of the form {"0030.rgb, "0003.rgb", "0300.rgb"}
instead of {"30.rgb", "3.rgb", "300.rgb"}. Then you'd enter "####.rgb"
for the template.
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Last modified: Wed Jan 13 19:14:27 PST 1999