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Converting Pictures (png) to a Movie (avi)

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I just had the problem to convert a fairly big number of png files into a movie. It turns out, the solution on a mac is fairly easy.

  1. convert the png’s to jpg. This step seems necessary — I couldn’t get the movie to work with png’s. I’ve done it under OSX comfortably with a fairly simple automator workflow:

    • get specified finder items
    • copy finder items
    • change type of images
    • make finder item names sequential
  2. download and install mencoder. All I ended up doing is downloading these two executable files and copying them into /usr/bin

  3. the all you need to do is go into the directory where your jpgs are and execute
    mencoder "mf://*.jpg" -o movie.avi -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mjpeg
    

The original suggestion I found here. Some more suggestions here. I played a bit with the framerate -ofps (see manpages). Here’s the wikipedia page. Here’s a video encoding wiki.

update Monday; June 24, 2013: scaling, cropping and compression can work like this

mencoder -oac copy -ovc xvid -xvidencopts pass=2:bitrate=-700000 -vf scale=480:-2,crop=480:208

Written by Claus

November 26th, 2010 at 11:36 am

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