Converting Pictures (png) to a Movie (avi)
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.
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
download and install mencoder. All I ended up doing is downloading these two executable files and copying them into /usr/bin
- 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