Imagemagick's 'animate' is not working properly

don quixada · l33t Joined: 15 May 2003 Posts: 811

I am trying to animate almost 2500 images using the 'animate' tool from Imagemagick and I'm having trouble with it. I left it overnight and it still wasn't complete. I was able to divide the quantity of images and create two separate animations, but now I'm not sure how to join the two videos together and also I can only save in mpeg format which severely reduces the quality of the animation. For some reason it cannot create an avi-- I get an error message.

So my questions are:

1. How can I save to a better format that doesn't reduce the quality too much?

2. How can I join two videos together, or even better, how can I get 'animate' to work with nearly 2500 pictures?

3. Is there another tool out there that may serve me better?

Thanks.

dq

yabbadabbadont · Posted: Mon Aug 04, 2008 6:23 pm Post subject:

In what format, are the original images?

don quixada · l33t Joined: 15 May 2003 Posts: 811

Originals are jpegs, but I converted them to pngs and it yielded the same results. The images are 640x480 and from a digital camera.

dq

yabbadabbadont · Posted: Tue Aug 05, 2008 12:12 am Post subject:

The only thing I know about, is mjpegtools, which contains programs to convert jpeg (and other image formats) into yuv4mpeg2 streams. These are then passed to mpeg2enc.

I'm pretty sure that you can use ffmpeg to read the output of jpeg2yuv (or png2yuv) and use it to encode into avi. I doubt that the quality would be any better though.

You might see if something like avidemux can create an avi using image inputs.

don quixada · l33t Joined: 15 May 2003 Posts: 811

Yeah, I'm using avidemux for doing the other editing and soundtracking etc. But I haven't looked much into its capabilities.

jpeg2yuv looks promising though (I forgot to mention that I tried to use png2swf to no avail). I'll give the jpeg2yuv a shot and report back.

dq

don quixada · l33t Joined: 15 May 2003 Posts: 811

Ok, it worked. Although the examples the program gave didn't really work. But a little playing around and doing it in two stages worked (instead of piping it directly to mpeg2enc).

I still need to know how to join two videos together. Can one use avidemux to do this?

Thanks.

dq

yabbadabbadont · Posted: Tue Aug 05, 2008 4:08 am Post subject:

I think avidemux can do that. If you actually ended up with two avi files, then avimerge (part of transcode) can join them for you.