Movies

Q: If anyone has tips on constructing high-quality MPEG-4 movies (animations) from a series of still frames, I'd be interested in hearing them.

Maris wrote:

Encode all .png files in directory to out.avi with 15 frames per second:

mencoder "mf:///path/to/files/*.png" -mf fps=15 -o out.avi # put -ovc here, see next lines

## for DivX - libavcodec MPEG 4 (DivX5), use:
-ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vhq:vbitrate=1800
## for XviD, use:
-ovc xvid -xvidencopts bitrate=1024
## for DivX4, use:
-ovc divx4 -divx4opts q=5

Uses mplayer's encoder. Choose one of encoding formats and append to end of "mencoder" line. Unfortunately only way to know quality settings is by encoding, watching result and reendocing with different params.