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© Simon Fitzgerald 1999 [email protected]
Made in the UK.
So, you've got your individual frames, and now you want to make a movie. Well, don't worry as it's not that hard to do. Everything I'm going to say I've found out the hard way by experimenting. That's always a good for everyone to do, since what I'll say here may not always apply to your creations. Nevertheless, I hope that what I've said will be useful as a general guide, if nothing else. And if you know I've got something wrong, please let me know! Go here for a summary of what I've said on this page.
Before, here's some definitions of terms that might be handy:
The first thing to do is decide what format you'll going to record your movie in. The four main are Windows AVI, Apple QuickTime, MPEG, and RealMedia. They've all got relative merits, and sometimes one is more appropriate than another, although the first two are often the best. (See further down though for a promising newcomer - Bink - which now that I've played around with it a bit, has got to be the best high quality choice for PC)
MPEGs can produce similar file sizes to the best AVI and MOV, but you can only use a frame rate from the following list: 23.976, 24, 25, 29.97, 30, 50, 59.94, or 60 fps. The reason has something to do with how the MPEG standard was created. Anyway, that can be a serious limitation if like me you can only spend the time to render images suitable for a 10 frame per second movie. You could cheat and repeat frames, but that would greatly increase the file size. I don't know if Macs can play MPEGs or not.
I don't know how common RealMedia is on Macs, but it is a ok format for PCs. Everyone will almost certainly have RealPlayer 5 installed, and the download for the latest version, RealPlayer G2, isn't that large (and it's often on cover CDs). The big advantage of Real is that it is designed for the internet. When you encode a file, you can choose the appropriate level of compression (ie file size) for downloading over different modems, so you can have a top quality version for those with quick modems and a lower quality version for those with 28.8 speed modems. In addition, the files can be streamed from any website - in other words, you can watch while it's downloading. The downside is though that as it's really meant for live video broadcasts, and not for computer generated images, the quality isn't as good as it could be. To demonstrate, here's a movie compressed for a 28.8 modem, and here's the same movie compressed for a T1 connection. The first is 20K, but poor quality, and the latter is 219K, but better quality.
Once you've decided what format you are going to record in, you need to decide upon a codec. Uncompressed movies are very large, and the best codecs sacrifice very little quality for huge filesize savings. The original movie used for the examples on this page is four and half megabytes, and it's only got 97 frames at 160 by 100!
There is no choice of codec when recording in either MPEG or RealMedia, but there is a vast choice with AVI and QuickTime. A standard set come with Windows, but better are available. The standard set in Windows 95 are very old and outdated, but Cinepak can be handy to use. It compresses the file size reasonably well, and doesn't require a powerful computer to use. The downside is of course the quality loss, although on some sorts of movies, especially static "lets watch the sun come up", the difference is neglible. The loss tends to appear in colour definition.
A newer and much better codec though is Intel's Indeo 5, which you can download here (805K). That's the FTP address for the basic files, because there's no need to download the full 1.85Mb setup; the webpage is here if you want more info. File sizes are lower with this codec, and the quality difference from the uncompressed original is small. However, a more powerful computer (Pentium up) is required for best effect.
There's no point discussing other AVI codecs; I'd recommend using Cinepak for a low specification movie and Indeo 5 for top quality. With small movies, like 160 by 100, the quality is the same as far as I can see between Cinepak and Indeo 5, but the Indeo 5 compressed movie is always smaller. This is a Cinepak (437K zip) example, and this is the equivalent Indeo 5 (295K zip), both at the quality settings of 85%. Unzipped, the Indeo 5 movie is 235K smaller, but with no quality difference.
It's a similar scenario with QuickTime. Cinepak is a default codec, but there are better. The best seems to be Sorenson, and fortunately it comes with QuickTime 3 as standard.
Right, on to the software. First, Windows AVI. The best program for the PC I've seen is the Fast Movie Processor from Gromada. It's free for non commercial use, and has quite a few useful filters and functions that you can use to change the movies. Presuming your frames are numbered sequentially (as they will be if they're direct from Terragen), you select the first frame and then FMP auto selects the rest. Choose the output filename, colour depth, movie size (best to stay at what was rendered), frame rate and codec and you're away. It's fast too.
The free encoder for Real on the PC and the Mac is available at the Real site. The wizard will take you through the whole process. You will need to have created a movie first though, because the encoder doesn't take individual frames. My advice is to use Fast Movie Processor to create an uncompressed AVI and use that. At lower bandwidths, I've found that that using the 'sharp' video quality makes the movie jerky. Here is a movie encoded for a 28.8 modem using the sharp video quality, and this is the same encoded using the smooth quality. Both are 20K.
I haven't been able to find a free QuickTime 3 encoder for the PC. I have found some convertors though, that take an AVI and change it into a MOV. The problem with this is that there is no recompression, ie the source and destination codecs need to be the same for the process to work. So if you start with an uncompressed AVI, then you will end up with an uncompressed MOV of about the same file size. Since the Cinepak codec is common to both platforms though, you could use that to compress the AVI first and end up with a Cinepak MOV. Download Recordings have a convertor available at this page called TRMOOV which works quite well, and Intel have a convertor called SmartVid.
I have found a shareware QuickTime 3 encoder called QuickEditor. Available for both the PC and the Mac, registration costs $35. The author says he's not going to develop the PC version any further, but seeing as he has only just released an updated version that's not much of a problem.
As for MPEG, well, it's a nightmare. Somewhere back in the midsts of time I found a collection of DOS files which would extract the frames from an AVI and then (optionally) create a MPEG, and they are available here as a 106Kb zip file. It's all command line, but once you get the hand of it it's alright. Hey, if I can do it .... ! A possibly more useful program that I've found, now that I think of it, is the cunningly entitled AVI2MPG. It's a command line program with an optional Windows shell, and it does a straight convert from AVI to MPG. Amazingly.
Bink is very new, so new in fact that it's not officially finished yet. Written by the same team as Smacker, a format used in tons of games for cut scenes, it's claimed that Bink is the best there is (better than MPEG-II apparantly). And I'd tend to agree. The encoder/player is only 721K and is very simple to use. Some of the options fly over my head, but as long as I don't try anything complicated, it's fine! Instead of fiddling about with data rates when encoding, I use the file size option. Basically, you can choose the size of the compressed movie that you end up with. The only downside is the system requirements, a 'high end Pentium' apparently, and at the moment the encoder is for the PC only. This is a Bink version of the movie used above; encoded from the uncompressed AVI to 3% of the original file size, it did indeed come out at just under 140K, with the quality better than the Indeo 5 AVI! You will need the encoder/player to view, available from the Smacker website.
If you go to my Animations page you can see many more examples of the same movie encoded differently. And you can enjoy the movies as well.
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