On Fri, Aug 12, 2005 at 09:11:38PM +0200, Al Bogner wrote:

I have a lot of stillimages from a digicam and want to make a movie like this: http://pinguin.uni.cc/jerking_flickering_xvid.avi

The quality of this avi-file is not perfect, so I am searching for a way to do it better. If you look at the motion, it is not a quiet motion, it is jerking a little bit. If the file is encoded to a DVD with transcode it is flickering, probably an interlace-problem, although it is interlaced encoded.

My question is: can something like this short test-avi be done with gimp-gap? I am not happy with image2raw and I think stills2dv is not my 1st choice too.

I have installed gimp-gap on my Etch-Linux-system, but there are problems with my xanim-version
http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/pool/non-free/x/xanim/xanim_2.80.1-14_i386.deb (Ea, Ee, Eq not supported)

So, if you tell me, that I can't do what I want with gimp-gap I don't have to spent time, why gimp-gap doesn't work, otherwise I would be happy to get a few hints how I would do this with gimp-gap.

i will be honest, i did not look at the avi you showed here. gap can do most things to a stack of images that gimp can do with just a single image.

what gap uses xanim for is for breaking the single video file into separate frame images. then, it might use xanim to put them back together -- it has been a while since i had gap and xanim installed together.

the xanim that gap wants is seriously broken. when it creates single images from the one video file, it makes them without the blue channel.

mplayer is another option to build gap against. it works better and correctly. once installed and gap recognizes it, you get more options in the Xtns menu where the fun with gap starts.

when i first started to play with single images, there were so many picky little rules, like png cannot handle layers or offset. indexed images can not be jpegs -- stuff like this which today seeems easy. video manipulation has millions of these same sorts of picky rules. from the size of the frames to how to set the timing when you re-encode it.

getting mplayer installed is only a small part of the bigger task.

that being said, it sure was fun to play with gap. the same way it was fun to play with gimp the first time all those years ago.

gap needs mplayer and disc space.

carol

On Saturday 13 August 2005 18:34, Carol Spears wrote:

i will be honest, i did not look at the avi you showed here.

me neither, my browser is not set up to view them yet.

gap can
do most things to a stack of images that gimp can do with just a single image.

but can it make .avi files ?, i think it can't but would be pleased to hear otherwise/differnt.

what gap uses xanim for is for breaking the single video file into separate frame images. then, it might use xanim to put them back together -- it has been a while since i had gap and xanim installed together.

you know i have a big problem with that as in cannot figure out how to load the movie files into gimp to break down, do you know how that is done ?

gap needs mplayer and disc space.

yes, it is very processor intensive.

sammi

On 8/13/05, Carol Spears wrote:

On Fri, Aug 12, 2005 at 09:11:38PM +0200, Al Bogner wrote:

I have a lot of stillimages from a digicam and want to make a movie like this:

My question is: can something like this short test-avi be done with gimp-gap? I am not happy with image2raw and I think stills2dv is not my 1st

Yes, but only if configured properly. It may be easier to simply use a different program.

I highly suggest you build MPlayer with support for the images you're reading, and then use mencoder to create the AVIs. Read the MPlayer man page for details. The example is near the bottom, it uses jpegs, but can be adapted to use pngs.

BTW, ? wildcards (in addition to * wildcards) work with mencoder -- at least on my system they do. But I built my own mplayer, and downloaded every single dev package for still file formats I could find (libpng-dev, liblzo-dev, etc...). And I run Debian (unstable/testing). *shrugs*

On Saturday 13 August 2005 20:35, Al Bogner wrote:

That is the key-question. I need a tool which does perfect rendering, when transitions are created or the motion of the still images is rendered.

have you seen cinelerra ?
http://heroinewarrior.com/cinelerra.php3, it's something i'm looking into but i need a differnt video card first.

sammi

On Sat, Aug 13, 2005 at 06:51:13PM +0100, sam ende wrote:

On Saturday 13 August 2005 18:34, Carol Spears wrote:

gap can
do most things to a stack of images that gimp can do with just a single image.

but can it make .avi files ?, i think it can't but would be pleased to hear otherwise/differnt.

yes it can make avi. in fact, once you have some of the supporting software installed, making avi is the default action of the encoder, for other formats, the encoding options need to be changed.

what gap uses xanim for is for breaking the single video file into separate frame images. then, it might use xanim to put them back together -- it has been a while since i had gap and xanim installed together.

you know i have a big problem with that as in cannot figure out how to load the movie files into gimp to break down, do you know how that is done ?

Xtns -->Split Video to Frames -->Extract Videorange is the nicest gui. there have been a few occasions when this failed and Xtns -->Split Video to Frames -->MPlayer based extract worked.

you show the dialog to the file and tell it where to start extracting and where to put the frames it makes. i have a web page about this some where....

carol

On 8/13/05, sam ende wrote:

On Saturday 13 August 2005 20:35, Al Bogner wrote:

That is the key-question. I need a tool which does perfect rendering, when transitions are created or the motion of the still images is rendered.

Are you kidding? If you compress ANY MOVIE in MPEG, H.264, or WMV, you are still going to get artifacts; there is no such thing as perfect rendering. If you want "perfect rendering", you have to use an uncompressed AVI, which takes up a couple hundred MB for a couple seconds of footage.

You may want IMGCON for that: http://www.fmrib.ox.ac.uk/~yongyue/imgcon.html

BTW, Try looking in the archives for the POV-Ray lists (www.povray.org) -- since their animation features generate a series of still PNGs, this is exactly the kind of utilities that they need. Look in the archives of binary utilities; they're scattered in various odd messages there.

If you're looking for transitions or moving still images, I highly suggest you get some movie editing software, such as the Windows Movie Maker bundled with XP, or Pinnacle Studio 9 (http://pinnaclesys.com/). To be honest, GIMP, while it can do these things, it is not necessarily the best or quickest or easiest way to do these things -- I mean, at 30 frames per second, does anyone really have the space to edit each of those frames with a picture editor (even with automated tools)? The most I've ever done in Gimp to date is 90 frames, or 3 seconds... [This was a few days ago.]

have you seen cinelerra ?
http://heroinewarrior.com/cinelerra.php3, it's something i'm looking into but i need a differnt video card first.

Last I checked, that required a heck of a lot of CPU...

Hi,

Al Bogner writes:

I have a lot of stillimages from a digicam and want to make a movie like this: http://pinguin.uni.cc/jerking_flickering_xvid.avi

The quality of this avi-file is not perfect, so I am searching for a way to do it better. If you look at the motion, it is not a quiet motion, it is jerking a little bit. If the file is encoded to a DVD with transcode it is flickering, probably an interlace-problem, although it is interlaced encoded.

My question is: can something like this short test-avi be done with gimp-gap? I am not happy with image2raw and I think stills2dv is not my 1st choice too.

Yes, as far as I know the CVS version of gimp-gap is capable of doing that.

Sven