img2video

Overview

img2video is a wrapping tool for converting images of many types into video files using Mencoder and gifsicle. It has been developed for the animation of DVRP (TIFF images) and NCL-plotted data (EPS images).

Requirements

img2video requires the ImageMagick and the Mencoder package (contained in Mplayer) as well as the package gifsicle.

The input files have to be numbered (e.g. “karman0000” - “karman3999”). Missing files will be usually skipped without further notice, so please keep an eye on the completeness of your files. In general, single missing images will not affect the animation significantly (due to frame rates of at least 25fps). If you create animated gifs, warning messages will show up, if files are missing. To provide a fluently playing video, you should provide 25 single images (=frames) per second (25 fps).

User Instructions

1. Prepare a folder with your input files.
   e.g. “/localdata/dvrp/video” containing the files “image0000.tiff” to “image3999.tiff” in TIFF format (as used by the DVRP software).

2. Run img2video with at least the -i and -n parameter from command line,
   e.g. “./img2video -i /localdata/dvrp/video -n image”. Other parameters can be used as follows:

Parameter Name	Default Value	Explanation
-a.. fps	25	Frames per second
-c.. codec	flash	Desired video format. Currently supported codecs are: flash (Flash Video) mpeg (MS MPEG 4.2) mpeg4 (MPEG4) mjpeg (Motion JPEG) gif (Animated GIF) wmv2 (Windows Media Video 2) Motion JPEG is a high quality video format, which produces animations of high quality without further compression. This results in a relatively large file size (e.g. ~200mb for 3min video). Flash is the best choice for web pages (~18mb for 3min). Animated GIF is recommended since it can be played out-of-the box in most browsers.
-f.. filename	Internally set	Output file name. If this parameter is not set, img2video will generate a nice filename for you, e.g. “karman_50fps_mjpeg”.
alpha_surface