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”.
-h	N/A	Flag parameter to enable high-quality (not yet implemented)
-i.. input_path	.	Path to the input path (necessary), e.g. “/localdata/dvrp/karman”
-k	N/A	Use this flag parameter, if you would like to keep the generated image files at the end of the run.
-n.. jobname	""	The basename of your files (necessary), e.g. "karman".
-o.. output_path	input_path	Path to the output_folder, e.g. "/data/username/dvrp".
-r	N/A	Use this fag parameter to encoding videos with already existing converted files in your “output_path/jobname/”
s.. scale_width	1024	Scaling width. The original sized images width x height will be resized for the video output to scale_width x scale_height. scale_height is calculated internally to keep the aspect ratio.
.t.. file_type	tiff	Image file type (input).
-w.. filename	N/A	Filename/location of a watermark. For IMUK, there are already a black (imuk_wm_black.png) and a white (imuk_wm_white.png) watermarks