For the reasons you wrote under 2) I decided not to use 'convert' to
directly make an MPEG coded movie out of my MIFF data. Instead I use
convert to extract every frame of the MIFF and to save them for
example in the PNG format. Afterwards I use 'transcode' to rebuild a
movie out of the individual frames. Doing so I normally use the XviD
codec to encode the video stream. I hacked all these steps together in
a more or less not so elegant bash script 'miff2xvid' that I attached
to this mail. It needs Image Magick (for convert), transcode and the
XviD package to work. At least for a unix like OS it should be
possible to install these pieces of software quite easily.
Maybe this helps!
Best regards
Ulrich
P.S.: If the MIFF data consists of frames with comparable high
resolution the 'convert' process reapes a huge amount of memory to do
his job. It looks to me that it keeps all the data for all frames in
memory at the same time. Does anybode know a more memory friendly way
to extract every single frame out of MIFF data?
On Wed, 13 Oct 2004, D.A. Crawley wrote:
> One way would be to concatenate all the files in to one file to be read in
> by DX. Then all the data is represented internally in your machine. You
> can then use the sequencer to select out the particular time slice you are
> interested in and use the continuous save option in the save image window
> to create a MIFF file with all the frames present. If you are using Linux
> or some other Unix you can probably use the Linux command line command
>
> convert input-file.miff output-file.m2v
>
> to create an mpeg. Note that if you are running RH or Fedora (and possibly
> other unicies as well) you'll need to download and install the MPEG codec
> so that convert can use it.
>
> Notes:
>
> 1) This method is relatively memory intensive.
>
> 2) The MPEG codecs I have been able to download for convert are all a
> little bit buggy and frequently fall over with large complex files.
>
> 3) This does depend a little bit on what format you are feeding your data
> in to DX, for my applications its easy, I have regularly sampled binary
> data of a known size, I have no idea how you are sampling your data.
>
> Good Luck
>
> David
#!/bin/bash
function usage ()
{
echo 1>&2
echo "Usage: miff2xvid [-f frames_per_second]" 1>&2
echo " [-o outfile.avi]" 1>&2
echo " file.miff" 1>&2
echo 1>&2
echo " Converts file.miff to file.avi (or outfile.avi if -o is given)" 1>&2
echo " using frames_per_second as framerate (defaults to 25)" 1>&2
echo 1>&2
exit 0
}
if [ $[$# < 1 ] = 1 ]; then
usage
fi
FOPTION=25;
OOPTION="";
while getopts "f:o:" OPTION; do
case $OPTION in
f) FOPTION=$OPTARG;;
o) OOPTION=$OPTARG;;
?) usage;;
esac
done
shift $[$OPTIND-1]
if [ x"$OOPTION" == "x" ]; then
OOPTION=`basename $1 .miff`
OOPTION=`basename $OOPTION .MIFF`
OOPTION=`dirname $1`/$OOPTION".avi"
fi
TMPDIR=`mktemp -d -t miff2xvid.XXXXXXXXXX`
mkdir -p $TMPDIR
declare -i FRAMES X Y
echo "######### Analyzing $1"
IDENTIFY=`identify -format "%n %w %h" $1 | \
tail -n 2 | head -n 1`
FRAMES=`echo $IDENTIFY | gawk '{ print $1 }'`
X=`echo $IDENTIFY | gawk '{ print $2 }'`
Y=`echo $IDENTIFY | gawk '{ print $3 }'`
FRAMES=$(( FRAMES-1 ))
if [ $(( $Y % 2 )) -eq 1 ]; then
JOPTION=1
else
JOPTION=0
fi;
if [ $(( $X % 2 )) -eq 1 ]; then
JOPTION=$JOPTION",1,0,0"
else
JOPTION=$JOPTION",0,0,0"
fi;
echo "######### Extracting $(( FRAMES+1 )) frames out of $1"
convert -quality 9 $1 $TMPDIR/frame.png
for ZAHL in `seq 0 $FRAMES`; do
mv $TMPDIR/frame.png.$ZAHL $TMPDIR/frame.$ZAHL.png
echo $TMPDIR/frame.$ZAHL.png >> $TMPDIR/frameliste.txt
done
echo "######### Encoding animation to $OOPTION"
echo
transcode -i $TMPDIR/frameliste.txt \
-x imlist,null \
-g "$X"x"$Y" \
-z \
-j $JOPTION \
-y xvid4,null \
-f $FOPTION \
-w 1500 \
-H 0 \
-o $OOPTION
rm -rf $TMPDIR
