Stills to DVD movie: How?
Charles Packer
http://cpacker.org/trees
I use Javascript to handle the transition between
images that creates the movie illusion. This works
for a Web site, but now I want to turn the same
series of stills into a movie on DVD. This is
essentially an animation task, and it resembles
stop-motion animation except that a given frame would
record a cross-fade point between two stills instead
of the evolving positions of objects.
Apparently, stop-motion typically is done by using
a camcorder connected to frame-capture hardware.
For example, see
http://www.stopmotionworks.com/howtostopmofilm.htm
But I already have everything captured! I just
need to know how to do the back-end process of writing
each frame to a DVD. So far, I can't find
any information on the Web that will tell me how to
do this in so many words. So it looks like my best
bet would be to find some freeware that does it from
the above-mentioned frame-capture hardware and
reverse-engineer it to find out how the DVD is
written, no?
--
Charles Packer
http://cpacker.org/whatnews
mailboxATcpacker.org
Richard Brooks
Do you want the whole thing to resemble a slide show with each frame
taking up a second or two or do you want to actually turn it into an
animation with each frame taking up the normal frame time for your
country, (25fps for UK)?
If it's the latter then VirtualDub will do that for you if you have
your images sequentially arranged by just selecting the first image in
the folder and having the checkbox for importing all in that sequence.
This is something I use for that task and there is a field/frame
option. There are many filters that are built for it too.
The result of saving the sequence is that you end up with an AVI
animation so it may then have to be converted to a format to be read
into a straight DVD authoring package (for making your DVD menus and
making a DVD burn ready folder set) that is if that authoring package
does not recognise AVI in its importing list of file formats and some
don't!
If on the other hand, you mean that each image should take even 1/2 of
a second then you need something which will build copies of that image
for the duration so that it becomes a short animation of stills,
before going onto the next image and repeating the same thing. For
that you'd need something like Intervideo WinDVD which builds a slide
show into a file.
In any case it's [Stage 1 - build animation] [Stage 2 - author and
make DVD ready].
HTH!
Charles Packer
armstrongs.com> wrote:
> Do you want the whole thing to resemble a slide show with each frame
> taking up a second or two or do you want to actually turn it into an
> animation with each frame taking up the normal frame time for your
> country, (25fps for UK)?
>
> If it's the latter then VirtualDub will do that for you if you have
> your images sequentially arranged by just selecting the first image in
>
Yes, it's the latter, not a slide show. I see that
VirtualDub handles BMP images, which is a promising
start. I'll have to study it further. Thanks...and thanks for a useful
phrase, "DVD authoring," with which I'll
be sure to find material about the mechanics of getting
my content onto DVD.
Richard Brooks
That's just a catch-all phrase which means taking some form of
animation and turning the result into something which can be burned
onto DVD. I'd say most of those packages include you being able to
burn the DVD also, and not having to export it as a finished edited
product to your usual separate DVD burning package.
With authroing, the fun part is being able to choose your own
background (still frame or animation with music), whether you can add
your own animated company logo to play as soon as the DVD is inserted
into a DVD player before it goes to the menu and whether to add extras.
One name which is kicked about a lot in terms of DVD Authoring is
Tempgenc. <http://tmpgenc.pegasys-inc.com/en/product/taw4.html>
You could try authoring then burning to a DVD-RW to test then wipe it
again.
I use VirtualDub for the more fancy stuff due to the vast range of
plug-ins such as zoom to a specific spot in the frame over time,
saturation, brightness and contrast, padding and resizing the image
frame edges to allow for a safe-frame area rather than straight image
to authoring which sometimes gets cropped around the edges.
Good luck and have fun!
Richard.