ffmpeg or virtualdub ?

[scavenger]

sounds like it's not the good place to talk about it but since fractal still images are far different from natural videos, I ask : would it be good to create a video production discussion ?

well, for those who play on video making, what to you use and with which parameters ?

at first, I knew only the virtualdub method + divx/xvid, but my CPU is only 70% used so I went to ffmpeg + libx264 (95%)
however, i'm not an expert with x264 parameters. Still playing with but it's a lost of time since i'm pretty sure people around here have found THE good parameters already

so can you post your softwares + parameters to produce the best 720p/1080p videos (with 9-11MB/s output rate) ?

thanksssssssssss

[slon_ru]

Hi!
http://www.fractalforums.com/help-and-support/xvid-settings/

[Pauldelbrot]

I don't know about the others here, but I've tended to use a pipeline consisting of:

1. Render to individual pngs from Mandelbulber, UF, custom code, etc., often at high resolutions (e.g. 8400x4725) for high quality AA.

2. Use a bunch of my own developed software to combine slides/clips generated in 1 to a single huge image stream -- say, 15000 numbered pngs at 1280x720 (720p high definition).

3. Use Audacity, own recorded sound effects, and possibly some public-domain music (e.g. pre-20th-century classical performed and recorded by a US military marching band), to construct soundtrack.

4. Use Virtualdub and the x264 codec to convert the outputs of steps 2 and 3 into an .avi or suchlike.

Virtualdub provides only a few no-frills editing capabilities, so my step 2 is where much of the "interesting" video editing stuff gets done (title cards, still images->slideshow, transition effects, keyframes->zoom movie, etc.) after the fractals themselves are produced in step 1.

<a href="https://www.youtube.com/v/XgvaWmDDct4&rel=1&fs=1&hd=1" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/v/XgvaWmDDct4&rel=1&fs=1&hd=1</a> was generated in this manner:

1. A relatively small number of still images and zoom keyframes, plus one clip of a Julia set morph. The mini-map and dot in the Julia morph was done within the fractal software's layer/animation capabilities.

2. Everything else in the video was done using about 1000 lines of Lisp code to implement a DSL for processing streams of images in various ways, and then using a short program in that DSL to transform the output of step 1 into all of the video's frames.

3. A few sounds recorded around the house, plus Audacity to synthesize some more sounds and glue everything together, produced the soundtrack -- no third-party content was used there at all for that one.

4. Virtualdub + x264 + mp3 from step 3 + directory of fifty gigs of pngs from step 2 = video file ready for upload to YouTube.

These days, there are increasingly capable movie editors for PCs and Macs that could be used for step 2; however, they're not 100% substitutable with what I've done, as what I've done is more like the LaTeX to their word processors.

HTH.

[scavenger]

wow

thanks for the big details !!!

i saw the movie, very nice ! exactly the kind of stuff i wanna do, mixing history and some light informations, well that's so interesting like that.
i saw most of your recent videos : wonderfull colors, all are so beautiful, bravo !

So, you use virtualdub + x264, well, as long as you don't use any filter (resize, bulr or so), you could do it with command line ?

example:

Code:

set    ffmpeg=S:\wintools\multimedia\MediaCoder\codecs64\ffmpeg.exe
set  inputdir=N:\MOVIES\FRACTALS\Mandelbulb3Dv189\output\Inside_a_gold_box_02
set outputdir=N:\MOVIES\FRACTALS\Mandelbulb3Dv189\avi
set       crf=23
set        qp=
set    preset=veryslow
::set preset=medium

%ffmpeg% -y -f image2 -framerate 50 -pattern_type sequence -start_number 000001 -i %inputdir%\Inside_a_gold_box_02%%06d.jpg -vcodec libx264 -crf %crf% -preset %preset% %outputdir%\Inside_a_gold_box_02.crf%crf%.qp%qp%.%preset%.avi

but honestly i don't understand what you do in "step 2" ??
and when do you do the AA ? with the AA ability from M3D or in step 2 ?

for the rest, well i should have been more precise... the idea behind my question was about the framerate.
- with x264:
when i make movies with lot of motion (ie: rolling cam inside a cube), with 25fps on a 42" TV all i see is sluggish, clippering video. when I change the encoding to 50fps, it becomes smooth, swift. however depending on quantizer (qp or crf) used, the bitrate my eventualy become too high for my player, resulting in clippering again : 18 to 23,000kbps

- with divX :
different quality quantizer, videos at 50fps suffers from clippering or not, same issue. bitrate fluctuates with peaks up to 25,000kbps

is there a way to still have smooth movie with big motions scenes at 30fps or should i just forget about it ?
All of the videos of yours i watched don't have the high motion scenes i'm talking about

should i just cap the higest bitrate at 15,000kpbs when encoding 720p and that's all ?

[Saquedon]

Handbrake is the most popular and high quality x264 (H264) encoder for encoding but it needs video input files.

http://handbrake.fr/

With Avidemux you can encode straight from image files.

http://www.avidemux.org/admWiki/doku.php?id=general:input_formats

http://avidemux.sourceforge.net/

[patjoyce]

I use a program called AppGeeker video converter. Does all kinds of converting for 720p/1080p video.

http://www.appgeeker.com