Mandelbox Trees

[jwm-art]

"Mandel Trees is a video generated by the open source 3D Mandelbrot
program Mandelbulber, which can render a variety of 3D fractals. The
video consists of renderings of a negatively scaled Mandelbox. As far
as Mandelbox videos go, this one is unusual as it is not showing an
area of the Mandelbox packed tight with intricacy."

video stills: http://jwm-art.net/dark.php?p=mandeltrees
video (77mb): http://jwm-art.net/art/mandelboxtrees.ogv

Only open source software was used in this rendering.

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Ok, I'm pretty clueless about video codecs and the like. I'm a bit of an open source freak too, so I'm using  the Theora format via FFMPEG (ie command line encoding from the JPEGs output by Mandelbulber). It loses some detail in the shadows, but just pretend it's depth-of-field effects ;-p

Uses an audio sequence generated by Yoshimi sequenced by a little JACK MIDI app of mine which is half finished with development stalled.

[kon16ov]

Very nifty anim!  One thing I love about this forum is seeing cool things I haven't seen before.

As far as open source video editing goes, I've been using KDEnLive with pretty solid success for a few months, now.  It's not quite to the level of Adobe Premier, but it's a solid non-linear editor and comes with a decent array of codecs.  I tend to use AVI simply because it's easier to throw up on YouTube than some of the others, but it has a wide selection, including some HD options.  I only handles 2048 still images at a time, so I tend to throw 300 in at a time, making 10s vids, and then assemble them all after that.  It's a little bit of a process, but getting to see previews and things is nice.  The only caveat is that while the previews may appear smooth, sometimes the finished product has some jerkiness between vid clip transitions... :-/

Again, nifty anim -- good stuff...

Phil

[jwm-art]

Thanks Phil. Thinking about it, the tree-like form is the central theme to this animation - I came across them while exploring these particular parameters and a single image just couldn't capture their form - they look different from different angles.

I dislike both KDE and Gnome desktop environments so KDEnLive might not be for me. I've installed Lives (Lives Is Video Editing Software) but haven't had time to get to grips with it yet. Video is one of the last great areas (for me) of computing I've not explored (networking is the other area I know little about). I don't know if Lives has any difficulty handling a great many still images or not. FFMPEG was happy encoding 3800 still images.

I created a little BASH script like so to do it so I don't have to remember all those options:

Code:

#!/bin/bash
ffmpeg -i bs_demo_16bit.wav -f image2 -i image%05d.jpg -f ogg -aspect 4:3 -vcodec libtheora -vb 4096k -acodec libvorbis -ac 2 -vol 300 -ab 128k anim_theora_l2.ogv

Anyone have any tips for fractals, Theora and FFMPEG?

[kon16ov]

I tend to agree with you about Gnome/KDE...although, I'm kind of looking forward to the "paradigm shift" that Gnome3 is supposed to be touting.  We'll see.  I tend to have GUI ADD...XCFE, WindowMaker, Blackbox...along with Gnome, KDE4...something for every mood, you know?

At any rate, KDEnLive is pretty solid, and handles things *mostly well.*  I just downloaded LIVES and will give it a poke -- although it's griping about gdk-pixbuf2 and I have the most recent version.  hmmmm.  Will probably also see what FFMPEG can do, though I've noticed that flattening of shadows/highlights in a couple of my other anims -- then again, it may have more to do with the codecs included with KDEnLive...

Also -- thanks for the command like to toss in a script.  That does look like a bit to remember!

Oy.  Well...my video just finished.  without audio, AVI DV 640x480 = 757MB.  Gah...might have to try the new tools and see what they can come up with!

[Tglad]

Aw I really want to see the video now, but the ogv doesn't work for me... maybe you could upload to vimeo or something, I don't know.
But I saw one image of a tree which was cool and a different sort of tree than I've seen before.
If you haven't seen them, here are some other types:
http://www.fractalforums.com/index.php?action=gallery;sa=view;id=2149
http://www.fractalforums.com/index.php?action=gallery;sa=view;id=1913
http://www.fractalforums.com/index.php?action=gallery;sa=view;id=1974
http://www.fractalforums.com/index.php?action=gallery;sa=view;id=3620

[visual.bermarte]

nice trees.
For the codec see>http://www.xiph.org/dshow/

[jwm-art]

Hi Tglad,

I don't know what to suggest. I uploaded the video to vimeo last night but this morning it tells me there was a problem converting the video - but it still manages to pull the first frame from it to show as a thumbnail

In Linux, the video plays within Firefox without problem and out of the browser it's also playing fine with mplayer. Unless someone has a better idea, I'll try and upload one of the AVI's I also encoded it as.

@Visual: Dshow is for MS Windows and no good for me using Linux.

[jwm-art]

But I saw one image of a tree which was cool and a different sort of tree than I've seen before.
If you haven't seen them, here are some other types:
http://www.fractalforums.com/index.php?action=gallery;sa=view;id=2149
http://www.fractalforums.com/index.php?action=gallery;sa=view;id=1913
http://www.fractalforums.com/index.php?action=gallery;sa=view;id=1974
http://www.fractalforums.com/index.php?action=gallery;sa=view;id=3620

Hmmm, they're nicer trees. Mine look more like concrete fans/ferns.

[Don Whitaker]

Cool video - I like the subdued palette.

Video plays well with VLC - an open source, cross-platform video player
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/