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rbedard
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« on: December 02, 2007, 05:52:33 PM » |
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Howdy all. I have been playing with fractals for a little over ten years. Blew me away when I recently started looking around at what others are doing ... I have a lot to learn. ;-)
I think I first started playing with the fractal generator that came with Autoshade; running on a PC with EGA card and, the dithering was lame ... so I "found" Fractint, and started playing with that. I have images I generated in Fractint and modified in Photoshop dating back to the mid 1990's.
Earlier this year I became interested in animating fractals. I am using Paul de Leeuw's (Lionheart) Manpwin program to generate my fractal images. I sometimes use Paul's graphic viewer to crop images, I use Perl and whatever else I can come up with to kluge my way through things.
I am afraid most of my stuff is pretty pedestrian in comparison to what people here are doing. ;-) I am enjoying myself, but I am using really klunky tools for converting my frames to video ... I started looking for improved tools which led me here. I am hoping to improve my process after lurking here for a while and trying to get up to critical mass.
Right now, I use Paul's Manpwin to generate png images which I am assembling into video using Windows Movie Maker. Yes, I know this is a flawed tool, but I am still very much at the experimentation stage ... ha ha ha ... the issues with WMM are that it was never designed to do animation, so it can at best do 8 frames per second. It has some issues with managing a large number of frames, so I have to create small video clips of no more than 100 frames each or WMM crashes. I then assemble the smaller clips into a larger one. A pain, but like I said, I am new to this; I expect I will find better tools. WMM also does not create the best quality video ... lossy compression in addition to the lousy frame rate ... WMV files are large and not platform-independent.
First thing I am looking for is a better way to integrate my still frames into video. ;-)
Really glad I stumbled across this forum. Thanks.
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lycium
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« Reply #1 on: December 02, 2007, 08:24:16 PM » |
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heya, welcome to the forum  about making animations, i cannot recommend virtualdub enough. you just need a sequence of images in a folder, and upon opening the first it will look for the rest and you can start messing around with the animation settings, antialiasing filters, compression options etc. a very impressive (and free!) tool. you can find virtualdub here: http://www.virtualdub.org/and a very good codec pack (ffdshow) here: http://x264.nl/looking forward to seeing some animations  |
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rbedard
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« Reply #2 on: December 02, 2007, 09:32:09 PM » |
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lycium, thanks for the suggestions ... I already have virtualdub.org open and am taking a gander. I think going back and redoing a couple of my animations with better tools might be a really good idea. As to animations ... I was pretty happy with what I was doing until I found fractalanimation.com and followed a link here ... stuff people are doing just blows my mind. My stuff looks so flat and retro ... ha ha ha ... but as soon as I have something I think is adequate, I will share. Thanks for the encouragement. Here's a chunk of an image that represents one of the end points of my animations. This was a Special Newton animation done with Paul de Leeuw's (Lionheart) Manpwin fractal software.  |
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LionHeart
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« Reply #3 on: December 02, 2007, 09:32:53 PM » |
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Hi rbedard, I'm glad that my little fractal generator has been of use to you.  I only just found this site myself. There are some really helpful people here that will help us explore the beauty of fractals in new ways. Things have come a long way since the early days of FRACTINT. But that program is still an inspiration as it has so many methods of speed optimisation that really helped speed up exploration of fractals in the days of EGA and 8086 processors. Tim Wegner's "super-solid guessing" algorithm and Mark Peterson's high integer arithmetic really helped, along with symmetry and periodicity checking. Ah, those were the days. Now the PCs have so much grunt, that FRACTINT has even dropped its integer arithmetic routines. ManpWin has never really used integer arithmetic. I gave that away when I gave up on Manp, the DOS version.  Anyway, thanks for the plug of ManpWin. Take care, Paul the LionHeart  |
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Paul the LionHeart
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rbedard
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« Reply #4 on: December 03, 2007, 04:24:44 PM » |
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lycium: thanks; VirtualDub is precisely what I was looking for. First couple of animations are spectacular in their clarity (in comparison with what I was using previously); but ended up being a gig or more in size before compression ... I need to spend some time playing with VirtualDub now ...
Paul: I was about to send you another DVD, but I am now re-rendering a couple of previous animations at 320x240 using VirtualDub at about four times the frame rate, and with less lossy compression. I may just wait until I have re-rendered some of these at 640 x 480, as they will look much better.
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LionHeart
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« Reply #5 on: December 04, 2007, 11:41:24 AM » |
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Hi rbedard, Wow, that will be really great. I love the animations you send me. Thanks a million, Paul the LionHeart |
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Paul the LionHeart
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rbedard
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« Reply #6 on: December 08, 2007, 06:51:25 PM » |
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Here is a Mandelbrot animation that I did last night. It's my first experience with YouTube ... don't much care for what their compression does for the quality, but I guess you get what you pay for.
<![CDATA[<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/6NWRmmXcSaM&rel=1&fs=1&hd=1" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/6NWRmmXcSaM&rel=1&fs=1&hd=1</a>]]> |
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LionHeart
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« Reply #7 on: December 08, 2007, 09:55:52 PM » |
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Hi Rbedard, That animation looks great. And it's only 3.5 MB in size. Did you use ManpWin and VirtualDub to generate it? I'd be interested to see the script file for it, if that's OK. Thanks, Paul the LionHeart |
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Paul the LionHeart
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rbedard
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« Reply #8 on: December 09, 2007, 05:08:18 PM » |
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Paul I sent you a copy of the recreated sci file via e-mail.
Yes, the original 3000 frames were created in Manpwin and assembled in VirtualDub.
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LionHeart
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« Reply #9 on: December 10, 2007, 06:43:23 AM » |
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Hi rbedard, Got it thanks. I will have a play. You are a better artist than me. I'm better at programming, I think. Paul the LionHeart |
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Paul the LionHeart
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October 20, 2006, 05:09:43 PM
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