I usually render 24bpp PPM frames from my own software (PPM is raw uncompressed RGB with a simple ASCII header), and make a soundtrack of the correct length (export 16bit stereo WAV from Audacity).
Then I make a lossless (PNG + FLAC in Matroska container) movie file for archival purposes (note that ImageMagick's 'convert' can create greyscale or indexed PNG files for some frames, but most players prefer all frames the same format, so I use 'pnmtopng -force'):
flac --best --verify soundtrack.wav
for i in *.ppm ; do pnmtopng -force -compression 9 < "${i}" > "${i%ppm}png" ; done
avconv -i "%05d.png" -i soundtrack.flac -acodec copy -vcodec copy lossless.mkv
Usually I stick to the default 25fps. Then I can delete all the input files (particularly the PPM which take up huge amounts of space) and transcode from the lossless.mkv to various formats, usually h264 video (with CRF constant-quality single pass option) with Vorbis soundtrack:
avconv -i lossless.mkv -crf 18 output.mkv
For animated GIF, I use 'gifsicle':
for i in *.png ; do convert "${i}" "${i%png}gif" ; done
gifsicle --delay 4 --colors 16 --optimize --loop *.gif > animated.gif
But animated GIF is generally much larger and lower quality than a video file, even if you heavily reduce the number of colours to reduce the size.
May 13, 2011, 09:17:44 PM
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