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Sweet.  I like the splatter effect.  Makes the IFS look like drops of mercury.

The movie you posted uses Microsoft's old MP42 codec, which isn't really MPEG-4 but should work for most Windows users.  More info here: http://www.moviecodec.com/topics/5098p1.html

I grabbed the GIF version from DeviantART and encoded MPEG-1 and XviD movies which might play better for some folks.  Okay by you if I post them?

Sure, please do

I'm using Mencoder to make the videos (it's free). Obviously I'm still learning, and Mencoder is hard to use and poorly documented.

If someone has a suggestion for a "real" video suite I'd appreciate any suggestions. I've tried out several now including Blaze Media Pro and WebEx both of which didn't work as well as Mencoder and weren't freeware anyway.

i've suggested the free+good+standard approach just above!

here's an executive summary if it was tl;dr -

1. get virtualdub & xvid codec
2. encode
3. ...
4. profit!

it's even a zillion times easier than using mencoder, which i too have used (and found horrible compared to just opening the first of a sequence of frames in vdub, selecting the xvid codec and saving the avi).


if don doesn't re-encode the original data and you're forced to work with the gif, a way to regain that lost precision while simultaneously getting a bit of antialiasing is to convert the gif to a truecolour avi, then resizing (with high quality) and encoding with virtualdub. even with only 256 colours in the source signal you'll get some precision back from the resize, and having a smoother signal to work with will improve the quality/filesize ratio significantly. those 17mb should be < 1mb for an anim of that length!

there is a very obviously named option for video compression selection, ditto for audio. if you look around you'll also find the framerate setting, for this animation i think 15fps ought to be ideal.

with my apps i've always saved a series with filenames frameXXXXX.bmp, the first of which i open in vdub and it scans the rest. adobe's imageready (which is used by many for making animated gifs) follows the same convention, and i've been using it for years before both apps so the convention must come from somewhere...

as for saving with mpg extension,