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Hello!
For my work as a scientist, I occasionally have to make animations of simple line plots. That is, I have a bunch (several hundred) of PNG stills showing a static coordinate system along with a few colored, "evolving" curves, and I need to make a movie out of them. Ideally, the resulting file should be as small as possible and be playable on a large number of computers without much hassle.
I have successfully used mencoder as well as ffmpeg to create such movies, using XviD and the MPEG-4 codec that ffmpeg uses by default to create .mp4 files with (I'm still confused by the choices and nomenclature of container formats and video codecs available). Anyway, the results are not very satisfactory. "JPEG-like" artifacts are clearly visible, even if the size of the resulting movie file reaches the total one of all PNGs.
I understand, of course, that these codecs were not intended for input material such as I have, but I have not found anything better yet. So, are there any alternatives? Or are there encoding options for XviD, like switching off some filters which make only sense for photorealistic pictures, that will reduce the number of artifacts which give simple lines a blurry look?
Thanks a lot!
For my work as a scientist, I occasionally have to make animations of simple line plots. That is, I have a bunch (several hundred) of PNG stills showing a static coordinate system along with a few colored, "evolving" curves, and I need to make a movie out of them. Ideally, the resulting file should be as small as possible and be playable on a large number of computers without much hassle.
I have successfully used mencoder as well as ffmpeg to create such movies, using XviD and the MPEG-4 codec that ffmpeg uses by default to create .mp4 files with (I'm still confused by the choices and nomenclature of container formats and video codecs available). Anyway, the results are not very satisfactory. "JPEG-like" artifacts are clearly visible, even if the size of the resulting movie file reaches the total one of all PNGs.
I understand, of course, that these codecs were not intended for input material such as I have, but I have not found anything better yet. So, are there any alternatives? Or are there encoding options for XviD, like switching off some filters which make only sense for photorealistic pictures, that will reduce the number of artifacts which give simple lines a blurry look?
Thanks a lot!