Maxim DL Animation

Maxim DL has the ability to make animations from a series of images. It makes a crude AVI file that's quite large and has incomplete header information so will not play or convert with most tools.

  • File > Save Avi
  • Select all fits files from a directory
  • Click 'auto stretch' checkbox
  • Click save and it'll ask you where to put the file

Repairing the File & Encode

A solution to fixing the fairly useless AVI is to dump the video as raw video (in itself unplayable) and then re-encode to a given format. Even if avi, other tools will properly construct an AVI file and it will be useable. Of course MP4 with H-264 compression is the modern preferred format that most computers and mobile devices use.

I've use ffmpeg, which is a command line tool on mac that you can get from macports. Most tools you'd find online really use this library or tool underneath and are really interfaces to prepare the command line options.

  • To convert to raw video ('yuv' format)
  • ffmpeg -i animation.avi -vcodec rawvideo -pix_fmt yuv420p out.yuv

  • To encode to lossless MP4
  • ffmpeg -vcodec rawvideo -f rawvideo -pix_fmt yuv420p -s:v 1530x1020 -i out.yuv -c:v libx264 test4.mp4

  • To reduce the resolution when saving to MP4
  • ffmpeg -vcodec rawvideo -f rawvideo -pix_fmt yuv420p -s:v 1530x1020 -i out.yuv -c:v libx264 -vf scale=766:510 test4-320.mp4

-- LaurieNevay - 30 Apr 2017

Physics WebpagesRHUL WebpagesCampus Connect • Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey TW20 0EX; Tel/Fax +44 (0)1784 434455/437520

Topic revision: r1 - 30 Apr 2017 - LaurieNevay

 
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