Assembling/Encoding WMV from single frames
The following is snipped from an email from John Kuehne. The context is taking single frames exported from MatLab or POV-Ray (ray tracing 3d graphics) and compiling a windows-friendly WMV. In this case the client required a movie file that works on Windows without a plugin (i.e. quicktime).
AVI (audio video interlaced) format and Apple's MOV format are just container formats. They don't specify how the audio and video data are encoded, and they don't generally include the decoder. You already know that when you save a QT movie, you have a long choice of encoders, of which Sorensen 3 and MPEG-4 are two widely used codecs (coder/decoder). And Microsoft has its particular MPEG-4 codecs, which are not compatible with any other vendor.
To make movies that are guaranteed to be compatible on both platforms, you are going to end up making separate movie files. There are probably one-click solutions for this. However, when starting on a Mac, it works well to create your movie in QT without compression. This can be done, for example, by assembling the movie from the separate frames, which is an up-front menu item in QT. The movie of course will be enormous, because each frame is packed into the container format raw, with no compression, not even lossless encoding. In QT, save this movie as an AVI, and get it onto a PC.
Microsoft Media Encoder is a free software package from Microsoft that takes raw video, including our AVI file, and encodes it for Microsoft Media, using Microsoft's proprietary encoders. It actually does a nice job and is easy to use. The resulting WMV file can be used for downloads or streaming video, depending on the options you select.
Edited on Jan 19 2007 03:30PM by Nikolai Barnwell
