Smoothing Fredo6 Animator Animation

Extensions
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Fredo6 can back me up on this, but only if I am right! Here is a rough breakdown of those options:

MP4, pretty sure that means an .mp4 of an H.264 video track. The files size and quality are down to the data rate. It’s the format used in Blu-Ray I think, and the main format in YouTube, Vimeo, etc. You could get away with 2 mbps for moderately big images that have to look ok, and you would get decreasing amounts of gain when you go above 8 mbps.

MPG is, I think, 320x240 video, of not terribly good quality. Would be handy if your video needs to play back in Powerpoint Version 1.

AVI is another container format. The video may be uncompressed or compressed, and I’m not even sure what CODEC it would then use.

GIF is animated GIF I imagine, and probably custom 8 bit color.

FLV is the Flash video format. It’s what YouTube used before switching to H264. I’m curious if the codec is H.263, or On2 VP6. The latter one is reasonably decent, but not as good as the modern CODECs.

MOV is a container format, and could include almost any kind of CODEC. In this case it appears to be H.264. Updating that to H.265 would be nice.

WMV is a modern alternative to AVI. The CODEC it used to use was comparable to On2 VP6, and not far behind H.264. I read that you can get HEVC CODECs for it, which would be the same as H.265.

Ogg is a non-MPEG committee set of codecs. The video CODEC is called Theora, and would be useful for stubborn Firefox users. It ought to be comparable to H.264.

WebM is much the same thing, only it’s for stubborn Chrome users.

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I know what the formats are. :slight_smile: My question (and please try to read the post) was how to configure ffmpeg to only create the .mp4 in lieu of creating more than one format when it renders the video. I select only .mp4 in Animator but ffmpeg created multiple file formats anyway. This is a waste of storage space and time because I have to go delete the formats I do not need and I am asking Fredo6 how the selection works in Animator to configure ffmpeg.

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OK, thanks. Even though it does not take much time it is a file management issue. If I select only .mp4 that is what i want. I have about 40 individual clips and if it is rendering multiple file formats, it just adds work to the project. Thanks again.

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The rendering generates images as PNG. It’s independent of the format of the video.

FFmpeg just stitches the image files and generates the video in various formats. As said, there is a bug in LibFredo6 whereby the .MOV is always generated (which I fixed and will republish). This is anyway a very short calculation by FFmpeg.

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26

Colin,

You know more than I do. One of these days, I’ll take the time to explore the codecs. The point is that FFmpeg is quite difficult to configure with hundreds of options. The ones I found seem to work.

But, true, It’s worth now digging more in the problem of quality, file size based on the most recent progress in the video encoding world.

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Thanks, I was mainly asking if you guys knew a way to configure the desktop version of ffmpeg. I have the server version on my remote server for processing videos and I can configure it to control which file types it renders but I do not know how to configure the desktop version. There is no UI for the desktop version as far as I know? I have to use putty to configure the server version. There I can configure it to render different file types and qualities of videos. For example, when you upload a video to YouTube it process a quick 320 version of your video for quick viewing and then it continues to render, 640p, 720p, 1280p and so on so when you look on the server, there are multiple video files of the same videos which takes up hard drive space but of course google has quantum computers so it is no big deal for them :slight_smile:

Anyway, I was just curious about how to configure the desktop version of ffmpeg and I suppose that is outside the realm of this topic :slight_smile: but in all fairness, It would be hand y if not just for file management.

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As far as I know, the Animator extension has always generated a MOV file even if not selected in the extension’s UI - at least since 2017. @Fredo6 I’m glad you found and fixed the code such that MOV will only be generated if selected in the UI.

I have used ffmpeg by itself a little, with some of my video projects. As Fredo mentioned, it is a very complex tool. I have a Mac, and so I used the Terminal app (similar to PuTTY) to run the Command Line Interface (CLI) to ffmpeg. Using the CLI, one must specify the desired options via command-line switches.

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ffmpeg is even generating the webm format also but I think thus must be a function of ffmpeg.

Thanks all for your help. I will give credit in the final animation to this forum :slight_smile: I am doing it for a company called Metal Pro Building Products and will post the final video in a month or so. It is quite involved and will take a bit to complete :slight_smile:

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For info, the fix for the ‘unwanted’ MOV file is in LibFredo6 11.2c.

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31

Wow, with all of Fredo6’s help and Animator fixes plus optimizing my new laptop, I went from around 4 secs per frame to around 1/2 sec per frame if I am doing the math right. This has inspired me to go back and re -render the entire 15 minute instructional video because before I was recording my screen with OBS and the quality was not as good. I also made a small donation to Fredo6 at SketchUcation :slight_smile: of course he never suggested this and that is why I did it. Thanks again to all!

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