QUESTION :
I’d like to convert a folder of PNGs into a quicktime .mov with PNG compression (it’s a folder of fractals in an animation; PNG compression works great here and the losslessness is important). What programs will do this with minimal fuss? (I don’t have or want to pay for a full license of QuickTime Pro.)
UPDATE:
Let me make this more clear: minimal fuss means: I download some EncoderMagic.app (for example), I double click it to launch it. I select the folder with my numbered images, and out pops my movie. No mess. No resizing. … Perhaps this doesn’t exist (or is called QuickTime Pro?)
ANSWER :
There is a freeware AppleScript-based application by the name of Sequimago which should fulfill your requirements admirably. It is available from this page at MacScripter, a forum site where Martin Michel, Sequimago’s author, is an administrator.
This is his description of the program:
Requirements
Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard •
QuickTime 7.2.1Installation & Usage:
Download and
extract the ZIP archive. Then open the
script with a double click or drop a
bunch of image files onto its icon.
The script will then ask you to
specify a file name and location for
the new QuickTime movie. After you
provided certain settings for your
image sequence (e.g. frames per
second/seconds per frame), your image
sequence will be produced.Supported Image Formats:
jpg, jpeg,
gif, png, tiff, tif, psd, pict, bmp,
pdf (only the first page of a PDF
document is recognized)Notes:
Sequimago currently uses the
JPEG image format for the image
sequence, which results in a smaller
file size of the QuickTime movie. But
you can easily edit the Python script
to use alternative image formats (e.g.
TIFF). The Python script is located
at: Sequimago.app/Contents/Resources/crtimgseq.py
– – – – – – – –
P.S. — I think you’ll appreciate a comment he made in the course of explaining how he came to write the program:
I knew that you could easily create
custom slide shows with QuickTime Pro,
but why spent hard-earned $29.99 when
you can get the same functionality
free of charge by using built-in Mac
OS X 10.5 technologies?
The ffmpeg command line tool does this:
ffmpeg -n -i "image_%03d.jpg" output.m4v
ffmpeg will, in this example, look for files matching the pattern image_xxx.jpg in the current directory where the xxx part is a zero-padded decimal number, like 003. ffmpeg automatically chooses the output format based on the suffix of the output file, e.g., m4v.
Change -n to -y if you want ffmpeg to always overwrite output file without asking (useful for repeated tests).
I suggest you download ffmpeg from either homebrew or macports.
ImageMagick (available from macports) can do that, try running the command
convert -delay 30 'pic-*.png' movie.m4v
where 30 is the hundreths of seconds between frames and the files follow the pattern:
pic-001.png pic-002.png ...
Framed – it’s free.
- Create sequences of any size with a virtually unlimited amount of images, and using any number of frames per second.
- Preview images by double-clicking them, and reorder them if need be.
