Making Movies - DRAFT

If you want to make movies out of your OpenGL animation, here are some instructions on how to do it. Bascially, you have to call a routine every frame that will read the OpenGL color buffer and write out the information into a numbered file (frame001.ppm, frame002.ppm, ...). The code linked to below write out .ppm files which is uncompressed RGB pixel information (very space inefficient). There is a shell script that will convert these files to .jpg format and delete the .ppm files. Then you need to find some utility that will assemble the .jpg files into a movie format file.

1. Ceate PPM frames
   Output PPM files from program. See outputFrame.c, outputFrame.h

2. Convert to jpg (or other format)
   Use shell script ppm2jpg.sh under Unix or Mac OS
   To make it executable, if it's not already: chmod a+x convertCleanScript to run it: ./ppm2jpg Use the ./ so it doesn't go some other path to try to find it This script will delete the ppm files. If you want to keep the ppm files, edit the script appropriately.

3. Import & Assemble using some appropriate utility.
   • For the Mac
     • using Final Cut:
       • Read in:
         in Final Cut (FC), make bin, highlight jpeg files, drag into bin use View->Arrange->By Name, to list files in numeric order highlight all in bin and drag to video window; a menu will appear; drag and drop into 'Insert' panel
       • Render:
         select MarkIn and MarkOut in timeline then Sequence->Render In and Out -> Video
       • Export:
         in FC, Export->Quicktime Conversion; select Options, then select H.264; choose project directory to put movie
     • use 'convert' from ImageMagick package see here
     • use 'mencoder'. see here
   • On-line notes for Windows: AVI (I haven't tried this)