A Movie Creator

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JorisGoosen
Posts: 3
Joined: Tuesday 02 June, 2015 - 16:03

Re: A Movie Creator

Post by JorisGoosen »

For anyone using or wanting to use the movie creator I have recently made some niceties that could be of help.

If you use one of the inbuilt codecs it might lead to disappointing results, what I suggest is to make your movies with the "uncompressed" codec (ie no codec). This however results in very large files and because of certain limitations this means the file has to be split up whenever one part reaches +1.4GB. To merge these together one can use the Batch-files in the attachment to this post.

- To use it, first download Mencoder/Mplayer from http://mplayerwin.sourceforge.net/downloads.html
- Extract it so that at least mencoder.exe is in the folder where you will save the videos.
- Extract the .Bat files from MovieCreatorPostProcessing.zip to the same directory
- Pick a name for you video in the MovieCreator GUI (for instance "Filename" as I will use it here)
- Choose the "Full Frames (Uncompressed)" Codec
- Setup the rest and run your simulation.
- You should now have a folder with an amount (of rather large) videofiles named Filename_001.avi, Filename_002.avi etcetera.
- Open Cmd.exe from the start menu and change directory to the videosave folder
- Then you only need to run "TranscodeAndCombineEDMovies.bat Filename"
- Now there should be a much smaller Filename_Merged.mp4
Attachments
MovieCreator Beta_005.zip
(800.08 KiB) Downloaded 647 times
MovieCreatorPostProcessing.zip
(1.19 KiB) Downloaded 661 times
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HarryBunnik
Posts: 362
Joined: Monday 07 February, 2011 - 11:22

Re: A Movie Creator

Post by HarryBunnik »

Already since some time the movie creator is part of the standard library of Enterprise Dynamics and has shown it use.

Unfortunately, the standard codecs that are provided by Windows are outdated. In the past we always advised to record in uncompressed frames, which however results in very large files, which are not always so easy to edit.

Unfortunately, it was not clear if and how new codecs could be added in a way, that they would also be recognized by ED and/or PD.

A recent check showed that by installing the "K-Lite Codec Pack Mega" (I don't post a link since it can change and using a search engine makes it pop-up directly) results in the installation of several up-to-date codecs that are also appearing in the "choose a codec" GUI of ED/PD.

So for everyone who is recording movies, this may be a good way to do it in a more efficient way, reducing editing time and/or save storage.

On my computer, I got at least 3 new codecs:
  • x264vfw
  • Lagarith Lossless Codec
  • Xvid MPEG-4 Codec
For me, the last one was working best, but please try as well and share your findings.

Cheers, Harry
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HarryBunnik
Posts: 362
Joined: Monday 07 February, 2011 - 11:22

Re: A Movie Creator

Post by HarryBunnik »

The size of the videos produced by codecs Xvid MPEG-4 and x264vfw are much lower than the current approach (10 minute movie with a frame rate of 30fps, inter frame time of 0.1 sec. and a resolution of 1600 × 900 pixels:

Codec:
  • Microsoft Video 1: 2900 MB
  • x264vfw : 13 MB
  • Lagarith lossless : 1800 MB
  • Xvid MPEG 4 : 29 MB
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