VMD-L Mailing List

From: Vermaas, Joshua (Joshua.Vermaas_at_nrel.gov)
Date: Sun Oct 27 2019 - 13:35:12 CDT

I'll second Nathan's opinion that the VMD defaults within movie maker are not great. This is a line that I use pretty frequently:

ffmpeg -i inputfiles.%04d.ppm -pix_fmt yuv420p output.mp4

ffmpeg has a TON of options, and I use the pix_fmt option to make really sure that its something that plays nicely with the default mac video players.

-Josh

On 2019-10-27 11:26:40-06:00 owner-vmd-l_at_ks.uiuc.edu wrote:

Grant,
I would strongly recommend that you use ffmpeg manually to make videos. This is the command I use to make a high-bitrate video from the TGA images produced by VMD:
ffmpeg -framerate 60 -i frames/frame.%05d.tga -vcodec mpeg4 -b:v 100M test.mp4
You can play with the settings of course, but this works well generally.
Nathan Kern

On Sun, Oct 27, 2019 at 11:58 AM GRANT KENNY <gck22_at_scarletmail.rutgers.edu<mailto:gck22_at_scarletmail.rutgers.edu>> wrote:
Hello everyone,
I am trying to produce MPEG files of my system on Mac-OS, and with my installation of VMD seemed unable to do so without downloading a third party encoder, in this case ffmpeg. However, my output files seem to have quite high compression, making it difficult to view the interactions clearly. Are there any preferred encoders to utilize, or any settings that I might be able to change which could alleviate this issue?
Thanks in advance,
Grant Kenny