UKC

Hi,
I'm having all sorts of trouble getting windows movie maker to save my 21minute movie made up of stitched togethor stills into a wmv. Yes its heaps of data but the damned thing claims that the original files have disappeared which they haven't. So I guess its just running out of memory or something. Are there alternatives - preferably free that I could try?
much appreciated.
Matt

In reply to mutt:

I've done this with ffmpeg from a command line, but all my jpegs were in the same folder and numbered consecutively, and had been actually created with the intention of combining them into a video file...

ie I used a USB video camera to take a snapshot every thirty seconds to make a time lapse film of some mustard seeds sprouting and growing and following the sunlight...

In reply to mutt: Get yourself a macbook pro and life will be a helluva lot easier . i converted around 2 years ago and its a piece of cake even for a general ignoramus like me , sure its a lot of cash to lay out but they dont crash , the system works and its made for creativce people , you know it makes sense

In reply to mutt: iMovie !

In reply to mutt:
Virtualdub

a £50 quid Canon compact made this:
vimeo.com/24544296

okay, not exactly a blockbust but shows what you can do with a cheap camera and free software

In reply to mutt: Pinnacle VideoSpin is good for a free bit of software, tho I'm not sure it'll do any better then MovieMaker if dealing with lots of large raster files.

Have you resized all of your rasters to a suitable size (ie 1920*1080 or 1280*720 pixels, unless your panning across images)? If not I'd try this first. If you copy and paste the original files elsewhere first to save the originals and then resize the files and save with same names in the original location you could have a very quick fix. Possibly.

In reply to mutt: I second the FFMPEG approach. Yes it's command line but it's really not hard to use and does a great job on time-lapses.

This site will give you a few pointers:
http://programmer-art.org/articles/tutorials/ffmpeg-time-lapse

If you want a bit more detail feel free to pm me.

Example: youtube.com/watch?v=KVLJhONP1Gs&

In reply to mutt: Make sure you have the latest version of Windows Live Movie Maker. I use this a lot and the recent versions are so much better than older ones...

In reply to mutt: I haven't used it yet but VLC (the gods who can play anything) are working a on a video editor at the moment. Pretty sure you can find on the VLC website. It's in beta but it's still totally usable.

If you happen to use Ubuntu OpenShot might be worth ago. It uses ffmpeg like stuff but in a pretty user interface (clicky buttons).

In reply to nk: I'm seconding the "converting to Apple and being an awesome person" approach.
Doesn't have to be a MacBook Pro, I prefer the white body to the aluminium and my iMovie runs fine. Do it.