Converting image sequence to movie

Thanks, Nick, that already doubles or more my knowledge. 🙂

As far as final form, could be one of many. Leading candidates are QuickTime (.mov), MPEG (.mp4) or iPhone (.m4v). (Is iPhone format just a special case of MPEG-4?)

I'm generating the frames as .png files using Perl's GD library. They are very compact and in fact the primitive QuickTime movies I make from them, with all media included in the file, are still very small. (E.g. a 600-frame movie is half a meg.) Converting each frame to JPG actually increases the size dramatically (could spend more time tweaking the JPG conversion).

At first I thought .png would be good because I could play them easily in an iPhone app. But then I started thinking perhaps it would be better to turn them into a movie and then tell the iPhone app "play movie" rather than handle all the timing of rendering each frame myself. And synchronization of audio... a big can o' worms to roll your own.

I have had the experience twice of upgrading QuickTime to QuickTime Pro only to see the Pro-ness vanish in the next QT upgrade. @#$%! But you may be right that QT Pro would suffice.

Well, QT Pro really falls down on the job. It imports frame sequences well enough, albeit at only a restricted set of frame rates. But when I add a sound track to it, the track plays back at something like 20% higher speed. When I use the "Add to Selection & Scale" version, there is a lot of resampling grunge. And it still doesn't sync properly.

I guess I need higher power tools than QT.

OK, I'm getting farther. See www.andrewduncan.ws/zboard, and scroll to the bottom where there are some video clips.

BUT... the path I'm using (frames into video stream via QT; integrate with audio via iMovie HD) messes with the image size. I'm generating them at 480 x 156 and I want them to stay at that resolution, pixels undisturbed! Instead, iMovie transcodes them to some other res when importing and again when exporting. Aaargh!

I need more control over this process. So I am still in the position of asking: what tools are best adapted for someone whose frames do NOT come as a prepackaged video stream, but as individual frames in individual files on disk?