I have been using a program called Vapor that produces a sequence images, numbered correctly, name001.jpg, name002.jpg, etc, but they need to assembled into a movie. It is for atmospheric scientific work, so there are not many frames, usually between 18 and 60. So, I used "slide show" within kdenlive to make a movie that played back slowly at 1 frames per second. I used the AVI codec at the top of the AVI codec list. Kdenlive makes the movie, and plays back at the correct speed, but the quality of the image in no where close to the original jpg images. How can I turn off compression or whatever is necessary so that the quality of the image in the movie matches that of the original images?

I tried using other codecs, such xvid and mpeg4, but they are only displayed as red X's in the kdenlive options. I tried following various instructions on the web to install these other codecs, but none of them worked.

I am running ubuntu 11.04 on a MacBook Pro. I would like to use a common video format, so that other colleagues do not have to install anything in order to watch them. But, I can a different codec is necessary. It would be good if we could just turn off compression so that the AVI movie images were identical to the jpg input images.

Any advice or recommendations would be greatly appreciated.


Many Thanks,

Chad

For xvid and mpeg4 you just have to install the necessary codes, they are all in the repositorys.
After that start the "configure-assistant"(?) again (in german it is the Konfigurationsassistent), and then you can use the codecs.

What codecs did you use?

@Chad Please also post your resolution you use for rendering and the bit rate. Probably you should just chose a higher bitrate.

thanks both of you for your suggestions. As for codecs, I just used the first one in the AVI list.

How do I adjust the resolution and rendering bit rate inside of kdenlive? I never set the resolution, just made a slide show at 1 frame second directly from the images. Is there somewhere I can tell kdenlive to keep the same horizontal and vertical resolution as the original images?


Thanks,

Chad

You need to create a new project profile (Settings > Manage project profiles) with your desired preferences (frames per second, resolution, etc.).

Though depending on the image resolution of your input images it might be better to first scale (and perhaps crop) them to, for example, FullHD. This is a very easy task with imagemagick:

$ mkdir fullHD; for i in *.jpg; do convert -resize 1920 -crop 1920x1080+0+50 -quality 97 $i fullHD/$i; done

This is a command I use for my images, they are larger than FullHD, so I first scale them to a width of 1920. Since they are 3:2 and not 16:9 the image is then still too high, so I crop it to 1920x1080 with an offset of 50 px from the top. The imagemagick command list is here.


Regarding the bit rate, this is set when rendering to a file. 4000k, 12000k, and so on. 4000k means 4000 kb/s is used for video, i.e. 500 kB/s.

Hey everyone,

I have been trying all of your suggestions. My image size is 1367x1033. No matter what I try, all of the AVI formats produce ugly blurry movies (I am using the slideshow option to get slower playback speeds of 1 fps or so).

I tried using one of the HDV options, 30 fps 2 pass and the results were much better, but it generates a file format called m2t. I have not heard of this format before. My concern is will many of the colleagues at the universities that know nothing about computers be able to watch this format without installing anything extra?

Unfortantely, many of the other encoding options are still disabled:

HDV ok
Raw DV ok
AVI DV ok
mpeg2 ok
mpeg4 red X
xvid4 red X
H.264 red X
Flash red X
RealVideo ok
Theora ok
WebM ok

I am using Ubuntu 11.0.4. I tried running synaptic and installed every codec and anything else that seemed related, then I launched kdenlive and ran Configure Wizard, as someone suggested previously, but still no change. What do I need to do so I can encode in the above 4 codecs with red X's? Can someone provide me with an exact list of what needs to be installed from synaptic or apt-get?

I found some forums where people were talking about the need to compile ffmpeg and kdenlive from source in order to get all these codecs working. For example,

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/KdenliveSVN

I really hope that is NOT necessary. I am extremely busy with my research and do not have time to compile a bunch of things from source. There must be something that is not installed or a library path that is set wrong, or something like that.

Any help or ideas would be appreciated.


Many Thanks,

Chad

Please try using sunab's packages: http://kdenlive.org/user-manual/downloading-and-installing-kdenlive/pre-compiled-packages/ubuntu-packages The other formats should work there.

The resolution is quite strange, I would suggest to scale to something such that the sides are at least a multiple of 4 (some codecs accept multiples of 16 only, afair h.264 is one of them).

mpeg2/mpeg4 should usually be fine.

Can you please also post the bit rate you selected. For this resolution you should have around 5 Mb/s (5000k) for good quality.

Simon