Digital Animation and Video Basics

Can I take digital images (png files for instance) and assemble them as a movie? Is it easy?

The first part seems as if it should be an obvious yes, and the second does too. Take a bunch of sequential images, dump them into some tool (iMovie?), and voila, out pops a movie.

The images would be of uniform size, produced by tools I already have. No image manipulation would be required of the movie creation tool. Each movie would be a couple minutes long. No sound track would be required.

Thanks in advance!

Apps like Adobe After Effects can import image groups, but you might want to try QuickMovie. It works very well, just be sure to press the "sort images" button. If there is a way to do this with Quicktime Pro alone, then it's beyond me.

Yeah, After Effects will do this. I would suggest using an image format like PICT as it will ultimately look better than a PNG in the final export.

PICT is just a container format which can have all sorts of compression. How will it look better than PNG... isn't that lossless?

Thank you everyone!

When I looked at Adobe After Effects I about choked on the price. Ah the joys of software, eh? While this will be for work, it's uh, sort of a skunk works project. Occasionally I do things people don't want and tell me explicitly NOT to do. I do them anyway and sometimes the results are used by lots of people, senior management included. Alternatively QuickMovie looks to be much more affordable. I've also looked at iMovie '06 and documentation on it, and that too might be an option.

At the very least I have access to ImageMagic, which supposedly allows creation of mpeg videos from single images assuming you have the needed plugins. Whether I can get the right plugins working through DarwinPorts on my Mac or not I don't know, but I'll try that. Alternatively I have ImageMagic on the Linux lab machines at work. I also get very good support from the system administrators at work, so if something isn't available or working I can get them to make it function.

I'd prefer to do all of it on my Mac. I've been immersing myself into the Mac, much as I did 10 years ago when I went to Linux. In the end I'll do it on whatever platform works, but if it were all on the Mac that would be Very Cool.

Thanks again!

Yeah. Quickmovie. Like I linked to.