I have a series of frames from a simulation that I’m running , saved as JPEG files, that I would like to convert into a movie. What would be the best way of doing this? Any particular (free or trial) software that I could use? I could make them into an animated GIF, and will do that if it’s the last option, but would prefer a .avi or something equivalent.
Suggestions?
Search your computer for software that came with it. You never know what you’ll find.
My desktop at home is a Sony, and part of their suite is a program that will do just what you describe, complete with custom fades and background music.
Adobe ImageReady, which I believe comes with Photoshop these days, has the capability to make animated .gifs. Not freeware, but you might have it.
I’ve used SSMM to do this in the past - the interface is a little bit quirky until you understand it, but it does the job very well indeed.
I suspect what you have will make what is basically a slide show; I suspect what Dervorin is looking for is to take each image to use as a frame in a movie.
But just suspicions. 
Your second suspicion is spot-on. Not sure about the first, but a slide show definitely wouldn’t cut it.
Mangetout, I’ll investigate SSMM; thanks! I was amused that you described the interface as “quirky” while the website describes it as “clean-looking” and “logically laid out”. 
Cagey Drifter, if it comes to making an animated GIF, I’ll just use Jasc Paint Shop Pro, which does everything I need and which I have. It’s something I’ve done before, and could probably do again if necessary.
I don’t play with Windows MovieMaker too much but I just opened it up and it lets you import images. You can do transitions and audio overlays and everything.
It comes with Windows XP.
MonkeyJam
It’s primarily an animation pencil-test program, but it will also do what you want. It only exports into avi’s.
It’s written by a former animation instructor of mine.
If you have access to a mac, you can do it in Imovie. Import images and spit out an mov file.
But we determined that is not what he wants to do. He wants frames in a movie, not slides in a show.
If you are comfortable working from the command line, try MEncoder. It’s Free Software. What you want to do can be accomplished with the following:
mencoder "mf://*.jpg" -mf fps=25 -o output.avi -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4
This assumes that all your JPEG files are in the current directory, that you want the movie to be 25 frames per second, that you want the output file to be named output.avi, and that you want the movie to be encoded in MPEG-4 format.
In what order does it insert the images?
I checked out the site. I can’t figure out what you guys mean by pencil-test. The site says, “Although it is designed for pencil and paper…” I await your explanation of how a piece of software that captures digital images and puts them into a digital movie has anything whatsoever to do with pencil and paper.
Well, if he really wanted to he could import them all into a video editing suite and shorten the stills to one frame each manually (although I’m sure there’s a better way). WMM would be bad for this though, because it’s a 15 FPS editing environment, and I can’t see him getting anything higher out of it with still frames, which I somewhat suspect he does. Not to mention that the output quality isn’t all that good, and he’d need another piece of software to get it into a compressed .avi–it can be done with free software, but it’s just added hassle.
Think about the simple flip-book animations you did as a kid.
Now, add in a Gigflop computer…The possibilities are endless.
A pencil test is when you’re hand-drawing animation and take pictures of the sheets in succession to form a completed animation. Even when I was in school, 2001-2004, we still used a video camera connected to a special VCR and recorded straight to VHS tape. This software uses a webcam or video camera connected to the computer to capture the animation into a digital file.
For your purposes, it can also import existing picture files to be assembled into an avi.
In the order they’re specified on the command line. Are you asking about what order results from specifying the filename wildcard *.jpg? On Unix at least, wildcard (i.e., * and ?) expansion is done by the command shell, not by the program being run, and generally works in alphabetical order according to the current locale. I assume this holds for COMMAND.COM on MS-DOS and cmd.exe on Microsoft Windows. If your images are numbered sequentially with leading zeros (e.g., foo001.jpg, foo002.jpg, …, foo999.jpg) you should have no problems.
If you have Quicktime (Mac or Windows) the upgrade to Quicktime Pro ($30) should do what you want.
Try Gif Works. http://www.gifworks.com/ I tried it a long time ago, but don’t remember how it worked.
If you have Mac Office, Mac PowerPoint will do it. Insert each JPEG in a different slide, move the slides around in whatever order you want them to appear as frames in the movie, then File | Save As | QuickTime Movie. You can control the compression, add transitions, animated objects on each slide, and a background soundtrack if you wish.