It certainly is clean and there’s a definite logic to it, but it’s not completely intuitive in the way it modifies parameters. You end up with a list of frames in the main grid. To change, for example, the number of frames each image will appear for, you have to select the records you’re interested in, then make the change in one of the boxes, then click ‘apply’ - or something like that - I seem to recall that it’s quite easy for a beginner with the program to be frustrated by it not seeming to do what it is told because of omitting one of the above steps).
Once you get used to it, it’s a great program and it does exactly what you’re asking.
VirtualDub would be my suggestion. Download the one for MPEGs (the regular version can only do BMP and TGA sequences, but MPEG can also do JPEG–all of them are free). Then just go File > Open Video File and select the first frame in your image sequence. You can do whatever you want to it, then either save it as another image sequence or turn it into an AVI (uncompressed or using whatever compression scheme you want).
It is designed for slide shows, not movies. The practical result of this is that you cannot set the time for each frame small enough to make anything but the jerkiest of animations. I suspect the same is true of Mac PowerPoint that Morbo mentioned.
Hell, I was trying to coordinate a fast-paced slide show in time with a music file and I couldn’t even cut the slide times down low enough for that, let alone something like smooth animation.
Alright, I was really bored and happen to have a series of still frames on my hard drive, so I opened up WMM to see what I could do. I managed to get 8 frames per second out of it by adjusting the defaults, but I don’t know that I could get anything faster without manually adding speed ups to every. single. frame. And I certainly wouldn’t be able to get the 24 FPS that it was originally even doing that. 16 or 32, but not 24.
Sorry for the delayed response; I’ve been trying out all these things.
**ZipperJJ **and Jayn_Newell: WMM does indeed only do 8fps maximum without editing each transition manually, which is tedious at best when you have 200+ frames. I couldn’t find any way to keep the dimensions of the video the same as the dimensions of the image files; it resizes to 640x480 at the best resolution that I found.
Psychonaut: I can’t seem to find a codec to play the files created; can I use any other codec? Some help would be appreciated.
Dusty: VirtualDub did work, and I’ll play around with it some more.
garygnu: I haven’t tried MonkeyJam yet, lack of time, but I will try it out in the next few days.
Thanks for the suggestions, all; I’m still trying things out.
Do you mean files created with mencoder? If so, yes, you can try any other codec. There’s a list in the documentation. If you’re on a Windows machine, you might want to try the msmpeg4 codec.