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Encoding Videos
To create a video, make and xaf
file first (the easiest way to do this is
to use the record function in the file menu). Then you need to render
the animation. XaoS can output sequences of ordinary PNG
images, that
can later be used by a video encoder.
To generate an image sequence, choose Render Animation from the Misc menu. You can also use the following command on the command line:
xaos -render [filename] -size 352x240 -antialiasing
-renderframerate 24 -basename [basename]
File to render ([filename]
) is the name of the xaf
file,
Basename ([basename]
) is the name used as the base filename for rendered images. This should also include the path where you want to save the images.
XaoS adds a four digit sequence number and .png
extension to this name automatically.
You might also want to change the resolution. Make sure that the resolution you choose is supported by the video codec you wish to use.
The framerate can also be altered. Make sure you choose a framerate that is supported by the video codec you wish to use.
Antialiasing (-antialiasing
) is used to produce anti-aliased images.
It takes a much longer
time and much more memory to calculate them, but resulting images are better
for video compression and they result in a much smaller video file.
(the same is true of JPEG images)
On the other hand, the other XaoS rendering option Always Recalculate (-alwaysrecalc
) (which disables
XaoS's zooming optimizations) is not recommended. If that's used, the
sequence of animation then contains quite a lot of extra information, which
increases size of video file, but because of the codec's lossy compression it is hard
to see any difference, so it's not worth it.
Once you start it, XaoS will generate thousands of frames. They take quite a long time to calculate and save, and consume plenty of disk space. (e.g. to render part 1 of the tutorial you need about 60MB and half an hour of time).
All images are named [basename]framenum.png
. For example intro0001.png
is
the first frame of the animation intro. If consecutive frames are the same, XaoS
doesn't save them, so some frames may be missing. If your encoder can't handle
that, you will need to write a simple script which will fill in the gaps by means
of mv
or symbolic linking.
A list of all filenames is saved into the file [basename].par
, where each line is
the name of one frame. The names repeat here if necessary, so you can use this
file to supply filenames to the encoder.
Once XaoS has generated the png files for each frame of the animation, you can use a third-party video encoder to convert the sequence of images into a video file. We currently recommend the following encoders, which support a wide variety of video codecs and file formats:
- ffmpeg (Instructions
- mencoder (part of mplayer) Instructions