Many LTR postprocessing tools generate a series of images (file-001.png, file-002.png, ... etc).  When viewed in sequence, these images form a movie or animation.  This page documents how to merge these images into a movie which may be played on a variety of players:

• Windows Media Player
• Quicktime
• MPlayer
• VLC
• xanim

Our favorite movie encoder is ffmpeg with the H.264/x264 MPEG plugin/codec.  We have found that H.264 offers the best compromise between image quality and movie file size.

Instalation

• Linux: See ffmpeg Compilation Guide
• Mac: The easiest way to install is via MacPorts.  After you've downloaded & installed MacPorts, execute:

  port install x264 ffmpeg

Usage

Assume you have images:

image001.tiff
image002.tiff
image003.tiff
…

and you wish to generate an animation (movie.mp4). Here's the command you would use:

ffmpeg -f image2 -i "image%03d.tiff" -pix_fmt yuv420p movie.mp4