Encode image sequence to MPEG4 video

Today something very simple: use ffmpeg to encode an image sequence as a MPEG4 video:

ffmpeg -f image2 -i filename-%04d.png -vcodec mpeg4 -b 6000k output.mp4

I often use blender or custom software to render out a bunch of images. Blender usually names output files filename-0000.png, where 0000 is the frame number.  So ffmpeg can generate those filenames with the usual printf style format. You can of course tweak ffmpeg’s output via a myriad of options. But this here will simply generate a 25fps mpeg4 file, which is easily embedded for example into your Keynote presentation. On OS X you can get ffmpeg for example via MacPorts: sudo port install ffmpeg, and Linux distros usually have a package for ffmpeg as well.

UI Changes in Blender 2.5

There is a nice blog post about the UI changes from Blender 2.4x to the 2.5 series. All in all I think the new UI is much improved. However some things are still not perfect. e.g. Blender windows on OS X are not resizable, apart from the zoom (+) button. That’s because the resize corner in the lower right is missing. On Linux, this will be provided by the window manager. Anyway, here is an idea of what Blender 2.5 looks like: