I need some help. I'd like to make a few movies of animated graphics for a series of talks I have to give over the next few years. I work in a linux environment, so I usually do this by generating frames of the graphic in R, Maple or gnuplot, and then using a utility like ppmtompeg to combine them into an mpeg movie.
The problem is that I would like to animate the phase portrait of an oscillator (easy enough), but I want to add audio: I want the movie to "beep" at the beginning of each oscillator period. So every Nth frame needs to have a beep in it. Does anyone know how to do this?
I promise, there will be no rotating cubes or animated slide transitions in my talk. The movies are to illustrate a rather complicated mathematical problem that would otherwise take six slides to present.
Friday, June 29, 2007
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9 comments:
You could try photostory3 - a free download. It's ms, but hard to believe (guess they bought it from someone else).
Sorry, I don't know any Linux. Just Windows and I am teaching myself some MAC OS X.
Pete, I don't run Windows. Therefore I can't use photostory3.
Here's the low-down on Linux:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8589
It ain't pretty.
I would use AfterEffects on a Windoof box or a Mac.
Cinelerra might help http://cvs.cinelerra.org/ or maybe Kinodv http://www.kinodv.org/article/static/2
I have never used either, I use my Mac :)
No rotating cubes? I'm saddened.
I haven't used it myself, but if you can create the audio file on your own, you could try 'mplex' and 'mp2enc' from the MJPEG tools suite (check SourceForge) to merge it into your MPEG video. I don't know what the best tool to create the audio in the first place is, though.
Do you have access to (and knowledge of) Mathematica? It's better at multimedia than Maple and can probably do what you want programmatically.
Hmmm...
Couple of things:
a) Probably you are going to
have to make the sound last longer than one frame, depending on your
frame rate. You might consider a low hum where the pitch is upped briefly in synch with the period of the oscillator.
b) Do you have a friend with a Mac? The combination of iMovie and Final Cut Express (the cheaper academic version) should allow you to do this fairly simply. You may not even need Final Cut...
c) If worst comes to worst send me an email offline and I might be able to help. It is pretty easy to track me if necessary. Just follow the link below, go to the end of the file, and you will almost be there.
Good luck.
Bonzo
You might try avidemux (http://fixounet.free.fr/avidemux/); I've been able to use that to combine video and audio files that I created separately. This page (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ScreencastTeam/RecordingScreencasts) has decent instructions on using it in the context of making a screencast, though it sounds like you won't need all the video-creation instructions on that page.
And, if you're looking for audio programs, a lot of people seem to like Audacity, though I currently use Ardour.
AP, you could always just stand there and say, "BEEP!" whenever you want the beep to occur.
Alas, I am a geek, but my MAD L33T G33K Sk1L2 do not extend to this kind of thing.
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