Can I make a movie with Panda 3d?

General Discussion
1

Can I make a movie with Panda 3d?

Can I output to mpeg or avi or quicktime?

Thanks

2

You can use base.movie() to dump the rendering to a series of numbered images, then use the movie-making tool of your choice to assemble the result into a video file.

Or, you can use an external tool like FRAPS to capture the video in real-time.

David

3

Thanks Dave.

4

Interesting Subject, but won’t dumping it in a series of images make it hard to make large movies?

And secondly how would you convert those into 1 movie?

5

The GIMP is possible (I used base.video + GIMP for my avatar), but I’m sure there are more tools out there.

Not sure, but isn’t FfmpegTexture.write or OpenCVTexture.write working?

6

I guess it depends on what you consider “large”, and how much disk space you have. Nowadays disk space is cheap and you can easily store hundreds of thousands of image files (hours worth of video) on an inexpensive disk. On a Linux or Mac box, and maybe even on Windows, it’s also possible to pipeline the output into a command pipeline using the linux-based mjpegtools suite of tools, so that no disk space is actually consumed other than the final MPEG file. But this is a fairly advanced trick, and you should consult the mjpegtools documentation for more information.

I don’t think FfmpegTexture.write() or OpenCVTexture.write() are implemented; but even if they were, they would only rewrite the same mpeg file that you had already loaded. These objects are not designed for capturing the framebuffer and encoding to MPEG.

David

7

Not only is the term “large” relative, it also depends on what he considers “hard.” Dumping all the frames to individual images that are then assembled into a movie is how pretty much all computer animation is done. As in, once Pixar or Dreamworks or whoever has some scenes animated, the batch render then outputs all the frames of the scenes to sequentially numbered images, and then the video editor imports all the frames into the movie editing software.

So I suppose that’s harder than sending an email, but it’s also a pretty common workflow for movies made on the computer.

Pretty much all movie editing software can import a folder full of sequentially numbered images. When I want to make a Quicktime file out of something I’ve animated in Maya I use After Effects or Final Cut. I’m sure other movie editing software like Premiere or Avid can do it just fine too.