NLC animations.

[tmcewan]

During the June 11-12 NLC I made a series of images (jpg's from digital camera) taken at 1 minute intervals and then 'animated' a sequence using windows movie maker. The finished result is rather rough. Can anyone suggest more appropriate software and/or techniques to improve quality?

You can see the result here:

www.nlcnet.co.uk/images/2007/mcewant/07061112/2007061112.wmv

During a chat earlier tonight with Bill Ward I discovered that he also used movie maker to create his animation at:

www.nlcnet.co.uk/2007wardb.htm

Tom

[martinastro]

Both animations are very good indeed. I would be interested in learning more about this myself.

Here's a link regarding NLC animations by Robert Cobain in N. Ireland...

www.meteorlogni.com/iaa/articles/hidefnlcs.htm

It is very informative.

[tmcewan]

Thanks - this is exactly what I was looking for!

[olaf3sky]

Thanks Martin for that helpful link.

Another nice tool is Antechinus® Animator
(www.c-point.com/index.html)

The simple version is about $20 and easy to handle!

Virtual Dub had been to complicated for me, but now I got a helping hand!

With Antechinus I can produce "original" AVI-Files in good quality just doing a few steps. These files of course are to large for the web. For use on the web I change the AVI in a DivX-Avi. But sometime images make problems to build an DivX-Avi, I think if the contrast is too low. The results are "compressed" in sky areals, while the foreground for example is okay.

A good example You can find here:
3sky.de/NLC/NLC2/2006/060628/nlc_060628.html

The link to the movie (900KB) is included, the original AVI is about 8MB!

Olaf

[james]

hi tom,

try out this gif animation software. it can load bmp jpg tiff, photos and resize them and you can set frame rate to what ever speed you want. it saves them in gif movie format. best of all its freeware. try it out!

i posted two NLC animations on this forum using this freeware.

James

www.photo-freeware.net/beneton-movie-gif.php