Encoding Blender Animations for (S)VCD

Step 1: Create an animation.

This is up to your artistic genius. You'll probably also need to pay for the blender manual, or hire a mystic to channel some blender skillz for you. (blender doesn't cost money, but it is not at all 'free'.)

Step 2: Render the animation.

Next, you need to push the right buttons on the Render page. These instructions assume you already know what the buttons do; I'm just going to tell you which ones you need for a VCD or SVCD.

[blender screenshot]

Set up the rendering as follows:

Finally, hit "ANIM" to start the rendering process. Go read a book for a while.


Step 3: Convert rendered frames to an MPEG video stream.

cd to the directory containing your rendered frames, and use the following command-line to convert them an MPEG video stream (this should all be on one line):

ls *.tga | xargs -n1 tgatoppm |
ppmtoy4m -Iilace -FFPS |
mpeg2enc -f MPTYPE -o YOUR_MOVIE.mXv

The "*.tga" should be replaced by whatever shell wildcard expression you want to select the animation frames. (tgatoppm is a program in the NetPBM distribution. What the first line up there does is to call tgatoppm for each .tga filename in the current directory.)

The italicized arguments above can be filled in from the table below. By convention, the extension on the output filename should be ".m1v" if it is a VCD stream (MPEG-1 encoding) or ".m2v" if it is an SVCD stream (MPEG-2 encoding).

MPEG video conversion arguments
   ilace FPS MPTYPE
SVCD NTSC 'b' or 't'30000:10014
PAL 'b' or 't'25:14
VCD NTSC 'p'30000:10011
PAL 'p'25:11

For SVCD, the ilace parameter should match the field dominance you chose during rendering: 'b' for bottom/lower-field first and 't' for top/upper-field first.

Step 3: Convert that into an MPEG system stream.

The video stream created above cannot directly be used on a VCD or SVCD. The last step is to encapsulate it into a "system stream" This step is called "multiplexing", because this is where a video stream and an audio stream are jammed together to create a complete movie. The MPEG audio stream is optional, but the repackaging into a system stream is not.

Use the following command-line:

mplex -f MPTYPE -o YOUR_MOVIE.mpg YOUR_MOVIE.mXv
Use the same MPTYPE parameter that you used in Step 2. You could optionally add an MPEG-1 (Layer II) encoded audio stream after the video stream filename, but creating that is a subject for another web page!

Step 4: Stick your still into a VCD or SVCD.

You'll have to consult other documentation to do this.


return to the video library

Matt Marjanovic
Digital Media Group,
maximum impact research
<dmg at mir.com>
Last modified: Thu Dec 6 01:58:51 EST 2001

©2001 Matthew Marjanovic.
This material may not be republished in any form without express written consent of the author.