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seeking source code developer: make preset, mts/avchd > image sequence?
  • smrlosmrlo

    here's the link to the program: http://media-converter.sourceforge.net/developer.html I'm not skilled at all in coding at all, anyone willing to look into making a preset?

    Otherwise, anyone got a clue how I can convert mts to raw images? Is that even the best conversion to try with the gh2 hack?

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  • tupptupp

    You can do it from the command line with free (and open source) ffmpeg. I think mencoder can also encode to raw.

    Here is what the ffmpeg command might look like:

    ffmpeg -i input_vid.mts -c:v rawvideo -pix_fmt yuv444p -qp 0 raw_output_vid.yuv

    You might need to add a few "flags" (variables) to get exactly what you want.

    These raw files are enormous, and are probably capable of holding a lot more info than your original camera files. You can reduce the size of the raw file without losing any image information by matching the "pixformat" to that of your original files (yuv422p, yuv420p, etc), but you might be better off just going with a non-raw file with a high bitrate setting (and with the same pixformat as the original file).

  • smrlosmrlo

    Well that's all well and good, I just downloaded ffmpeg after all, however, I still have no affinity for this sort of thing currently... I'm only just learning all this command prompt stuff. I'm not even sure I installed ffmpeg correctly. I tried at least three times, and the last one I just put the binary into another program, I think, as a dependency (?) as per a user guide on how to install MLP (magic lantern processor), so I'm also curious, can I still use ffmpeg independently from MLP now? Everywhere I go looking for information on what I need to do winds up leading to another thing, and the same with that, ad nauseum, with different errors popping up (like that I have some kind of flag that I need to set in LDFLAGS: -L/usr/local/opt/openssl/lib, or something... I don't even know what's going on at this point). I keep finding information that seems self referential if you know what I mean. No offense, but I don't even know what variables are, or how to set them. I'm sort of rambling at this point, forgive me, but I haven't been able to find a practical, step by step guide on how to do any of these processes and I've been spending the better part of the early morning hours for the last three days trying to figure it all out with painstakingly slow progress being made... I'll keep what you've said in mind if I can get it all working though, I appreciate it.

  • tupptupp

    I would be happy to try to help you. It would be easier if you were a little more forthcoming with useful information and if you checked in here more frequently.

    First of all, what is your OS (Mac, Windows, Linux, Unix, etc) and which version?

    Secondly, what exactly are you trying to do (and why)? Are you try create raw video, or do you want individual, still, raw frames from your source video?

    The error message that you describe makes it sound like you are trying to compile ffmpeg on a Linux/Unix system. Compiling ffmpeg is probably unnecessary.

    Don't know anything about "MLP," but there are zillions of third party front-ends for ffmpeg, including "media-converter," to which you linked in your original post. None of the ffmpeg front-ends are near as robust as actually using ffmpeg directly.

    There are lots of tutorials on how to use ffmpeg on the command line, and web searches for certain types of conversions will often yield useful examples. It is not that difficult. The syntax for Windows might be slightly different than the syntax on Posix systems.

  • smrlosmrlo

    Forgive me, here: OSX 10.9.5 individual still/raw frames, well I had some ideas about why initially, but now I mainly just want to learn how to use ffmpeg, I'm not sure if what I was thinking of initially (color grading/batch processing with RPP) will be necessary.

    I was trying to figure out how to compile it, and then I found a website that had a precompiled binary for mac, but I didn't install it per se. I put it in a folder within another program which was labeled "place binaries here," so I'm wondering if I still need to install ffmpeg. I installed it once prior to that, but I started the installation process without realizing that I had no idea where it was going to install, and that I thought it was a program with a gui at first...

    The other problem I was having was trying to install UFRaw, but I discovered that I could do that with homebrew. I still don't know how to actually use these programs or packages though...

  • smrlosmrlo

    I'll look into some tutorials though. I appreciate your help.

  • tupptupp

    Sounds like you are having trouble installing ffmpeg on your Mac. You shouldn't have to compile anything. However, the site that provides the ffmpeg binary for Macs (http://www.ffmpegmac.net/) seems like it might not include some codecs (and the site seems to direct one to compile the codecs). It is probably worth it to first just download the ffmpeg binary and see if it works with the included codecs.

    Here is a tutorial that seems to use homebrew to simplify the ffmpeg/codec installation process:

    Here is a tutorial that seems to manually grab the codec binaries off of the Internet:

    After you get ffmpeg installed, it is a simple matter of finding examples of ffmpeg commands used to convert video to raw images. Here is one such thread, in which the posters discuss converting an avi video to a raw tiff image file(s):
    http://superuser.com/questions/881783/convert-from-avi-to-uncompressed-tiff-using-ffmpeg

    There is a way in ffmpeg to specify a range of frames/seconds to convert (and possibly individual frames).

    By the way, if you didn't need raw stills, you could just use VLC to grab jpgs or png of video frames.

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