How to Create an SGI Movie
from an MPIV0 Video File

Purpose

This document describes how to make an SGI movie from an MPIV0 digital video file.

What You Need

You need:
  1. An MPIV0 file to be converted
  2. An SGI workstation in the Visual Computing Laboratory of the University of California, San Diego.
  3. The path environment variable set so that you can execute mpivtopnm, and makemovie. mpivtopnm should be in /local/zizkov6/vsam/bin.

Step-by-Step Instructions

  1. Create a set of pnm images from the MPIV0 file using mpivtopnm. For example: 
    
mpivtopnm vid.mpiv vid
    The above command converts the MPIV0 file, vid.mpiv, to the set of ppm files named vid.0000.ppm, vid.0001.ppm, vid.0002.ppm, and so on. If you have a BW8 MPIV0 file then mpivtopnm makes .pgm files, otherwise it makes color .ppm files.
  2. Use makemove to create an SGI movie file. For example: 
    
makemovie -o vid.rgb -f sgi -c jpeg -l once -r 30 vid.????.ppm
    makemovie has too many options to describe here. It is best to see the Unix man page on an SGI work station for full documentation. The above example produces an SGI file named vid.rgb that can be viewed with the SGI movieplayer.
  3. Delete all of the .ppm and .pgm files to save disk space. For example 
    
rm vid.????.ppm
  4. The SGI movie file creation processes is now complete.

Web page design by Jeffrey E. Boyd