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Apple provided a nice way to get at the H.264 parameters in the Pro version of Quicktime 7. Quicktime 7 is free, and the Pro upgrade is about $30. More recently, Quicktime no longer allows general adjustment of the encoding parameters, instead providing a few defaults that work for portable devices. Now they want you to buy Final Cut to do more interesting compression. But, for now, Quicktime 7 with the Pro upgrade are still available, and serve our purposes very well.
In QuickTime 7 Pro,
Open "Image Sequence", and select the first frame of the sequence. Quicktime will spot the pattern and load all other frames in that sequence as well. For previewing purposes, select the frame rate of your final movie (shoot for 30fps, but use 15 fps if you know that you have to).
Then Export your movie. Check the options carefully. You want:
- H.264
- Multi Pass encoding.
- Automatic Frame Rate.
- Quick Start for streaming
- Current Frame size (don't let the encoder change frame size; it's usually much faster to do this via the makefile/script combo mentioned above).
- Quality should be set to High as a first guess.
More than this tends to look no different, but create a larger file. Less creates a smaller file, but can start to look bad. Almost always, "High" or slightly less turns out to be best. For laptop presentations, you probably want to keep movie size under 15 or 20 MB. For nice HD movies, you probably want to stay under about 100MB.
save as .mov