D3PLOT supports three video formats:
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MP4
(
.mp4
)
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MPEG-4 Part 14
This is a versatile and modern digital multimedia container format, used in D3PLOT for storing video data. This data is encoded using the H.264/MPEG-4 Advanced Video Coding compression format to produce high-quality video content at a reasonable file size.
Image quality and file size with H.264 encoding are controlled by a number of factors. One of these is the nature of the "GOP" structure (group of pictures). This refers to how "I" frames, containing full information, are mixed with several "P" frames containing only the difference between this and the preceding frame(s). The max GOP size in D3PLOT for MP4 is currently set to 5, such that each I frame is accompanied by at most 4 P frames. In cases where there are significant differences between successive frames, the encoder should be able to detect this and opt to use fewer P frames.
Another factor to consider is the bitrate. This can be controlled through either the Quality slider or the target file size.
With the quality slider, setting Quality to 100% corresponds to a maximum bitrate of 100 Mbps. This is very large and should be more than enough for almost any use case. If the encoder detects that this bitrate is in excess of what it needs to achieve optimal image clarity, it will automatically drop to a smaller value to keep file size minimal.
If setting a target file size, the bitrate is adjusted automatically to achieve the target file size. The actual size of the output file might be smaller than the target file size you request.
The H.264 encoder we use requires that both width and height of each video frame be divisible by 2. In D3PLOT, we automatically shrink the window size by 1 pixel in any dimension which does not adhere to this at the time of video capture.
MP4 is our recommended choice for widely replayable, high quality video output.
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AVI
(
.avi
)
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Adapted Video for Internet
This format acts as a "wrapper" around a sequence of static
images, adding information about their content and the replay rate required.
D3PLOT supports MJPG (Motion JPEG) encoding, which gives
great compression, and each frame gets good image quality which is the
same as a JPEG. D3PLOT supports also bitmap encoding which, while it does
not give good compression or image quality (unless the voluminous
24-bit option is used), is at least in the public domain and will guarantee
to play back in any package. The dithering options (see
Controls)
give a reasonable compromise between
image quality and file size when 8-bit compressed bitmaps are used.
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GIF
(
.gif
)
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Graphics Interchange Format
This format acts as a "wrapper" around a sequence of static
GIF images, adding information about their content and the replay rate
required.
GIF animations will tend to be smaller than AVIs and have
the advantage that they can be inserted into PowerPoint and other applications for simple and immediate playback.
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