You'll need to have ConvertToMovie (available at the QuickTime FAQ software page)

The normal way people use ConvertToMovie to create a movie from stills is to name the stills with sequential consecutive numbered extensions (e.g. pict.001 to pict.144). The trick to creating a movie that has frames of different durations is to name the stills so that numbers are missing. For example, if you want the 1st frame to stay up for one second, the 2nd to stay up for 3 seconds and the third to stay up for one second, you'd number the images pict.001, pict.002, and pict005. By skipping pict.003 and pict.004, you're indicating that pict.002 should stay up for the time that pict.003 and pict.004 would have been there.

  1. Name your images as described above (skipping numbers when a previous frame should remain up).

  2. Open ConvertToMovie.

    An Open file dialog will appear with a prompt above it to pick a file to be converted.

  3. Pick the first image in your series.

    Another Open file dialog will appear with a prompt to pick the last PICT to be converted.

  4. Pick the last image in your series.

  5. In the compression dialog that appears next, pick Animation or Graphics as the compressor. Pick the number of colors that best suits your source material (Millions of Colors probably only if you're using photographs.) Set your frame rate to the length that you want the shortest duration for a frame to be. (In the example we give above, that would be 1 second.) Set the key frame number to be greater than the number of frames in your movie; quality will be just as good as with more frequent key frames.



  6. In the dialog that next appears, make sure to select "No duplicate differences". (The other choices are up to you, but you probably want to use the settings as below.)



  7. The next dialog is a standard save dialog. Indicate where you'd like your file saved and click Save.

    The movie will be converted frame-by-frame; if you watch in the lower left corner of the window where the number of the frame it's working on is indicated, you'll notice that some frame numbers are skipped.

  8. You can click Quit Convert to Movie when you get the dialog with that choice (as well as "Convert another file(s)" and "Append another file(s)).

    It will take a few more seconds as the movie is flattened and rechunked.


To see your resulting movie, you can open it in MoviePlayer. If you use the step buttons to step through frame-by-frame, you'll see that the playhead jumps forward different amounts for different frames.


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copyright 1996-97  Judith L. Stern and Robert Lettieri, jandr@ccnet.com
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