Search the CONFOCAL archive at
http://listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu/cgi-bin/wa?S1=confocal

An excellent freeware program for such manipulations is mplayer (and in its format manipulation mode, aka mencoder).  This is the most prominent open source easy video format encoding app.  It is native to Linux, but has ports to Windoze and MacOSX.  See:

http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/news.html

for the general page, and

http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/projects.html#windows

for Windoze ports.

Because of the huge number of options, you need to read the documentation if you want to play with all the paramaters.  It is written for command-line control, but there are a number GUIs to act as more friendly front ends.  You also want to download the complete codec sets.

billo


On Mon, 23 Jun 2008, John Oreopoulos wrote:

> Search the CONFOCAL archive at
> http://listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu/cgi-bin/wa?S1=confocal
>
> My mistake, I should have written "fps" for the playback frame rate instead 
> of "ms". I got my units mixed up in the second paragraph of my email.
>
> John
>
> On 23-Jun-08, at 2:48 PM, Julio Vazquez wrote:
>
>> Search the CONFOCAL archive at http://listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu/cgi- 
>> bin/wa?S1=confocal Hi John,
>> 
>> I'm a bit confused... if you need a frame rate of 300 ms (~ 3 frames per 
>> second), then a avi's frame rate of 100 ms (10 frames per second) should be 
>> sufficient, no? As for imagej's 1000 frames per second (1 ms per frame), 
>> that would be about 10 times faster than most monitor's refresh rate (?)...
>> 
>> In any event, with QuickTime Pro, you can reformat your movies at speeds up 
>> to 60 frames per second (16 milliseconds per frame).
>> 
>> --
>> Julio Vazquez, PhD
>> Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
>> 1100 Fairview Ave. N.,  mailstop DE-512
>> Seattle, WA 98109-1024
>> 
>> 
>> http://www.fhcrc.org/
>> 
>> ==
>> 
>> 
>> On Jun 23, 2008, at 11:29 AM, John Oreopoulos wrote:
>> 
>>> Search the CONFOCAL archive at http://listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu/ 
>>> cgi-bin/wa?S1=confocal Dear confocal listserver,
>>> 
>>> I just posted the following email to the ImageJ listserver, but I thought 
>>> perhaps people in this community might be able to help too:
>>> 
>>> 
>>> I have a small problem I was hoping the community might be able to advise 
>>> me on. I have several long time-lapse live-cell image sequences captured 
>>> using TIRF microscopy. 1000 images were captured with a 200 ms exposure 
>>> time and a 500 ms delay in between exposures. A typical image sequence 
>>> file size is about 500 MB. It is necessary to capture many images and with 
>>> this rate of repetition since the the cells I am imaging express a 
>>> fluorescent membrane protein that exhibits very interesting dynamics (both 
>>> fast and slow motions) and over a long time period. I do not have the 
>>> option of capturing fewer images over the same time interval since doing 
>>> so will cause the software to miss recording very transient and fast 
>>> vesicle fusion events with the membrane. We use ImageJ for analysis and we 
>>> run the program on a powerful Linux computer with 4GB of RAM. To see the 
>>> protein dynamics, it is necessary to play back the image sequence with a 
>>> 300 ms frame rate on the computer screen in ImageJ, which is possible with 
>>> the latest version of ImageJ (max frame rate 1000 fps or frame rate 
>>> allowed by memory and processor speed). If played slower than this, then 
>>> it's difficult for the human eye to discern a fusion event and notice any 
>>> protein motion.
>>> My problem is that I would like to make these movies portable for 
>>> presentations (in Powerpoint or Quicktime for example) without too much 
>>> compression that masks the features I'm trying to show and without slowing 
>>> them down to a lower frame rate.
>>> I usually save image sequences as .avi files, but I've noticed that if I 
>>> do this when the display frame rate in ImageJ is greater than 100 ms, the 
>>> avi is saved with a frame rate of 100 ms. Is this a bug or is it simply a 
>>> limitation of the .avi format, or is it a limitation of the player I use 
>>> to playback the .avi file (Quicktime)? I can find no mention of a maximum 
>>> frame rate in the .avi writer plugin on the ImageJ website.
>>> Even if I can save files properly with these high frame rates, I likely 
>>> will not be able to embed them in Powerpoint and play them at that speed 
>>> since the demands on my laptop for this file size and display rate are too 
>>> great. Does anyone know of an alternative way for displaying large movies 
>>> with high frame rates?
>>> 
>>> Thank you for your time.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> John Oreopoulos, BSc,
>>> PhD Candidate
>>> University of Toronto
>>> Institute For Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering
>>> Centre For Studies in Molecular Imaging
>>> 
>>> Tel: W:416-946-5022
>>> 
>> 
>
>

billo
http://www.billoblog.com/billoblog