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Windows

QuickTime

Check out this link: http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_forum&Itemid=172&page=viewtopic&t=6414&highlight=quicktime

AVI (DivX)

To combine all your images into an .avi file, you can use mcp from the CommandlineTools .

• Make sure that you have a DivX codec installed. http://www.divx.com has a free one.
• Make sure that you rendered out your images in a resolution that is evenly divisible by 4 in both width and height. The DivX codec, and probably others, are incapable of encoding arbitrary sizes. If you have the Flask DivX encoder, it only encodes resolutions that are divisible by 16.
• Let's say you rendered out your sequence as filename.$F.tiff. If your file sequence was rendered out differently. Then substitute with the appropriate file name below.
• From the Start Menu, go to Programs > Side Effects Software > Houdini 6.1.xxx (ie. where you launch Houdini from), and choose Command Line Tools.
• This brings up a DOS prompt with its enviroment initialized to use Houdini's command line tools.
• Use the cd command to change your current working directory to where your pictures were rendered. If you've have never done this before, you might want to type help cd first. For example, if you rendered to c:\mypics. Then type cd /d c:\mypics
• Now type mcp -f FSTART FEND filename.$F.tiff -o -r FPS -w WIDTH -h HEIGHT filename.avi. Replace FSTART with your first frame number, FEND with your last frame number, FPS with your frame rate, WIDTH with your picture width, HEIGHT with your picture height.
• A dialog will pop up asking you to choose your encoder after entering this command. Find the DivX codec and press the OK button.
• That should be it. You may be tempted to use other codecs to compress but I've found that very little of the default codecs that comes with Windows have encoding capability and even then, poor compression or poor quality. Of course, if you have some other encoding capable codecs installed, then you might want try those but no guarentees.
• Note that if you want more details on how to use mcp, the command is mcp - (that's a single hyphen after mcp)

Other video making tools that you may want to try out:

• VirtualDub - http://www.virtualdub.org/
• Mencoder - http://mplayerhq.com/

Linux

MCP on Linux doesn't really do much right now, despite what the help says. The freely available (but quasi-legal) "Mencoder" at http://mplayerhq.com can be used to create Divx (and other codec) .avi and Quicktime files.

The syntax to encode a sequence of tga images with mencoder (using xvid codec) is:

mencoder -nosound -mf type=tga:fps=24 -ovc lavc -o test.avi mf://\*.tga

You need to have the relevant codecs installed and ensure you use the right one with the -ovc option.

Also I believe the mplayer legal grey-area concerns the use of certain codecs (such as patent encumbered win32 ones) instead of free codecs like xvid and ogg [don't take this as legal advice!].

Also to ensure that you videos will be watched without problems in Windows machines uses the -ffourcc XVID option in the command line, so:

mencoder -nosound -mf type=tga:fps=24 -ovc lavc -ffourcc XVID -o test.avi mf://\*.tga

Thanks to edward from Odforce for this clarification.

There have also been reports that http://www.hero.com/public/quicktime_movie_maker.html works.

Irix

MCP on Irix can make Quicktime files, but the codecs available on Irix are fairly out of date by modern standards. Type mcp - in a shell for help.