Create a movie file from a set of pdf files

Question

I have a set of files from which I would like to create a movie file with a certain frame rate. I can, however, not seem to find software that is able to do this.

I'm working under Ubuntu Linux. Ideally the movie would maintain the vector graphics format from the pdf. But I do not know if software exists which makes this possible. If this is impossible, I could also convert the pdf files to a nonvector format and produce a movie from it.

Does anybody have experience with this?

Answer 1

A tool to do that would be FFmpeg but unfortunately it does not support PDF decoding. Though you can convert your pdf's to png's using imagemagick (relevant question on askUbuntu).

And then create a movie out of those PNG's with ffmpeg. This guide on the ffmpeg page explains how, here an example command:

ffmpeg -r 1/5 -i img%03d.png -c:v libx264 -r 30 -pix_fmt yuv420p out.mp4

This read images from the current folder with the prefix "img" and a following number of 3 digits and display them for 5 seconds (-r 1/5) with a frame rate of 30 fps (-r 30).

Answer 2

Adobe Flash is designed to work with animating vector graphics and allowing playback of vector animations, but it requires that a user have Flash Player installed. I know there are third party Flash authoring applications out there, but I don't know what, if any, exist on Linux, or if they are still maintained as Flash has been falling out of favor all over the place and is completely unsupported on most mobile platforms.

Outside of that, video is generally a raster format, so you can't work directly with vector graphics without rasterizing them. If you rasterize your PDFs to an image sequence, then many video players and/or encoders can work with an image sequence. A lot will even automatically recognize it as a video if you name them the same with numbering. (Such as "myvideo00000.tga, myvideo00001.tga, myvideo00002.tga, etc.)

As Professor Sparkles pointed out, imagemagick and FFMPEG is one such option, but any combination of a tool that can convert PDFs to images and then a tool that can play or convert a series of images in to a video would work fine. (For example, in a pinch you could print the PDF to an image driver and then use Premiere or something similar to open the image sequence and output a video as well.

Answer 3

Using the latex package animate, a movie consisting of vector graphics can be made.

Construct a set of, for instance, pdf files with a base name img- and construct the file main.tex containing the code

\documentclass{standalone}
\usepackage{animate}
\begin{document}
    \animategraphics[controls,autoplay,loop]{10}{img-}{1}{20}
\end{document}

. Compiling the main.tex file produces a pdf file with an embedded vector graphics movie. For playback, either Adobe Reader or PDF-XChange Viewer is needed. For more details, consider the manual of the animate package at The animate Package. For Linux users, I believe only Adobe Reader is an option. Follow the instructions at How do I install Adobe Acrobat Reader?.

Answer 4

Assuming your PDF files are in your working directory, to create a movie file from a set of PDF files you can simply execute:

mogrify -verbose -density 500 -resize 800 -format png ./*.pdf 
convert -delay 600 *.png movie.mp4                               

This requires Imagemagick and Ghostscript to be installed. Works on Linux/Mac OS X/Microsoft Windows. Not vectorial.

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FYI:

• Imagemagick Convert PDF to JPEG: FailedToExecuteCommand `"gswin32c.exe" / PDFDelegateFailed --> that's the error message you get if Ghostscript is not installed.
• Convert every pdf in the current directory to png --> convert doesn't support batch conversion, unlike mogrify.
• ffmpeg requires the images to have some very specific naming convention, unlike convert which simply takes the lexicographical order.