Image sequence to HDTV 720p & 1080i/p (H.264)

[Alendri]

Hi!

I'm a 3d modeler and animator. I constantly work with animations, which are generally created as a sequence of images.
In this particular case it's a private project i'm working on.

After I get the images from my 3d application (several sequences of 100-10000 images), I port them to my editing software where add effects like depth of field. (yes, I export pixel depth info along with my images for post-processing effects)
At the same time I add things like text...

The output from the editing software is either a complete image sequence, .avi or .mov. So far the only way I've been able to encode properly has been to export the whole final movie to UNCOMPRESSED .avi and then running that through an encoder.

But now I'm tired of all that work so I would like to find an encoder that can take a sequence of images and encode them without me bothering going through .avi just to put it in to one file. While I still need to go through my editing software from there I would like to output an image sequence, to save space, time and quality.
The uncompressed .avi files easly amount to 20+gb. My latest 10 minute animation of 720p30 was 60gb as uncompressed .avi! Those 18.000 frames only need take 20gb or less when saved as individual images. This is the main reason why I have yet to make a 1080p animation, at 10 minutes that would be such a huge file I would need another harddrive for that single file, not reasonable.

A long story short:
Anyone have any suggestions on an encoder that can take a long sequence of images and encode to HDTV (mpeg4/h264), that does not include installing programs like Adobe After Effects or similar?
The encoder needs to be able to add sound from a separate file, be it .wav, .mp3, .ogg or some other. This is not my department so I don't know which format will be used.

The more cores the merrier. My computer has 8 cores, so any solution able to use it as much as possible would be most appreciated.
Oh and the format of the images I work with are .png .tga .psd and .tif. As long as the encoder accepts either of these formats I'm good to go. ALL images are either 1280x720 (720) or 1920x1080 (1080), depending on end usage and client!

I'm aware I'm asking many questions and requests. Any suggestions on anything here will be appreciated.
Thanks in advance
//Alendri

[manono]

Hi-

Anyone have any suggestions on an encoder that can take a long sequence of images and encode to HDTV (mpeg4/h264), that does not include installing programs like Adobe After Effects or similar?

Any encoder that accepts AviSynth script files as input can accept a sequence of images. This would include all of the encoders with which I'm familiar. You just use ImageSource:

http://avisynth.org/mediawiki/ImageSource

VirtualDub and its varients can accept them directly. And by the way, exporting as uncompressed doesn't make much sense. You could export as lossless (using, for example, Lagarith, or HuffYUV), and save a ton of space.

[Alendri]

Thanks for the reply Manono

Indeed, I would like to export as lossless, but I have not been able to get that to work with my editing software. However, if I can encode an image sequence that will be far superior solution than any single-file solution would.
I was not aware of the AviSynth script files, thanks for the tip. Seems very promising.

//Alendri