please help me choose software. Open source or low budget stuff

[phoenix777]

I make animations of technical stuff. I make hundreds of jegs by using cad. I then stitch together all these slides to make a movie. Yes I know I'm doing it the hard way but I'll stick with it i little longer.

I'm looking for a simple program that will:

stitch together all these frames

lengthen or shorten individual frames

allow me to make a subdirectory (like premier) for these frames or some other way to separate them. (ms moviemaker only dumps them in one place and this makes it very hard to work with)

Allow me to add subtitles AND PLACE THEM WHERE I WANT


this is a sample of my animations.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSPX5sjVYBc


My question is, will you help me choose a program that will help me edit these movies? I'm not after an animation programe (yet) I just want to join hundreds of jpegs together

[dragonkeeper]

I believe the combination VirtualDub and avisynth will allow to do what you need. Avisynth will allow you to take a single frame and turn it into a movie of various lengths. You can use a subtitle filter to add text, and the animate filter to scroll text, zoom in to portions of the frame and many other special effects.
Avisynth is a script based tool so you will have to learn some basic scripting avisynth, there are several visual editors for avisynth;AvsPmod, avsFilmCutter, and AVE Visual Editor. You can create a script use utilizing avisynth and one of these UI. Load the script in to virtualdub which will then create an avi file four you.
I like this approach when creating avi from a bunch of images as i don't have to create a hundred frame of the same image to create a 3 second clip of a still image. It's a bit of work but once you get the technique down it's a snap.