Converting an image sequence to a video

If we can play back our image sequence with View Animation (Ctrl + F11), don’t we already kind of have a video? Well, yes and no – a video may be little more than a sequence of images, but a sequence of image files alone will not be recognized by most media players, and is too large and unwieldy to be posted online or sent to anyone else. A proper video file contains all the frames in a single file and can apply both spatial and temporal compression methods to keep the video file down to a size much smaller than an image sequence.

Lots of professional video editing/encoding applications can convert an image sequence to a video file. For instance, I can use the video encoding utility FFmpeg to convert my sequence of .tif files to an .mp4 file with a single command:

ffmpeg -r 24 -i render/%04d.tif my_video.mp4

You shouldn’t need to download a new program or learn a whole new command-line syntax just to make your first...