Quick start¶
This guide assumes you have completed installation and have a colour TIFF image ready. The image can be uint8 or uint16 RGB; uint16 images are automatically stretched to uint8 using 0.1–99.9 percentile clipping.
Step 1 — Generate a keyframes template¶
This creates keyframes.py in the current directory. Open it and add a camera
path for your tile. See the Keyframes documentation for the
full format description and worked example.
Step 2 — Render a test movie¶
Start with a short, low-resolution render to check your camera path:
Output: MYTILE.mp4 in the same directory as the input file.
The terminal will show progress once per second:
Using GPU 0 (11.6 GB VRAM)
cv2.cuda available — full GPU pipeline active.
Loading MYTILE.tif ...
Image size: 19200 x 19200 (1.0 GB VRAM)
...
Rendering 600 frames at 30 fps (20.0s)
Flat encoder: h264_nvenc (GPU H.264)
Encoding to MYTILE.mp4 ...
t=0.0s / 20.0s cx=12850 cy=2470 zoom=0.2133 angle=0.0deg
t=1.0s / 20.0s cx=12797 cy=2320 zoom=0.2090 angle=-0.8deg
...
Done. Output: MYTILE.mp4
Step 3 — Render at full quality¶
Once the camera path looks right, render at your target resolution:
Output filenames¶
Output files are placed in the same directory as the input TIFF:
| Mode | Filename |
|---|---|
| Flat, H.264 | MYTILE.mp4 |
| Flat, ProRes | MYTILE.mov |
| Fulldome 4K, H.265 | MYTILE_fulldome4k.mp4 |
| Fulldome 8K, ProRes | MYTILE_fulldome8k.mov |
Tips¶
- Start with
--fps 30for testing — renders twice as fast as--fps 60 - Use
--cq 18for quick drafts (smaller file, slightly lower quality) - Use
--zoom 1.2to zoom in 20% without editingkeyframes.py - Use
--speed 0.5to slow the movie to half speed,--speed 2.0to double it - For very large images (≥19200×19200), check available VRAM before rendering at 8K fulldome — see Technical notes
- If your tile is not found, check that the tile filename (without extension)
matches a key in your
keyframes.py