Making mpeg movies from maya

here are some simple instructions to make an mpeg movie of your maya project:

• render your images into jpegs
  either from maya or from the cmdline. what's important is that they're jpegs, which is the easiest and fastest way to make mpeg movies. you can do it from 'higher quality' images too, but that's outside the scope of these simple instructions :)
• copy my generic.param to yourprojectname.param
  
• put this in the same directory as your images, and cd there.
  
• in yourprojectname.param:
  
  • replace OUTPUT.mpg with what you want your mpeg to be named
  • replace IMAGES with the name of your rendered jpegs
  • replace 640x480 with the resolution of your images.
  • move the * in IMAGES to where the number is in the filename so if your files are numbered à la foo.1.jpg, it the format should be foo.*.jpg, and if they're à la foo.jpg.1, it should be foo.jpg.*
  • replace FILERANGE with the numbers of the frames you want
    for example, if you want foo.jpg.1 to foo.jpg.200, replace FILERANGE with 1-200. also, if you images' numbers are zero-padded, zero-pad your FILERANGE too (in the previous case that'd be 001-200)
• from the command line, run
  $ mpeg_encode yourprojectname.param
• that's it.
  here's a short example of what I've made with the above instructions.