Pre processing fulldome frames for Uniview's Video Preparation Tool

If you are experiencing that the Video Preparation Tool is not able to process your frames then it might be because of some format inconsistency with the frames. In that case you need to pre-process the frames and run the video preparation tool again.

In that, here are some simple instructions on how to do that. We need two tools: imagemagick and a batch script.

First install imagemagick from here: https://www.imagemagick.org/download/binaries/ImageMagick-7.0.8-4-Q16-x64-dll.exe for windows 64 version. For others look at their web page: https://www.imagemagick.org/script/download.php

For .jpg frames:

1. Create a file say: copy_and_covert.bat 
2. Edit it and put this script in it and save.

   echo off
   FOR %%i IN ("*.jpg") DO (
    echo process %%~ni.jpg
    if not exist converted/%%~ni.jpg (
    echo converting converted/%%~ni.jpg
    magick convert "%%i" -sampling-factor 4:2:0 -type TrueColor converted/%%~ni.jpg
    )
   )

3. In the folder where you have all your frames e.g: Images: make a new folder called converted in Images.
   

4. Copy the script copy_and_convert.bat to the Images.

5. Double click on the script copy_and_convert.bat.

6. When it's done the new images will be in the converted folder. Use these for the video preparation tool.

For .png frames:

All steps are same except the batch script now is:

echo off
FOR %%i IN ("*.png") DO (
 rem echo process %%~ni.png
 if not exist converted/%%~ni.png (
 echo converting converted/%%~ni.png
 magick convert "%%i" -sampling-factor 4:2:0 -type TrueColor -define png:color-type=2 converted/%%~ni.png
 )
)

Lastly, it's possible to covert from .png to .jpg or vice versa if we modify the script.

.png to .jpg

echo off
FOR %%i IN ("*.png") DO (
 rem echo process %%~ni.png
 if not exist converted/%%~ni.jpg (
 echo converting converted/%%~ni.jpg
 magick convert "%%i" -sampling-factor 4:2:0 -type TrueColor converted/%%~ni.jpg
 )
)

.jpg to .png

echo off
FOR %%i IN ("*.jpg") DO (
 rem echo process %%~ni.jpg
 if not exist converted/%%~ni.png (
 echo converting converted/%%~ni.png
 magick convert "%%i" -sampling-factor 4:2:0 -type TrueColor -define png:color-type=2 converted/%%~ni.png
 )
)