Strategy for making and saving animations?
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg35779] Strategy for making and saving animations?
- From: AES <siegman at stanford.edu>
- Date: Tue, 30 Jul 2002 07:22:40 -0400 (EDT)
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
My overall objective is to create and store on HD a sizable number of medium-length animations -- maybe 50 or more such animations, with maybe 100 frames each, each frame consisting of a not too complex GraphicArray. These are intended for later playback or projection as a full screen (or near full screen) slide show on a Mac (OS 9.1, Mathematica 4.1), with forward and backward single-stepping under arrow key control and ability to restart from the first frame being important. I'm lookng for advice on the best strategy for doing this. 1) I can generate each of the individual animations "by hand" -- run a notebook containing a module that's iterated 100 times to generate the 100 frames, select the 100 graphics cells by hand, use the "Save Selection as QuickTime" menu option to save to a QT movie, play this move back later as a QT movie. This is tedious, however, and I'm not that fond of the QT Movie Player (can't get rid of the surrounding frame for example, at least AFAIK). 2) I can just save the notebook after evaluation -- presumably with Editable->False for all Cells -- then use ^A and ^Y to animate the graphics, and the up/down arrow keys to step forward and back through them. A not so minor annoyance, however, is that the animation starts off running and you have to use the up/down arrow keys to stop it, then step frame by frame back to the first frame. In addition, AnimationDirection seems not to work as advertised, and as a result restarting the animation from the beginning if you're up somewhere around the 90th frame is a problem. Inputting "?AnimationDirection" yields "Forward". Stepping forward using the arrow keys or the ">" button on the control strip at the bottom takes you to the end of the animation, but then stops and does not loop around to the first frame (and the ">>" and "<<" buttons on the control strip are grayed out). If you move backward too rapidly by holding down the back arrow or "<" button, however, you can overshoot the first frame and jump again to the end. Any better ideas for all this?