Creating Movies

Creating a sequence of files for generating movies (or animations) involves 3 steps:

• Setting up a list of Movie Viewing Positions (each view being similar to Setting the Viewing Position in the Main Graphics Window).
• Generating a sequence of image files, as the movie creator moves through the list of views.
• Converting the sequence of images to a single movie file using a standard commercial tool (such as Apple's Quick Time Pro).

Generating a List of Movie Viewing Positions

To generate a list of Movie Viewing Positions, select the Tools | Create Movie menu item (or hit the tool button near the top of the Main Window). For each Movie Viewing Position, specify:

• the view name
• the number of frames used (images generated) in moving to the next Movie Viewing Position
• parameters used to specify the viewing position and scene position.

Views can be added, deleted, duplicated, or moved up/down in the list of Movie Viewing Positions. The list of views is shown at the top of the Setup Movie Views dialog (see below).

To display a view in the Main Graphics Window (without saving the parameters), click the Display View button in the lower portion of the dialog. To save the parameters, click the Display and Save View button. The saved parameters are written to the workspace file the next time the workspace file is saved.

Generating a Sequence of Image Files

After a list of Movie Viewing Positions has been set up, the sequence of image files used for creating a movie are generated by hitting the Create Files for Movie button, which displays the dialog below.

All image files are then written to the specified directory, and the files are written with the naming convention: "name_NNNN.jpg", where name is the base file name and NNNN is a 4-digit integer value.

Generating a Single Movie File

Using the sequence of image files created, a single movie file (e.g., *.mov file) can be created using low-cost commercially available software.

To do this with Apple's Quick Time Pro, for example, simply open QT Pro, select File | Open Image Sequence, and then File | Save As a self-contained movie (*.mov). Movie files can be converted to other formats (e.g., "mp4" or "swf") using readily available conversion tools.

An example movie is shown below (right-click on image and select Play):

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