making movies

[Catherine Dibble]

Does anyone have suggestions for making web/viewer
friendly movies of Swarm simulations under Windows?

I've had good luck using the automated screen capture
of SnagIt (www.techsmith.com) to capture a screen shot
every second.  Then I use ULead's GIF Animator to glue
them together into an animated GIF that's quite web
friendly.  (E.g. it doesn't require plug ins to view.)
See for example:  
http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~cath/GeoGraph/GeoGraph-movie02.gif

BUT, now that my agents move smoothly between nodes
instead of hopping from one to another, I'd like to be able
to show off this great new feature.  Unfortunately, 1-second
captures are no longer fast enough and SnagIt can't go 
faster in GIF/JPEG mode.

SnagIt's AVI movie feature works okay, and TechSmith's
Camtasia and Camtasia Producer are a dream solution.
They produce extremely compact, smooth real-time movies
of Swarm simulations.  Since they allow capture of arbitrary
rectangular regions, I can even capture my equivalent of the
Happiness Graph in real time along with the simulation.

But they aren't so friendly to share.  Avi requires at least
the RealVideo plug in to run, and compression requires
users to download and install TechSmiths little
compression utility.  It works great, but is nevertheless a
barrier.

Has anyone else had good luck posting Swarm movies to
the web in user-friendly formats?  Are there other formats
or utilities out there to try for this?   Or does anyone know
of a way to convert AVI to animated GIF/JPEG?

Catherine
*===============================================*
This problem, too, will look simple after it is solved. 
                                            -- Charles Francis Kettering 
 Catherine Dibble                                      
 Department of Geography               www.econ.ucsb.edu/~cath 
*===============================================*



                  ==================================
   Swarm-Support is for discussion of the technical details of the day
   to day usage of Swarm.  For list administration needs (esp.
   [un]subscribing), please send a message to <address@hidden>
   with "help" in the body of the message.