Re: making movies

[Doug Donalson]

I just sent Catherine an mpg file I made with Corel Draw/Capture.  Size 20K
capture rate 4 frames/sec for 10 sec.  I made identical captures for .mov
and .avi formats but both of those are 3Meg files.  (Catherine, arn't you
glad I didn't send those as well?)  The only disadvantage I can immediatly
see with mpg over the other two is that is runs through the playback at
lightning speed.  The other two have embedded controls and play back at a
more reasonable rate of speed.

Cheers,

   D3
----- Original Message -----
From: Catherine Dibble <address@hidden>
To: <address@hidden>
Cc: Cath <address@hidden>
Sent: Friday, January 14, 2000 2:37 PM
Subject: making movies


> 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
> *===============================================*
>
>
>
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                  ==================================
   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.