SWF animation method
Hello Mike, You might want to give "mencoder" a try. It usually comes with mplayer. I did play with it a while ago and was fairly happy with the results. Basically, the idea was to create many jpg files somewhere, which is not too hard using the %03d substitution described in ?jpeg. The rest is described here: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/menc-feat-enc-images.html Cheers, Romain PS: You might find some links in this (not really maintained) webpage: http://addictedtor.free.fr/movies/
Mike Lawrence wrote:
Hi all, Just thought I'd share something I discovered last night. I was interested in creating animations consisting of a series of plots and after finding very little in the usual sources regarding animation in R directly, and disliking the imagemagick method described here(http://tolstoy.newcastle.edu.au/R/help/05/10/13297.html), I discovered that if one exports the plots to a multipage pdf, it is relatively trivial to then use the pdf2swf command in SWFTools (http://www.swftools.org/download.html; mac install instructions here: http://9mmedia.com/blog/?p=7). pdf2swf seems to generate swf animations with a slow frame rate, but you can increase the framerate using 'swfcombine -r 30 --dummy myslow.swf -o myfast.swf', where the value passed to -r is the framerate. Unfortunately, this method seems to have limitations with regards to the number of plots it can convert. For example, on my system (17" macbook pro, 2.33GHz, 2GB ram, OSX 10.4.10, R 2.5.1) the maximum number of single point plots I can do is about 5400 (i.e. for(i in 1:5400) plot(runif(1),ylim=c(0,1)) ). Complexity of the plots might matter as well, but I only have rather convoluted examples of this. Also, pdf2swf throws up a lot of errors ('ERROR Internal error: drawChar.render!=beginString.render'), the origin of which I know not, that might be slowing things down. Now, if only someone could wrap this process into a single R command (I'm a little too newb to do this myself I think). Mike -- Mike Lawrence Graduate Student, Department of Psychology, Dalhousie University Website: http://memetic.ca Public calendar: http://icalx.com/public/informavore/Public "The road to wisdom? Well, it's plain and simple to express: Err and err and err again, but less and less and less." - Piet Hein
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