rgl: insert pauses in animation sequence / movie formats other than gif?

Two questions related to creating animated movies with rgl:

1. I've created an rgl scene with 5 different views I want to display in
a movie, but I'd like to insert pauses (say, 5 seconds)
at each view.  How can I do this?

I first created 5 userMatrix's, then

play3d( par3dinterp( userMatrix=list(M1, M2, M3, M4, M5)),
,duration=2*60/5) )

then tried simply repeating each twice,

play3d( par3dinterp( userMatrix=list(M1, M1, M2, M2, M3, M3, M4, M4, M5,
M5)),  ,duration=2*60/5) )

but that didn't give the desired effect.  I see that play3d() has a
times= argument, but the documentation
doesn't indicate how to use it in this context.

2. With movie3d(), I can get an animated .gif, but I wonder if there are
other movie formats (.mov, .mpg) I can get,
either with convert, or an external tool, e.g., so I can embed a movie
in a LaTeX  ->  .pdf document using the
movie15 package.

e.g., I tried using convert at in a command prompt window,

  >  convert -delay 1x8 coffee-av3D-1*.png coffee-av3D-1.mov

but it seems that only one frame was used.

Something like this works:

play3d(par3dinterp(times=c(0,5,6,11,12,17),
             userMatrix=list(m1,m1,m2,m2,m3,m3),
             method="linear"))

The "linear" says to use linear interpolation between time points, so 
it will stay exactly constant when the userMatrix doesn't change.  If 
you leave it out, it uses spline interpolation, and that gives some 
irritating overshooting.

On 6/7/2011 10:52 AM, Duncan Murdoch wrote:

 Something like this works:

 play3d(par3dinterp(times=c(0,5,6,11,12,17),
              userMatrix=list(m1,m1,m2,m2,m3,m3),
              method="linear"))

 The "linear" says to use linear interpolation between time points, so
 it will stay exactly constant when the userMatrix doesn't change.  If
 you leave it out, it uses spline interpolation, and that gives some
 irritating overshooting.

Thanks very much for this, Duncan.

Something like this would make an excellent documentation example for
play3d/movie3d, or perhaps better
par3dinterp, even under \dontrun{}.

I take it that the times are relative rather than absolute, and time is
scaled according to duration and
fps when the scene is play3d()'d.  Yes?  If so, the description for
time= could also be clarified.

On 07/06/2011 12:22 PM, Michael Friendly wrote:

On 6/7/2011 10:52 AM, Duncan Murdoch wrote:

 Something like this works:

 play3d(par3dinterp(times=c(0,5,6,11,12,17),
              userMatrix=list(m1,m1,m2,m2,m3,m3),
              method="linear"))

 The "linear" says to use linear interpolation between time points, so
 it will stay exactly constant when the userMatrix doesn't change.  If
 you leave it out, it uses spline interpolation, and that gives some
 irritating overshooting.

Thanks very much for this, Duncan.

Something like this would make an excellent documentation example for
play3d/movie3d, or perhaps better
par3dinterp, even under \dontrun{}.

I take it that the times are relative rather than absolute, and time is
scaled according to duration and
fps when the scene is play3d()'d.  Yes?  If so, the description for
time= could also be clarified.

Definitely it should be clarified in the docs; they are absolute 
times, in units of seconds.  Things get a little complicated when you 
go past the last time (17 seconds):  there are a number of different 
extrapolation methods described in ?par3dinterp.

What the par3dinterp function returns is a function that takes a time 
(expressed in seconds) and computes the parameters (i.e. the 
userMatrix in the example) that should be in effect at that time.  It 
doesn't know anything about fps, that's used by play3d to choose what 
times to pass to that constructed function.  The function that play3d 
is given can do lots of things other than returning new viewpoint 
parameters; for example, the flag demo redraws the scene in every 
frame (using skipRedraw=TRUE to avoid showing partial versions).

Duncan