From rfrancois at mango-solutions.com  Wed Aug  8 17:11:16 2007
From: rfrancois at mango-solutions.com (Romain Francois)
Date: Wed, 08 Aug 2007 16:11:16 +0100
Subject: [Rd] SWF animation method
In-Reply-To: <FCD0D064-313C-4695-A706-4C4DCCFB06A8@DAL.CA>
References: <FCD0D064-313C-4695-A706-4C4DCCFB06A8@DAL.CA>
Message-ID: <46B9DD14.3020908@mango-solutions.com>

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
>
>
>


-- 
Mango Solutions
data analysis that delivers

Tel:  +44(0) 1249 467 467
Fax:  +44(0) 1249 467 468
Mob:  +44(0) 7813 526 123



[Rd] SWF animation method
Romain Francois