Recording Cines

You can create movies of manipulations taking place in Jim's 3-D display. Select Record Cine ... from the File menu of the 3-D Viewer:

This will bring up a dialog for you to set up the recording:

First, set the format of the cine that you want to record. Select either:

• to create a QuickTime video.
• to create an AVI video.

You are recommended to select the QuickTime video format, since it will result in much smaller video files. AVI videos can get very large even for short recordings.

Next, set the name of the video file that will be produced, by either typing in the video file name, or clicking the button, or the button.

You may want to set the exact size of the video by selecting:

• 240p - produces a 426×240 pixel video
• 360p - produces a 640×360 pixel video
• 480p - produces a 854×480 pixel video
• 720p - produces a 1280×720 pixel video
• Custom - produces a video to your custom size. Enter the width and height in the appropriate fields that become visible when you select the Custom size button:

Note: you are recommended to select one of the "standard" video sizes (240p..720p), since some media players will not play AVI files in non-standard sizes.

When you have selected the video size, click the button. This will set the size of the 3-D display area to your selected video size. The video is produced by capturing the contents of the 3-D display area, so if you subsequently resize the 3-D display, the size of the video will also change accordingly.

Next, set the number of frames-per-second for the video capture by moving the slider. Setting a high value will result in smoother videos, but a larger size of video recording file.

Note: the number of frames-per-second you set is a target: for big format videos, such as 720p, the number of frames-per-second recorded may be lower than the target if screen capture cannot be done fast enough.

Now set up the image elements in your 3-D display that you want to record, and when you are ready to start recording, press the button. You can now start to manipulate the 3-D display, changing transparencies and colours and adding new elements. Everything you do will be recorded.
Note: since the video is recorded by screen capture, if you place any other windows in front of the 3-D display, they will obscure your video recording.

During recording, the "LED" light will flash: . You can pause the recording at any time (for example, to add new image elements to the display) by pressing the button. During recording, the video frames are "buffered" in memory. If the buffering cannot keep pace with the rate of recording, the recording will automatically pause. To resume recording, just press the button again.

When your video is complete, press the button to save the cine recording to the disk file you selected. If you want to cancel the recording and discard what you have already recorded, press the button.

If you want to record a new video, be sure to change the name of the video file, otherwise your first recording will be overwritten.

When you are finished with video recoding, press the button.

Rotation Movies

You can create a movie of the view steadily rotating about one axis. Select "Export Rotation Movie ..." from the File menu:

This brings up a dialog to set up the movie.

First, choose what format you want for the exported movie:

• Animated GIF image.
• Quick time movie.
• Audio Video Interleave (AVI) file.

Then select the axis of rotation, and the rotation speed (by the setting the time for one complete rotation). Finally set the number of frames-per-second (fps) you require - a larger fps will give a smoother rotation, at the expense of larger cine files.

Press the button, and you will be asked to select a file name for the movie, before recording of the rotation starts. The recording will stop when one full rotation is complete.