animation (version 0.2-0)

saveMovie: Convert Images to A Single Animated Movie

Description

This function opens a graphical device first to generate a sequence of images, then makes use of the command convert in `ImageMagick' to convert these images to a single animated movie (in formats such as GIF and MPG, etc).

Usage

saveMovie(expr, interval = 1, moviename = "movie", movietype = "gif", 
    loop = 0, dev = png, filename = "Rplot", fmt = "%03d", 
    outdir = tempdir(), ...)

Arguments

expr

an expression to generate animations; use either the animation functions (e.g. brownian.motion(nmax = 30)) in this package or a custom expression (e.g. for(i in 1:10) plot(runif(10), ylim = 0:1)).

interval

duration between animation frames (unit in seconds)

moviename

file name of the movie (base only, without extension)

movietype

format of the movie ('gif', 'mpg', ...; as long as it's supported by ImageMagick)

loop

iterations of the movie; set iterations to zero to repeat the animation an infinite number of times, otherwise the animation repeats itself up to loop times (N.B. for GIF only!)

dev

a function for a graphical device such as png, jpeg and bmp, etc.

filename

file name of the sequence of images (`pure' name; without any format or extension)

fmt

a C-style string formatting command, such as %3d

outdir

the directory for the movie frames and the movie itself

...

other arguments passed to the graphical device, such as height and width, ...

Value

• An integer indicating failure (-1) or success (0) of the converting (refer to system).

Details

The convenience of this function is that it can create a single movie file, however, two drawbacks are obvious too: (1) we need a special (free) software ImageMagick; (2) the speed of the animation cannot be conveniently controlled, as we have specified a fixed interval. So just go ahead with this function to create your movies if you don't mind these two points.

References

http://www.imagemagick.org/script/convert.php

See Also

system, ani.start, ani.stop, png

Examples

## make sure ImageMagick has been installed in your system 
saveMovie(for(i in 1:10) plot(runif(10), ylim = 0:1), loop = 1)
saveMovie(brownian.motion(nmax = 40), width = 600, height = 600)