Making Movies in Visit

Once you have verified that your movie looks the way you want it to, you will probably want to save it as a movie. VisIt has a number of formats available for this, but we usually save our movies as a series of .png files and convert them into animated .gifs.

To save a movie of your VisIt images:

1. Click File->Save Movie. This will start the Save Movie Wizard.

2. Select "New simple movie", and click Next.

3. In the "Format and Resolution" box, select "PNG images" from the Format dropdown box. Make sure that the Scale option is set to 1. Then click the -> button to store these settings and click Next.

4. Set "Frames per second" to 10 and "Frame stride" to 1. "First frame" and "Last frame" are usually auto-populated with the index number of the first and last Chombo file, respectively. If this is not the range you want, then substitute the desired numbers. Then click Next.

5. "Output directory" should be the destination directory for the images you want to save. "Base filename" just that—the base name of the PNG sequence you are about to create (e.g., BxSliced0000.png, BxSliced0001.png, etc.). Enter the destination and base filenames you want and click Next.

6. E-mail notification is a matter of personal choice, and is not required to complete the job. If you would like to receive an e-mail notification, click "Yes", enter your e-mail address, and click Next. Otherwise, just click Next.

7. Select "Now, use currently allocated processors" and click Finish. VisIt will start rendering images now. Note that this could take a very long time for high-resolution data sets, especially if any derived expressions are being used.

8. Switch to the images' destination directory and enter

   convert -quality 100 file_name00*.png movie.gif
   

from the command line. This command strings together the .png files into an animated .gif file called movie.gif. The asterisk is a wild-card that indicates "all files that begin with…".

BackLinks