Holcombe:MakingDemos

SUPA Sydney University Perception and Action Lab Primer editing help refcard

Making animated demos

• Using Psychopy you can save your animated display directly to a movie file, using e.g. myWin.saveMovieFrames('exported/frame.mov'). But watch out for dissolving movie files problem
• Using Visionegg you can create a gif. Then you import the gif using Adobe Flash. You can adjust the speed manipulating the frame duration (Modify document). Finally, you export the file as a swf.
• Patrick normally makes short movies a frame at a time in Keynote and then makes them into movies with Quicktime 7 Pro. In past years, Quicktime Pro could be used to create movies from a bunch of still frames. Quicktime Pro is no longer supported, however it is possible to still run Quicktime 7 Pro if you manage to find a Quicktime Pro-enabled computer (thanks Patrick Cavanagh for informing me of this).
• Quicktime Player 7 (but not Quicktime Player) can still open image sequence, but not from GUI. Quicktime Player 7 can be found in Snow Leopard's Optional Installs. To use the functionality, have to do it with AppleScript/Automator. Here's a script I made: File:ImageSequenceToMovie.app.zip
• After the movie is made, you can change its playback speed with JES Deinterlacer (Project:Custom:Movie speed)

Animated demo playback problems

• The recent versions of Quicktime (including Quicktime 7 and X) no longer play all my 2-frame movie demos correctly. When most of my movies are played with looping turned on, it only displays the first frame even though it's a two-frame movie. It does display both frames when it is not set to loop. So a decent demo can be created by making a extended replication of the two frames, even though that yields a large file size. That's what I had to do for the demos for my TiCS article. I have also tried viewing the two-frame movies in looped fashion in the following applications that play quicktime movies:
  • VLC: doesn't show both frames
  • Movist: doesn't show both frames
  • Quicktime Player 7:doesn't show both frames
  • SimpleMovieX: doesn't show both frames. Claims to allow export to image sequence, but this gives an error message. Stills are in fact created, but hiding in a subdirectory of /private/var/folders/ . I used a recursive directory listing "ls -R" to find them. Can also create movie from image sequence, via manual Edit->Copy within Preview.app and Edit->Paste in SimpleMovieX
  • Firefox: shows both frames, but has "double-vision". Shows old movies that quicktime shows as blank, but also with 'double vision'
  • MacVCD: shows both frames!
  • Google Chrome: shows both frames! Stutters slightly when loop renews. Doesn't display old movies like "difftlocatn22frps.mov". Also, displays .mov files but doesn't display the same movie if it ends in .qt