avi file

I have been asked to create an avi file, or movie of my graphics program display.

My simulation program runs at about 20 frames per second and I have been asked to create an avi file of the screen, so that it can be taken as a snap shot for demonstration purposes. Can this be done ? I could copy all screen views to successive .gif files, but I don't know how to convert this to a 'movie'.

The requestor does not know how to run the simulation and wants an easy presentation.

Does anyone have any ideas on this one ?

John

John,

There's bucketloads of software available to do it. Here's one program:

http://www.mandsoft.com/

The free downloadable version puts a message up over the capture. It records straight to AVI.

You could also film the screen with a video camera. That gives you the added advantage that you can talk over it!

Eddie

Ian,

Thanks very much for the advice. I shall investigate this during the new year.

John

What i'd do, i'd write the program in Clearwin which saves your frames into clipboard and then into the jpeg, bmp or pcx file - you decide each of them or just every n-th, you also can select by the mouse part of your screen and save it - and then combine them into movie with some video software. All is doable in Clearwin. Again, such software easy to write in Fortran too, i've done that 15 years ago in FTN77 even before Clearwin - that's total freedom solution. User can see the movie or see frame by frame.

Of course that's not an AVI, so total files size will be large. AVI compresses initial stream substantially. But who cares nowadays about files sizes?

Dan,

Who cares about file sizes? Everyone who sends them via e mail...

Eddie

who sends nowadays large files via e-mail?

Well, I don't. But then I do send small files. Which of course is why small files are useful, and big ones often aren't. Thus getting us back to the point of the reply.

Eddie

You also need small file sizes to load quickly on web sites (I for one will not wait for a web page to load). It would be great to know how to create flash video files (.flv or .swf) using ftn95 , anyone ?

Depends what we are talking about. I download 700MB DIVX movie in 12 min, as a record even in 9 min and think it is fast.

Clearwin recently allows JPEG file I/O which is potentially compressed (check, not tried to compare). The movie you will make my way will not compete with AVI in size, of course, but it will be already smaller then with BMP and PCX i've used when PC harddrives sizes were 0.5 GB max. Unless our compiler developers already debugging own AVI creator for Clearwin which would be logical next step since SHOW_MOVIE@ exists, i am not sure you will get it fast. I do not know sources for such software.