Animation control

[Dave Allured]

Wang,

Exporting an animation from Grads is somewhat complicated.  There is
more than one way to do it.  In general, you must export each frame to a
separate output file, then combine the frames into an animation outside
of Grads.

Here are two of the important steps within Grads:

1.  Write a grads script to loop over time.  Generate one plot for each
time step.

2.  Inside the loop, output each completed plot to a separate file.  Use
the printim statement to generate file names with serial numbers, like this:

    'printim frame' itime '.gif gif x600 y600'

where itime is an integer time index number.  The first ".gif" is the
filename suffix.  The second "gif" is a control argument to the printim
command.  The result is a series of files named like "frame22.gif".  See
grads documentation for "printim".

I think you can use either png or gif output format.

Outside of Grads, you can either insert frames sequentially into power
point, or you can use the "convert" utility to make an animated image
file, such as an animated gif.

Here is a sample power point presentation that uses both methods:

http://www.cdc.noaa.gov/people/brant.liebmann/presentations/salljex_2003/salljex.ppt

Slides 7 to 16 are one sequence of individual frames.  Note that it is
easy to stop on a single slide, or go backward and forward.

Slides 95 and 109 are animated GIF's.  They each cycle through a fixed
time period, then repeat, until interrupted by the user (mouse click,
arrow keys, etc.) You do not have an easy way to pause or go backward,
unless you have a viewer with advanced animation control.

All of these examples were made with Grads.

--Dave A.
CDC/PSD/NOAA/CIRES

W Wang wrote:

>Hi,
>I am new user. I have a follow-up question about
>animation. How should I save the animation (movie) to
>a file that can be inserted into POWERPOINT?
>thanks
>--- Binh Trong Do <dtbinh at LIVERPOOL.AC.UK> wrote:
>
>
>
>>Hi Dave and Eric,
>>Thank you very much for your help.  It does work
>>very well and has
>>solved my problem.
>>cheers
>>Binh
>>
>>
>>