Can GrADS "animated time sequences" be captured to a file

[Dave Allured]

Armelle's method is fine.  Here is more general info that I had typed
before Armelle's message appeared:

This has been discussed before.  For the archive, go the the Grads home
page, then into the users group page, and find the link there to the
archive.  It's a searchable archive, which can be quite handy at times.

Here is the overview to exporting an animation to a common format.  The
short answer is, IIRC, you can't do it directly.  Instead, make a
relatively simple Grads script that loops over each time step.  At each
step, render a single frame with the display command.  Then output it to
a file with printim or other command of your choice.  printim makes a
png or gif file.

You must concatenate a serial number to the output file name, so that
each frame's image file has a unique name.  Hint:  Use string
manipulation to keep leading zeros, like Armelle did, so that the next
step will reassemble the frames in the right order.

Outside of Grads, use an external utility such as Image Magic
("convert") to glom the individual frames into a movie format.  I have
successfully made animated gif's this way.  You could also assemble the
frames individually into a Power Point file.  There are probably other
ways; if anyone else knows another, feel free to chime in.

--Dave

Armelle Reca C. Remedio wrote:
> Hi!
>
> What we normally do here is:
>
> 1. create a script to print all the 45 images using the printim command.
> set t 1
> printim image01.gif
> ....
> set t 45
> printim image45.gif
>
> 2. then in linux, use the command:
> convert -delay 10 *.gif <name_of_new_file>.gif
>
> this will convert the 45 images that you have into one gif file with a delay of
> 10 steps. sometimes, depending on your pc platform, the images skip files
> especially if its too many. this is the method we use to create a "movie" file.
> there might be a better way in doing this.
>
> hope this helps.
>
> sincerely,
> melle
>
> Quoting Tom Hardy <tomhardy at COX.NET>:
>
>
>> Hello:
>>
>> I have a 3-D (lon, lat, time)  45 year series of ERA-40 data that displays
>> wonderfully with GrADS. Is it possible to capture the display to a common
>> format that can be played without GrADS? Either a Linux or Windows solution
>> works for me. As an aside, I can't find a GrADS email archive, is there one?
>> Thanks.
>>
>> Tom
>>
>>
>
>
> --
> Armelle Reca C. Remedio
> Regional Climate Systems
> Climate Studies Division
> Manila Observatory
> Ateneo de Manila University
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> 1108 Q.C. PHILIPPINES
> Tel No:  (63-2) 426-5921 loc.214
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> www.observatory.ph
>
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